First, the windup:
Carson was appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday when host Chuck Todd asked, “Should a president’s faith matter?”
“I guess it depends on what that faith is,” Carson said. “If it is inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter."
“Do you believe that Islam is consistent with the Constitution?” said Todd.
“No, I do not,” Carson quickly replied. “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not.”
Then,
the pitch:
According to The Hill, Sanders said, “I am very disappointed that Dr. Carson would suggest that a Muslim should not become president of the United States.”
The statement went on to say, “It took us too long to overcome the prejudice against electing a Catholic or an African American president. People should be elected to office based on their ideas, not their religion or the color of their skin.”
It truly never ceases to amaze how many conservatives truly don't understand or even fully comprehend what country they're living in, from its founding to its present. It's like they're living in some dark, twisted, paranoid, and yet somehow candy-coated fantasy land where the power of Christ compelled America into being.
Keep reading to explore the alternative to that fantasy land.
The actual requirements to be president of the United States are as follows:
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
Nothing in there mentions the religion of the candidate for president. Further, the first portion of the First Amendment says this:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion
Which would tend to indicate that religious values are not necessarily interchangeable with, nor do they supersede, constitutional values.
And this, from Article VI.
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
And there is the
Treaty of Tripoli, as written by John Adams, one of our constitutional founders, when he himself was president of the United States:
Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen (Muslims); and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan (Mohammedan) nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
So where exactly Dr. Carson gets the idea that being a Muslim is "contrary to our Constitutional values" is a mystery, although it's not hard to guess.
I'm no expert on Islam. To be honest I know next to nothing, but that's surely more than Ben Carson knows. It's most important to be willing to learn more, which Carson seems incapable of.
At its core, Islam is a faith that is based on the same God as both Judaism and Christianity. All three religions worship the same Lord, based on that which Abraham, forefather of Kings David and Solomon of Israel, followed.
The split between Judaism and Christianity is largely over the issue of whether Jesus Christ was a gifted and talented prophet, or whether he was the foretold Messiah. Generally speaking, Jews felt during and after his time that Jesus was a failed Messiah because he died without delivering the nation of Israel from the bondage of Rome. Christians feel, in general, that his resurrection and rebirth after death is proof of his status as the true Messiah, and that his eventual legacy was that his religion and his faith ultimately conquered Rome when its influence grew so great that Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and called for its recognized canonization in the first Bible. Later emperor Theodosius would make Christianity the official religion of Rome.
Like Jews, Muslims also recognize Jesus as a great prophet, if not the Messiah. For some, Islam's roots trace themselves back far before Jesus to the split between the two sons of Abraham. The oldest was Ishmael, whose was birthed by Hagar, his mother Sarah's handmaiden, due to her initial difficulty producing an heir. The younger brother was Isaac, born to Sarah 13 years later. As you can imagine, there were issues as to who would be the rightful heir of Abraham, and also who it was that Abraham chose to sacrifice when he was called to do so by God as a test of his faith.
Muslims, in general, tend to feel that the Bible as canonized by Constantine, and later reworked by King James of England, is rather misleading on this and other issues.
Although the Koran does not name the child whom Abraham was to sacrifice, Muslims believe it was Ishmael, and they believe that idea is supported by the Koran. One Muslim scholar, after citing a number texts from the Koran, concludes:
It is quite clear that Ishmael was the son to be sacrificed and not Isaac, peace be upon both of them. We also saw how corrupt the Bible is. The Bible is not reliable. It was badly tampered with by man’s alterations and narrations, that we no longer can tell which parts of it are the True Living Words of GOD Almighty, and which aren’t.
Ishmael was 13 years older than Isaac, and Abraham loved GOD Almighty very much that he wanted to sacrifice his own son for Him. If Ishmael’s name represents Abraham’s gratefulness to GOD Almighty after a desperate long wait to have a son, then it makes perfect sense that Abraham wanted to sacrifice Ishmael to GOD Almighty by giving Him the most precious thing he ever had.
As a result Muslims began to develop their own interpretation of these sacred texts. Eventually Islam became solidified when the later prophet Mohammad crafted the Koran to fill the void left by the then-distrusted Bible. The Koran outlines five key tenets of Islam:
Al-Shahadah (Testimony)
The first of the five tenets of Islam is the profession of faith in pronouncing of the words that "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet".
In my opinion this is not drastically different from the first and second commandments:
I am the Lord, Thy God. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me. Whether Muhammad is a Prophet, as were Jesus, Abraham, Ezekiel, and Moses before him, is the difference.
Al-Salah (Prayer)
Prayers are of such great significance that some leading scholars of the religion describe them as the backbone of Islam.
Each Muslim is required to pray five times daily, in a prescribed manner.
It seems to me that Catholics in particular have a great many rituals in how they worship and perform prayer, from catechism to genuflection.
Al-Siyam (Fasting)
The imposition of fasting, which means complete abstention from food and drink and sexual intercourse from sunrise until sunset during the month of Ramadan.
This too is quite similar to the Catholic tradition of Lent, and the Jewish tradition of fasting for Yom Kippur, as well as the tradition during Passover to abstain from anything leavened.
Al-Zakat (Almsgiving)
In various parts of the Holy Qur'an great stress is laid on the Zakat, that is, almsgiving to those who deserve it. Each able Muslim should give a certain percentage of his annual income, either in money or kind, to the poor and the indigent.
