First let get something straight.
The pope said something. Donald Trump responded. That does not equal the “battle” that the media is pretending it is. They are not locking horns or going at each other.
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis reportedly said when asked about Trump on his flight back to Rome from Mexico.
People seem to forget, or perhaps never knew, that the title “Pontiff”, often used to refer to the pope, is the shortened form of “Pontifex Maximus” meaning “the Great Bridge Builder” because that is what Christians are supposed to do, build bridges between people and between people and Christ, and the pope is at the top of the heap.
So, obviously, if someone emphasizes walls and never mentions doors or bridges, the pope might just have a problem with that.
Trump, of course, hates being criticized, so his response was typical bloviation,
“For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President. No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith.”
And yet, while wanting to be our leader, Mr. Trump has no problem not only questioning the president’s religion, directly or through insinuation, but that of his competitors in the primaries and caucuses.
When looking for something, anything to condemn the president for, Obama’s opponents made a big deal about his alleged following of the preaching of Reverend Wright, which would mean, President Obama would have had to attend his church on a regular basis.
But there were those who then, and now, claim he is not Christian, but a secret Muslim working to undo America.
“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim,” Trump told Fox News in 2011. “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that.”
A year later, Madonna made what she called an “ironic” remark on stage about Obama being “a black Muslim,” andTrump tweeted,
“Does Madonna know something we all don’t about Barack? At a concert she said ‘we have a black Muslim in the White House.'”
At a campaign event, he had this interaction with a person attending it,
“We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims,” a man said. “You know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”
Without any effort to correct the man, Trump responded,
“We need this question. This is the first question. We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. You know, a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening. We’re going to be looking at that and many other things.”
And he’s not alone in questioning the president’s religion, or to not, at least, speak against the assumptions.
“Silence gives consent” as the saying goes, and letting a comment stand gives it a degree of validity
In February of 2015, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told the Washington Post that he was unsure of the president’s commitment to Christianity.
“I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that. I’ve never asked him that. You’ve asked me to make statements about people that I haven’t had a conversation with about that. How (could) I say if I know either of you are a Christian?”
When a woman addressed Rick Santorum with,
“I never refer to Obama as President Obama because legally he is not. He constantly says that our constitution is passé, and he ignores it as you know and does what he darn well pleases. He is an avowed Muslim and my question is, why isn’t something being done to get him out of government? He has no legal right to be calling himself president”,
and Santorum let the Muslim reference stand, his defense was that it wasn’t his responsibility to correct the record every time a supporter makes an incorrect statement.
Yes it is.
“I don’t feel it’s my obligation every time someone says something I don’t agree with to contradict them, and the President’s a big boy, he can defend himself and his record and I’m going to go out and talk about the issues that the President and I disagree on and try to defeat him because I think that’s the best thing that we can do for the future of our country. My position is clear, the President’s position is clear. I don’t think the President’s a Muslim, but I don’t think it’s my obligation to go out and repeat that every time someone who feels that way says something.”
He ignores that while the president could defend himself, he wasn’t there, but Santorum was.
At the recent debate Trump even went after Cruz’s religion,
“How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest? Just remember this – you gotta remember, in all fairness, to the best of my knowledge, not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba, OK?”
When threatened by Ben Carson’s lead in Iowa, in attempting to appeal to the evangelicals, Trump said this about Ben Carson,
“I’m Presbyterian. Boy, that’s down the middle of the road folks, in all fairness, I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about.”
As if in response, although his staff said he would not comment on Trump’s religious question Carson questioned Trump’s faith, saying the difference between him and Trump was that,
“I’ve realized where my success has come from, and I don’t in any way deny my faith in God”.
In India it is now prescribed by doctors to relax the smooth muscles around the penile region thereby allowing increased blood flow to get viagra cialis generic a powerful erection. That being said Kamagra jelly has a quicker onset due to its form, but the same thing happened another day and this time he failed before his artificial secretworldchronicle.com cialis on line australia inventions as no chemical procedures could provide him relief from this hair deformation and this disorder started to affect man’s life badly by making him completely bald. Whatever may be the demand of the clients, Saudi Dutest has the capability to provide the best alternative for men secretworldchronicle.com canadian generic cialis seeking to improve their sex existence and bring down the drift that is created and generate the lacking loving relationship. Benign cialis canadian prices Prostate Hyperplasia: What is it? Benign Prostate Hyperplasia, also known as BPH, is a serious health disorder in men. During the 2012 presidential elections, when asked about Obama being a Christian, Franklin Graham responded,
“I think people have to ask Barack Obama. He’s come out saying he’s a Christian, so I think the question is, ‘What is a Christian?’ “
But then he added,
“All I know is under Obama, President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians that are being murdered in the Muslim countries. Under Islamic law — Sharia law — Islam sees him as a son of Islam. Because his father was a Muslim, his grandfather was a Muslim … that’s just the way it works … that’s the way they see it.”
