Focused on the Irrelevant

Public Policy Polling (PPP) recently conducted surveys of likely Republican voters in Mississippi and Alabama, and a couple of questions/answers were interesting. For example, 66 percent of those Mississippians polled do not believe in evolution, which means that every other question in the poll was essentially moot.

But there was one that left me shaking my head more than the others, for several reasons. The question was, “Do you think Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim, or are you not sure?” In Alabama, 45 percent said they thought Obama was a Muslim; that was seven percentage points lower than Mississippi. I will now try to take the 4,000 reasons this nearly made me vomit and reduce it to a few:

1. Religion has been a factor with many presidential candidates in our history, because as much as we love to tout our credentials as a nation founded on the principle of religious freedom, that’s largely a pile of crap, and most of us know it. In the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy had to make a major speech to try to reassure people that even though he was the wrong type of Christian (Catholic), he wouldn’t be all pope-ing it up in the White House; he still needed vote fraud to win that election. More than three decades earlier, Al Smith tried to become the first Catholic president, but the country simply wasn’t ready for it. So we got Herbert Hoover. If you want to be president in the U.S. and you’re not Protestant, well, good luck.

But Obama says he’s Christian and he had a long affiliation with a United Church of Christ institution on the South Side of Chicago (some of the same people who approach hysteria over his association with Christian pastor Jeremiah Wright still manage to call him Muslim). Since when do we ask poll questions that get people’s opinions on someone’s religion? This is not an opinion question. It’s like asking, “Do you believe Barack Obama has male or female genitals?” We know that 30 percent of southern conservatives would choose the latter just as a way of expressing their hatred for the man, and then the topic would be in the news. This is what’s happened here. It keeps the Obama-is-a-Muslim fallacy out there for discussion, much like the Obama-isn’t-American or Obama-is-a-socialist fictions remain topical.

2. If you’re going to ask people what they think of someone’s religion, at least make these the options: a) Christian; b) Muslim; c) None of my damn business; d) Who gives a crap; e) Questioner interrupts answer with this.

We made great strides by electing a black man as president of the United States, but there are other walls to knock down: namely, gender and religion. When we can elect an Asian-American woman who happens to be an atheist, then I’ll believe that voters may finally be making their choices based on the best candidate, not a bunch of irrelevancies. I’m much more concerned about a president who thinks his/her actions are guided by a higher power. This is why I’d prefer to light myself on fire than vote for Rick Santorum in November.

3. As I mentioned above, part of this is a way for these conservatives to register their complaints of Obama, and it’s so disheartening that calling him a Muslim is the equivalent of calling him a terrible president and suspect human being. Muslims are not the enemy. Americans complained about Muslims when they rioted in response to U.S. soldiers burning copies of the Koran, and certainly it is a phenomenal overreaction to kill people after some pieces of paper are damaged.

Yet, while most Americans (myself included) don’t fully understand Islamic/Middle Eastern culture — and even fewer make any attempt to — we all know that when the Islamic world sees something as an affront to its beliefs, violence is likely. And I can say this pretty confidently — if soldiers of a Middle Eastern country had been on our soil for a decade, fighting Christian terrorists with a whole lot of collateral damage, and then several of them tossed some Bibles into a bonfire, our religious leaders wouldn’t say, “Oh, it’s OK, it was just an accident.” I mean, a priest recently suggested he’d die for the right to keep women from using birth control on the church's dime.

I hope that some day, we'll pay less attention to which holy books politicians (and people in general) read or don’t read, and focus more on things that actually matter.