Thursday, August 19, 2010

Basic Civics Basics

The thing I find most startling about this Pew Research Center poll finding...
Americans increasingly are convinced - incorrectly - that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, and a growing number are thoroughly confused about his religion.

Nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, said they think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 percent who said so in March 2009, according to a poll released Thursday. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is down to just 34 percent.

The largest share of people, 43 percent, said they don't know his religion, an increase from the 34 percent who said that in early 2009.
...is that only 34% of Americans pay attention. That's being generous too since some of that 34% didn't actually know but guessed correctly. The rest are either clueless to the most basic knowledge of the government and political life or totally brainwashed (so maybe the Rev. Wright is actually a closet Muslim).

The right has successfully gotten their way by painting Obama as a Muslim and then raising an uproar over the existence of Muslims and their places of worship in the US. They've done so by tapping into the old all-Muslims-are-terrorists paranoia egged on during the Reagan administration. There's really no other way to view this. It's plain bigotry, even when in the relatively milder form of the double standard.

Apart from the basic moral bankruptcy and perversion of basic constitutional concepts and duties, don't any on the political and religious right consider their place in history?

3 comments:

Cheryl Rofer said...

Reagan? He was president?

Learn something new every day, I swear!

mbc said...

It would be interesting to see a poll that asked people to classify a number of religions as either Christian or Muslim. Every religion in the US (with the exception of Jews and Mormons) are publishing decreases in their numbers of registered worshipers. For religions like Catholicism, their decrease in the United States would look much worse if it were not for recent immigrants joining the ranks. I agree that the fringe right has done a superb job making Obama out to be a Muslim. What I don't know is whether most people in the poll know the difference between a Christian and a Muslim religion. While it may be the case that they do presently, I suspect this will change as the oldest generations of churchgoers head off to heaven and the younger generation of more independent spiritualists see organized religion as less of a marker.

MT said...

"
Apart from the basic moral bankruptcy and perversion of basic constitutional concepts and duties, don't any on the political and religious right consider their place in history?"


These are the people who cared about Monica Lewinsky and would have Clinton impeached for denying adultery.