Although for Graham, Obama saying he was a Christian isn’t good enough, when it came to New Gingrinch, the multiply divorced and married defender of marriage, he had stated,
“I think Newt is a Christian. At least he told me he is.”
When he was asked about Obama’s religious faith in Iowa, Raphael Eduardo Cruz began his response in neutral with,
“The president’s faith is between him and God. I’m not going to speculate on the president’s faith,”
but then went on to say, as if it were not a form of questioning the president’s religious faith,
“What I will talk about is his policies. And his policies have been profoundly damaging to this country. His policies and this administration’s animosity to religious liberty and, in fact, antagonism to Christians has been one of the most troubling aspects of the Obama administration.”
At the United Nations in 2012 President Obama said,
“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. To be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.”
But my favorite social satirist, who doesn’t even know he is one, whose show should be on Comedy Central, Pat Robertson, ignored the whole quote, only concentrating on the first line and said,
“Our president is frankly out of his mind, making a statement like that The future belongs to those who belong to God almighty, not those who believe in this stuff,”
Pat has called the president a Crypto-Muslim who is someone who is a “revolutionary leftist” working with “hardcore Islamists” to bring down “Judeo-Christian western civilization” and “traditional America,” according to Pat’s friend and CBN terrorism “expert”/sports reporter Erick Stakelbeck.
Pat also said when the president was going to visit Indonesia,
“They say he’s going back to the place that he spent his childhood, he spent four years in Indonesia, I don’t know if he was trained in a madrassa, one of those Muslim schools, but nevertheless that is his inclination. His father was a Kenyan socialist and he talks about the roots of his father. So he’s got an African and an Indonesian background. I don’t know what his mother was doing; she just sort of flitted around. But nevertheless, this may give him a warped perspective of what needs to be done to make America the greatest nation on earth.”
The madrassa, by the way was a Roman Catholic school, run by the “whore of Babylon”, while the other school he had attended there was a prestigious and wealthy primary school founded by Dutch colonialists.
Lots of Muslim teaching going on at both schools apparently
It should also be mentioned that, unless he is really something special, Obama’s childhood was, like with the rest of us, more like 14 to 18 years than 4.
Jerry Falwell is dead, so we don’t get to hear his routine.
When asked about President Obama’s visit to a mosque recently Trump said,
“I don’t have much thought, I think that we can go to lots of places. Right now, I don’t know if he’s — maybe he feels comfortable there.”
Some may say that this is not a direct questioning of Obama’s faith, and we know Donald will claim it is not, but Trump claims that he did not actually say the “F” word in a recent speech/rant, but merely mouthed it, so he should not be criticize for using indecent language.
At the mosque this past week, the president had said.
“… we have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths. And when any religious group is targeted, we all have a responsibility to speak up. And we have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion.”
Marco Rubio responded with,
“Always pitting people against each other. Always. Look at today: he gave a speech at a mosque. Oh, you know, basically implying that America is discriminating against Muslims….It’s this constant pitting people against each other that I can’t stand.”
At a fall town hall meeting in New Hampshire, when asked about Obama’s being a Muslim, Trump had responded,
“There’s something going on with him that we don’t know about.”
And, just Saturday when it came to the President’s not attending the funeral of Justice Scalia because of the confusion that would be caused by his security detail and the disruption that would cause the family, something he explained to them and they accepted, Trump snarkily tweeted,
“I wonder if President Obama would have attended the funeral of Justice Scalia if it were held in a mosque. Very sad that he did not go.”
So the man who questions the president’s religion, either directly or through insinuation, and also questions the religion of his fellow candidates the same way, gets all upset when an historic religious leader questions his because of things he says and supports.
But, then again, what would a pope know about Christianity.
Apparently, as evangelical leaders question the president’s religion, and as candidates to lead this country question the president’s and each other’s religion, it’s only the pope who can’t?