Is America a Christian Nation?

The founders wrote, and the state's ratified Article VI, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution which states, "...no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Additionally, the First Amendment, added to the Constitution as part of the deal to get it ratified, says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

The Library of Congress published a piece entitled "The Founding Fathers and Islam” in 2003 and that hallowed institution concluded, “The Founders of this nation explicitly included Islam in their vision of the future of the republic.”

However, in all honesty, whether our nation was founded as a Christian or not is an argument best left to academics debating over the dusty tomes of history.

America was definitely founded as a nation that counted African Americans as three-fifths of a human being (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2, but the language was wisely scrubbed by the Fourteenth Amendment) and denied women the right to vote (took them until 1920 until someone wised up and enfranchised the all the ladies, credit to Wyoming for giving them the vote first).

We evolved for the better. The slaves secured their natural right to liberty. Women secured their natural right to vote.

Today, America is a multi-ethnic and multi-faith society with a shared set of core values: individual freedom and dignity, rule of law under which everyone is treated equally, individual opportunity, all committed to fostering the common good, etc.

Christianity is there, contributing to the good of our nation. But so are Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and a host of other faiths.

Advancing Bigotry on Capitol Hill

Liliana Segura over at alternet has published a worthy piece titled
“How Members of Congress Are Advancing Anti-Muslim Hysteria to Push a Radical Legal Agenda”

Here is an excerpt, but I recommend clicking on the link and reading the whole thing:

Beyond Congressional hearings that push the "homegrown Islamic terrorist" narrative -- or even repressive pieces of legislation like the [Stop Terrorists Entry Program (STEP)] -- CAIR's Corey Saylor says the alliances formed by members of Congress like Barrett with members of the anti-Muslim right are far more dangerous.

"It's less the legislation and more the legitimacy that's offered to some of the anti-Muslim bigots by members of Congress," he says.

One example Saylor cites is Rep. Paul Broun, a Republican member of the House from Georgia. Broun recently invited a man named David Yerushalmi to testify at a hearing on Capitol Hill. "Yerushalmi belongs to an organization that once called for adherence to Islam to be punishable by 20 years in prison," says Saylor.

Yerushalmi is the president and founder of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), which, in addition to seeking to criminalize Islam, has statements on its Web site such as: "There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote."

"This man has the right to free speech, he has the right to believe what he believes," says Saylor. "But he gets legitimized because someone like Paul Broun invites him to Capitol Hill and gives him a platform … That allows him to go out and push his hate speech."

Two days before Christmas, CAIR sent a letter to President Obama, urging him to address what it described as a "rise in Anti-Islam hate, Islamophobic incidents, and rhetoric targeting ordinary American Muslims." Among these incidents was "an attack on a Sikh youth in Texas who was mistaken for a Muslim," "a Colorado sheriff who called the U.S. Marines 'Travel agents to Allah,'" and "a spate of vandalism incidents at mosques nationwide." It also listed a disturbing number of anti-Muslim incidents among supporters of and aspiring elected officials, as well as elected officials themselves.

Most memorable, perhaps, was the attempt last year by right-wing members of Congress to convince the public that CAIR itself was engaged in a sinister conspiracy to infiltrate and take over Congress, by dispatching interns to Capitol Hill. Last October, U.S. Representatives Sue Myrick, R-South Carolina, was joined by Rep. Broun as well as Arizona Republicans John Shadegg and Trent Franks in issuing a call for a federal investigation into CAIR's attempts to place interns in the Committees on the Judiciary, Intelligence and Homeland Security. The accusation was inspired by a book titled Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that's Conspiring to Islamize America, written by Dave Gaubatz, an anti-Islamic activist who posed as an intern for CAIR in an attempt to prove that the group is trying to infiltrate Congress. (Rep. Myrick wrote the introduction to the book.)

The backlash against Myrick and her co-conspirators was swift. "These charges smack of an America of sixty years ago where lists of 'un-American' agitators were identified,"wrote Reps. Michael Honda, D-CA, Barbara Lee, D-CA and Nydia Velazquez, D-NY in a letter on behalf of the Congressional Tri-Caucus, and signed by 87 members of Congress.

"The idea that we should investigate Muslim interns as spies is a blow to the very principle of religious freedom that our founding fathers cherished so dearly. If anything, we should be encouraging all Americans to engage in the U.S. political process; to take part in, and to contribute to, the great democratic experiment that is America."

Another Fox News Appearance Discussing Security

A second Fox News interview this week. I disagree with the decision to call the segment "When Sensitivity Trumps Security." I feel it is reasonable to accommodate a person's sincerely held religious beliefs in this situation.

Fox News CAIR Warns Against Profiling

I recently appeared on Fox News to discuss the racial profiling as a technique to enhance security:

CAIR Warns Against Profiling

Response to ADL in Boston Globe

ADL casts stones of accusation
January 6, 2010

IN HIS Dec. 24 letter “In league with anti-Semites,’’ Derrek Shulman, New England regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, casts accusatory stones at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization that has consistently condemned all forms of bigotry, including anti-Semitism, and has a long record of defending the civil and religious rights of all Americans, regardless of faith.

For example, CAIR condemned an Iranian cartoon contest mocking the Holocaust. The council also called on an Arab-American publication that printed excerpts of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion to apologize, and condemned bias attacks on a rabbinical assistant in Brooklyn and on a Jewish student on the campus of Temple University.

CAIR disagrees with Israeli occupation policies, the likely genesis of the ADL’s smears. But converting legitimate disagreement with the policies of a foreign government to hatred of Jews is a logic-defying stretch.

Usually, the driving motivation behind letters such as the one published by Shulman is the Israel-Palestine conflict. CAIR is on record condemning both terror attacks on Israeli civilians and Israeli state terror attacks on Palestinians. Unfortunately, organizations such as the ADL lack a similar track record when it comes to condemning the killing of Palestinian civilians.

The ball’s in Shulman’s court. Will we keep casting stones at each other or, God willing, seek a way to actualize a word both our faiths love: shalom, salaam, peace?

Corey Saylor
National legislative director
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Washington