Defending and defaming faith

The Obama administration is requiring health insurers to cover contraception, even for employees of Catholic institutions that are opposed to the practice. Most of the Republican presidential candidates have characterized that as an assault on the cherished American doctrine of religious liberty. Rick Santorum recently accused the president and others of trying to "marginalize faith," going so far as to suggest that American Christians are on their way to the guillotine.

Such talk amounts to rank hypocrisy. Many of the people now defending the religious freedom of American Catholics have also been in the forefront of a sustained and ugly assault on the religious freedom of America's Muslims.

Remember Herman Cain? Without rebuke from his fellow GOP hopefuls, he announced he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet. Newt Gingrich said he could conceivably hire a Muslim, but only subject to a loyalty test. And Santorum is rewriting religious history in his railing against the Islamic threat: "Where do you think this concept of equality comes from? It doesn't come from Islam. It doesn't come from the East and Eastern religions. ... It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." The former Pennsylvania senator seemed not to realize that Muslims also worship the God of Abraham.

Mitt Romney, who has refrained from slurs against Islam, has nevertheless openly associated with a virulent anti-Muslim. Walid Phares, who promotes the conspiracy theory that mainstream Muslim organizations hide radical Islamist cells, has been appointed as an adviser to the Romney campaign. Phares has warned that "jihadists within the West pose as civil rights advocates" and that almost all of the faith's "mosques, educational centers, and socioeconomic institutions fall into their hands."

Last week's Conservative Political Action Conference prominently featured a who's who of anti-Muslim bigots, including Pamela Geller, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center calls "the anti-Muslim movement's most visible and flamboyant figurehead." Geller has written on her blog that President Obama "will do nothing but beat up on our friends to appease his Islamic overlords." She is often associated with Robert Spencer, who was also featured at CPAC, and who has expressed the view that peaceful Islam is a myth and that violent extremism is endemic to the faith.

This sustained barrage plays a role in mounting hate crimes against Muslim Americans, including arsons and bombings of houses of worship, as well as challenges to the construction of mosques from New York to Tennessee. Imagine the response if Christians were the object of such slurs.

Can we agree to stop attacking our fellow Americans who practice the Muslim faith? Islam is just as American as Santorum's and Gingrich's Catholicism or Romney's Mormonism. Our country is great because of our religious diversity, not in spite of it.