GOP Presidential hopeful Herman Cain is taking his efforts to win Republican votes by disparaging Muslims to the level of performance art.
Cain’s ignorance on the subject of religion and constitutional law is so vast it’s hard to know where to begin. For one thing, Islam is hardly the only religion to have its own laws — based on Cain’s arguments, Jews Catholics and Anglicans among others would also not qualify for religious protection under the First Amendment. The First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion, it does not sanction discrimination based on the religious prejudices of a given moment.
There is no one static set of precepts Muslims agree upon that Cain can refer to as “sharia law.” Sharia is a set of Islamic principles whose application varies based on interpretation. Ironically, by implying otherwise, Cain is insisting that the most draconian interpretations of sharia are the “real” ones, Cain is supporting the religious arguments of Islamic extremists. Cain argues that it’s not “discriminating against based upon religion” for a community to ban a mosque, which is absurd on its face. Cain is saying it’s not discrimination to discriminate.
The most pathetic part of Cain's argument however, is his insistence that "the people in the community know best." Most people in Tennessee support or are indifferent to the mosque, only 28 percent of those polled last year opposed it. But even if the community were overwhelmingly opposed to the mosque, that wouldn't justify discriminating against Muslims, anymore than popular support for segregation in the 1960s American South would have justified discriminating against blacks. Cain recently opined that President Barack Obama isn't a "strong black man" like Martin Luther King Jr. Does Cain truly believe that the MLK Jr, who referred to Islam as one of the world's "great religions" and fought his entire life against the idea that "local control" somehow trumps the fundamental rights of individual minorities, would have supported a ban on mosques?
It was the first President of the United States however, who said that America gives to “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Those words were more aspiration than fact when George Washington, himself a slaveowner, wrote them. But today, they are among the most basic principles any presidential candidate must uphold. Cain doesn’t even appear to want to uphold them.