Conservatives Attack Use of Koran for Oath

The Anti-Defamation League, a leading anti-Semitism watchdog group, said Prager's views were "intolerant, misinformed and downright un-American," especially since President Bush appointed him to the Holocaust Memorial Council in August.

On Monday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on the Holocaust council, which oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, to remove Prager.

"No one who holds such bigoted, intolerant and divisive views should be in a policy-making position at a taxpayer-funded institution that seeks to educate Americans about the destructive impact hatred has had, and continues to have, on every society," the group wrote in a letter to Fred S. Zeidman, the council chairman.

The museum, in a statement Tuesday, said Prager speaks "solely for himself."

"Affirming" an oath without reference to God or sacred works is an option the founding fathers provided for in the Constitution to protect the rights of atheists and agnostics, said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor specializing in free speech and religious issues, on National Review Online, in response to the Prager piece.

"Why would Muslims and others not be equally protected from having to perform a religious ritual that expressly invokes a religion in which they do not believe?" he said.

Many say barring Ellison from taking his oath on the Koran would violate the constitutional provision that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Kevin J. "Seamus" Hasson, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said, "It makes no sense at all to have him violate the Constitution in order to affirm his duty to uphold the Constitution."