Hitchens on Keith “X” Ellison’s “Jefferson’s Qu’ran” stunt (and the ignorance so many bring to the flap):

As to the invocation of Jefferson, we know that when he and James Madison first proposed the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom (the frame and basis of the later First Amendment to the Constitution) in 1779, the preamble began, “Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free.” Patrick Henry and other devout Christians attempted to substitute the words “Jesus Christ” for “Almighty God” in this opening passage and were overwhelmingly voted down. This vote was interpreted by Jefferson to mean that Virginia’s representatives wanted the law “to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahomedan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.” Quite right, too, and so far so good, even if the term Mahomedan would not be used today, and even if Jefferson’s own private sympathies were with the last named in that list.

And, moreso, if Jefferson would have been rightly nauseated by what so many of Ellison’s supporters at CAIR stand for.
(Via Chris at Buddha Patriot)

Have you never noticed that when hispanics, blacks or asians cross party lines and vote Republican – as they have in the last few elections in numbers that would have astounded people ten or fifteen years ago – nary a word from the media?

But let a couple of evangelical ministers break with the GOP, and suddenly, if you’re EJ Dionne, it’s a trend?

When Rick Warren, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.

Rick Warren is famous for his book The Purpose-Driven Life. He’s famous for donating a lot of money to AIDS research. He’s not famous as an especially conservative evangelical.

But EJ Dionne either doesn’t know that (do they all look the same to him?) or assumes his audience doesn’t.

Another fact; while the left is hopping up and down like monkeys flinging poo because some evangelicals flaked away from the GOP this past election, the numbers are a tad more sobering than that. In 2004, 22% of evanglicals voted Democrat. Last month? 30%.

And they’ve been fickle before. In 2000, when the issues on the table didn’t especially excite evangelicals, they stayed home in droves; some pollsters estimated that Bush would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college had evangelicals turned out in the same force they had in ’94, ’02 and ’04.

Finally – ’08 is another whole campaign. And the Democrat party at its highest level – once you get past the blandishments of Barack Obama, who is not exactly the favorite candidate of the Democrat inner circle – is intrinsically hostile to evangelical beliefs. They may run hot and cold on the GOP itself, but the fact that evangelicans have never been in the Democrat camp (not in recent memory,anyway) should tell you something; that, Rick Warren notwithstanding, Democrat evangelicals are a situational aberration, not a trend. EJ: get back to me in ’08 or ’10.
Mr. Dionne; I’ve met Mac Hammond, and Rick Warren is no Mac Hammond.

I rarely disagree with Dennis Prager (although I’ve broken with him about abstinence and the death penalty in the past).

Less often still do I agree with Keith Ellison.

So mark your calendars; Ed and I are with Ellison on his current flap about taking his oath of office on the Quran.

Ed recaps some of the discussion we had on the NARN last Saturday:

Prager, who usually gets it right, got this issue spectacularly wrong. He wrote that any Congressman not willing to swear an oath on the Bible should not serve in Congress, and that the American fabric would suffer its worst damage since 9/11 if Ellison used the Qur’an instead of the Bible. This is utter nonsense. In the first place, the entire issue is somewhat moot since members have one ceremony where they all take the oath of office as a group on the floor of the House. The rules of the House, furthermore, allows for the use of an “affirmation” for those choosing not to swear their oaths as a religious preference — which demonstrates that America does have a tradition of tolerance for the needs of other religions in its processes. Quakers in particular take advantage of that option, although Richard Nixon swore his oath when elected as President.

Besides, if using a religious text for an oath has any significance at all — and our experience with courts and politics strongly suggests there isn’t much — one would suppose that it would have to be a religious text with significance to the person swearing the oath. Atheists would not feel bound by the power of Divine retribution if they swore their oath on the Bible and then broke it later. Similarly, Christians would not feel much responsibility for protecting the honor of the Qur’an if they swore their oath on that text. Why wouldn’t we want Ellison to swear his oath on the one religious text he holds sacred, if we want him to feel some responsibility for acting in its defense by fulfilling his oath?

If I were to swear an oath on the Quran, would it be worth the air I spent saying the words? Yes, it would, because my word means something, but the Quran bit would be superfluous;  I don’t observe the Quran, less perhaps than Ellison does the Bible. The oath of office is being sworn to give an implied verbal warranty to the officeholder’s beliefs, not the voters’.

But while Prager is less correct than usual on this issue, he’s still more on the ball than whichever editoral-board drone wrote this bit of aromatica.  (I suspect Nick Coleman, the only person in the left-leaning world who still says “wingnut” with all the glee of a toddler who just made a big, juicy pants).