Saturday, January 21, 2012

An American shame

The level of ignorance among the candidates to be the Republican presidential nominee is a cause of shame for America.

The process has already dismissed the most egregious examples of this (Perry, Cain, Bachmann), but today Rick Santorum proved his credentials to join that club.  

His ignorance and bigotry are appalling -- his whole nervous obsession with gay sex, for one, as well as his moralizing wish to control how other people live.  But today he makes the ignorant claim about the source of the concept of equality in civic life, aired by ABC News:
"I get a kick out of folks who call for equality now, the people on the left. . . .  It doesn't come from Islam. It doesn't come from the East and Eastern religions, where does it come from? It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that's where it comes from."
Santorum obviously knows a lot about his own (Catholic) religion, but for a would-be president of all the 300,000,000 people who make up this nation, he is woefully uninformed about the history of religions or the place of religion in our secular society.

Muslims worship the same God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- only they call him Allah.  They acknowledge Jesus as a prophet, though not divine, as do the Jews.

Islam is considered to stem from Abraham and to be "an Abrahamic religion," just as much as Christianity and the Jewish religion.   They are all monotheistic religions, and Islam shares many of the same stories and prophets and moral teachings with Christians and Jews.

Nice try, Rick.  But you're just not presidential material.  Savor your making it to "the final four," as you said in the last debate.  And then say goodbye and go home to your dying daughter.   You've sacrificed your family long enough to this quixotic quest.

Ralph

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