The past few days have seen two unfortunate misstatements by Rick Santorum and his staff, a strange Tweet by a Wall Street Journal editor, and a pernicious interview with Billy Graham’s son on MSNBC, all of it adding up to a new chorus of voices intimating that the President is not a Christian, not the right kind of Christian, or an outright Muslim.
Meanwhile in Ohio, longshot GOP primary candidate Santorum said that Obama’s environmental policies were “about some phony idea. Some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.” Santorum was immediately called on his comments by on Face the Nation. “I was talking about the radical environmentalists,” Santorum told Bob Schaffer Sunday morning, referring the idea “that man is here to serve the earth as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the earth.” He said that he “accepted the fact that Obama was a Christian,” with the sound that he was doing so at gunpoint.
Not a day later, Santorum spokesperson Alice Stewart was attempting to defend her candidate’s misstatement when she made one of her own, denouncing Obama’s “radical Islamic policies,” when she apparently mean to refer to his radical environmental polices (hey, they both have Ms and Ls in them.) While Stewart’s seems to have been a genuine slip of the tongue, it shows how easily some on the right can segue from criticizing Obama’s policies to criticizing his faith.
Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son, appeared on MSNBC Tuesday morning to discuss Santorum’s comments, and wasted no time undermining the President’s religion himself. Graham repeatedly avowed that he “didn’t know” if Obama was a Christian. “He has said he is a Christian, so I just have to assume that he is,” Graham said, a response that has been bandied about since 2008, and a strange one, as nobody else appears on talk shows to say they have to take John McCain or George W Bush at their word over their religion. The hosts ask Graham if he believed Santorum was a Christian, and Graham said adamantly, “No question, I believe he’s a man of faith.”
“That’s an amazing double standard you just applied,” the host replied.
“You think he behaves in an un-Christian way?” they pressed.
“I have no idea what he really believes,” Graham said.
Graham said numerous times that “you’d have to ask President Obama” whether he was a Christian, despite the fact that innumerable people, including Graham, have. Graham went on to detail Obama’s Muslim history on his father’s side, and say that under Shariah law, Obama is considered Muslim. He refused to categorically deny that Obama is a Muslim, and said that the question is, what is a Christian?’” implying the kind of moving-horizon logic always used with proofs of Obama’s birth and religion, in which no documentation or protestation is ever enough to satisfy critics.
Graham got into real troubled waters when he suggested that Muslims had “gotten a free ride” under Obama’s administration. When pressed by his hosts, who did as admirable job in holding his sanctimonious feet to the fire, Graham said he was referring to the takeover of the Arab Spring movements by Islamist political parties, who have since been less than kind to Christian minorities, especially in Egypt. Graham said explicitly that he would prefer Mubarak’s oppressive regime, the one Egypt worked so hard to overthrow, to the current oppression of Christians. He argued that Obama has not stood up for Christians, though Alex Wagner, the other guest on the show, promptly smacked that claim down.
(In fairness, Graham doesn’t like Romney’s Mormonism, either.)
Meanwhile, James Taranto, an editor for the Wall Street Journal, tweeted: “Didn’t Obama himself once refer to ‘my Muslim faith?’ Oh, but that was just a slip of the tongue.”
Ironically, the statement to which Taranto is referring was from an interview with George Stephanopolous, in which Obama was defending himself from the very same rumor of being a Muslim when it surfaced in the 2008 campaign. Taranto is now claiming he was misunderstood. Maybe he just wanted to know what it was like to have your religion mischaracterized.
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