Again, a tradition not that different from the Christian tradition of tithing in order to provide for the church and the poor.
l Hajj (The Pilgrimage)
The fifthaand last Pillar of Islam is the Hajj. It is explicitly stated in the Holy Qur'an that everyaphysically and financially able Muslim should make the Hajj to the Holy City of Makkah once in his or her lifetime. The Hajj is considered the culmination of each Muslim's religious duties and aspiration.
This is not necessarily a formal tradition for Christianity or Judaism as far as I know, except for the Mormon tradition to send their young men out across the globe on a mission for two years. (More on this in
comments) But either way, this isn't something that I would find in gross conflict with American constitutional values.
Generally speaking, these religions all come from largely the same place with the same basic traditions. Although they have diverged in some specifics as I've outlined, those divergences are far less than one might find between Roman Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalians, Baptists, Quakers, Coptics, Jehovah's Witnesses, Branch Davidians and Mormons. Just as Christianity split into it's own sub-factions, Islam too split over the issue of which heir was most worthy among the sons of Muhammad leading, for example, to the divisions between the Sunni and Shia sects.
The idea that these divergences are so great that it would be contrary the constitution and the values of the nation for any Muslim to serve as president of the United States is just as ridiculous as the claim that John F. Kennedy couldn't serve as president because he was Catholic and therefore beholden to the Pope and Rome.
As Bernie notes, we should have come further than this by now.
Does radical Islam present a serious threat to the American people? Sure it does. But so does radical Christianity in the form of the homegrown terrorist groups like the KKK, Aryan Brotherhood, Redneck Mafia and the Army of God, who have in fact killed more Americans in the years since September 11 than have Islamic jihadists:
In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes or social media rants.
But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.
We must remember that the most devastating terror attack on U.S. soil prior to September 11 was carried out by former U.S. soldier Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City. Yet I don't see anyone saying people like him should be disqualified from being president.
What Dr. Ben Carson stated is as vile and repugnant as saying every Christian was responsible for Oklahoma City; that every Christian is responsible for Eric Robert Rudolph's bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games and his subsequent bombings of gay nightclubs and women's health clinics; that they're responsible for Shelly Shannon's firebombing of women's clinics; for Scott Roeder's cold-blooded murder of Dr. George Tiller; for James Van Brunn's murder of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum as he attempted to implement his plot to kill David Axelrod; for James Cummings killing and wounding multiple people in Knoxville, Tennessee; for Byron Williams' attempted mass murder at the ACLU and Tides Foundation in San Francisco; for Jared and Amanda Miller killing two Las Vegas cops and one "good guy with a gun" as part of their "revolution" against the government; and for Dylann Roof's massacre of nine black people at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston. Simply because all those killers had the same religion.
And they were all white. And conservative.
Surely we are far above making unfounded and overly broad assumptions about every single individual in a large diverse group simply because some members of that group have done terrible, horrible things in the name of their religion, or their ideology, or their race. Right?
Right?
7:34 AM PT: And lo, Carson's great walk-back has begun:
Defending Carson, campaign spokesman Doug Watts said Carson will reach out to members of the Muslim community to explain his comments, saying they are being misinterpreted and that he was speaking of the American public accepting a Muslim president and not himself.
“He did not say that a Muslim should be prevented from running, or barred from running in any way,” Watts said. “He just doesn’t believe the American people are ready for that.”
“Dr. Carson is a strict adherent to the First Amendment — freedom of religion. That includes people of all faith,” Watts said. “He has great respect for the Muslim community, but there is a huge gulf between the faith and practice of the Muslim faith, and our Constitution and American values.”
Which I'm sure is going to disappoint Fox and Friends:
On Monday, Fox News hosts Brian Kilmeade and Elisabeth Hasselbeck argued that Todd had asked Carson the “ultimate gotcha question.”
“They were debating whether a Muslim should be a president back in the creation of our country,” Kilmeade opined. “There’s a whole book written on it. Back when you had Jefferson and Madison debating other great American founders about should a Jewish person be president? Should a Muslim person be president?”
“You can have that discussion and not be labeled a racist, or a Zionist, or anything else. This is an open dialog,” he continued. “Why is everyone calling on everyone to apologize? It’s an ultimate gotcha moment. You have 16 people in the race and everyone’s just waiting on eggshells.”
“Who is real?” Hasselbeck agreed. “Whose the real person?”
“Yeah,” Kilmeade agreed. “Can he just give an honest answer? And now there’s going to be a fourth clarification.”
“That’s how he feels — he would not vote for a Muslim,” the host added. “It doesn’t mean they should not run. It doesn’t mean the rest of America can’t vote for a Muslim.”
Let's all recall that what he said, specifically, was that Islam is contrary to the values of the Constitution, not that the American people weren't ready for it, or that he would or would not personally vote for a Muslim. He said that Islam is un-American. He pretty much did say that they couldn't, or shouldn't even run, regardless of how his spokesperson is trying to spin it.
Seems like only failed Virginia lieutenant governor candidate E.W. Jackson is willing to take him at his word.
See, isn't that clear? Jackson also went on to say: “Islam is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution,” and also defended GOP frontrunner Donald Trump for not correcting a supporter who claimed President Barack Obama was Muslim.
2:22 PM PT: Before he announced he was running for President, Carson was disinvited from a Southern Baptist Leadership Conference because as a Seventh Day Adventist, they found his beliefs far to divergent from their's.
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