Reflections on the Recent Anti-Muslim Rants
Conservative, red-state-types have been on a tear recently with Minnesota representative-elect Keith Ellison and even Barack Obama. The first was over Ellison's entirely appropriate decision to do his "swearing-in photo-op" with a Quran and not a Bible. The official swearing-in doesn't use any book. It's only the post-swearing-in time that this has become a tradition. I am glad that he is willing to make his statement on a book he believes in and trusts and not in one he doesn't. That sure gives some weight to his vows.

I gather also that some have begun to attack Barack Obama whose middle name is Hussein. Some have gone so far as to say that he can't truly be a Christian because somewhere back in his past his roots were Muslim- and as everyone knows- once a Muslim, always a Muslim.

I shudder to the depths of my soul when I hear those words spoken. Those justifications were used to murder many Christians in post-Muslim Spain when the Inquisition decided that people who converted to Christianity after the Reconquest hadn't really done so. They were still Jews (Muslims were already long gone) and had to be expelled or killed. After all, once a Jew, always a Jew from generation to generation.

Need I even mention Nazi Germany where my daughter, the child of a Christian preacher, would have headed to the gas chambers with her Christian father because he had converted to Christianity at age 15? Once a Jew....

I am afraid for the very soul of our nation when things like that are said by supposedly intelligent people. Christianity does not need that kind of support. America and its ideals of freedom and hope and equality are heading out the door when we begin to think that way. I pray that those with such views will be seen by the rest of the world for what they are: bigots and ultimately un-American.