Ann Althouse really has a bee in her bonnet. She’s so mad about a New York Times piece on Mitt and Ann Romney that she’s sputtering about the president being a “Muslim by inheritance through his father.” She says it’s a cultural matter. Obama’s a Muslim by inheritance because the children of Muslims are considered Muslims.
So, you know, if a pollster calls you and asks if you think the president is a Muslim, it’s perfectly acceptable and correct to answer in the affirmative. After all, it’s true in a cultural sense.
Even for Ann Althouse this is depressingly stupid. I wonder if Althouse knows that the president’s grandfather was Catholic and worked with missionaries before he converted to Islam. Does she know that Obama’s father was an atheist? How come those Catholic and atheistic values didn’t transfer culturally? Surely, Althouse knows that the president only really spent time with his father once in his life. I have an idea, let’s make it a rule that all children are culturally members of the adopted religion of their grandparents. If there’s a conflict among grandparents, choose the ones whose child abandoned the kid and had nothing to do with them.
That does’t help with me though. My parents stayed together. One grandfather was an atheist and the other dropped Catholicism for Episcopalianism. What does that make me?
Answer: whatever the hell I want to be.
Let’s not forget that Devil Anse was a Hatfield. This means a lot.
It’s a good weekend to listen to the Stones: Faith has been broken, tears must be cried.
Althouse has a bee in her bonnet except the bee is actually a bat and the bonnet is more like a belfry. Otherwise, spot on.
it’s all a mystery to her…
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note her cameo at the conclusion.
My grandfather was a street kid in Russia. I’ve cast aside cultural matters and have a permanent residence. Surely I must be an embarassment.
Boo:
F–k Althouse!! Why waste time on her? I would have rather you talked about Cory Booker today on Fluffyhead’s(aka Dancin’ Dave) show this morning. Obviously, it lit up the Twitter machine and blogosphere. It was a very dumb thing for Booker to say. I don’t care that his political career is being funded by Bain-types. At the very least, you can’t be stepping on the President’s message!! It’s rule # 1!!
Ann Althouse is insane. How about Campbell Brown’s horrible NTY editorial going after President? She really wants a job at Fox News.
Do you know who Campbell Brown’s husband is? Dan Senor. Remember him? And he now works for Mittens, which the NYT didn’t display prominently enough!
yes, it’s a real shame that I couldn’t find time to dump on Cory Booker.
I’m not saying you have to dump on him. Only wondering what your take is on why he did it. It was obviously a stupid thing to do. And especially in an election year.
Also, too, Booker got smacked down on the same show by none other than Carnival barker extraordinaire Jim Cramer!! That’s pathetic!!
I read the linked piece, and I’m wondering if you did.
You latched onto one phrase and did a whole riff about it, but that phrase wasn’t the main point of Althouse’s post. It wasn’t even the main point of the sentence in which it occurs.
There is a glaring contradiction in right-wing circles, where Obama is simultaneously viewed as a Muslim and as a (Christian) follower of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Althouse devotes a paragraph to arguing that this isn’t necessarily a contradiction, as a person can be culturally Muslim by upbringing and theologically subscribe to some variant of Christian doctrine. Admittedly, it’s a bit of a contortion to make that claim, but it’s not central to her article.
She devotes a paragraph to utter bullshit, JLG.
People call Obama a Muslim because Muslims are feared in this country, and not-liked nor trusted by a very large group of people.
She continues the trend of calling him a Muslim. He’s a cultural Muslim. He inherited his Muslimness.
Look. I was raised as a Protestant. But I am not a Protestant. I am definitely not a Catholic like one of my grandfathers. I didn’t inherit Catholicism and I didn’t grow up in that culture.
Obama did, at least, spend some years in a heavily-Islamic country. He did at least have a Muslim step-father. But Althouse didn’t mention those things. She said is father was a Muslim (he wasn’t) and that he inherited the religion.
This is just a repeat of nonsense the tea baggers believe about Islam. Because it’s a no-no to stop being a Muslim once you have been one, you can’t leave. And if your Daddy was a Muslim, then you’re a Muslim and no other faith is an option for you. This theory relies on same rather harsh warnings in the Koran about how to treat Musims who abandon the faith, but it has nothing to do with the real world. People leave the faith without consequence every day.
And she has all her facts wrong. So, no there is no sense in which Obama is a Muslim. And to repeat that is just stupid spitefulness on her part.
It’s neither stupid nor spiteful. It’s a very intentional political calculation. It’s dishonest as all hell – probably consciously so – but the motive can be explained pretty easily without armchair psychology.
As Flavor Flav might say:
Muslim man, Muslim woman, Muslim baby;
Christian man, Christian woman, Christian baby
Christian man, Muslim woman, Muslim baby
Muslim man, Christian woman, Muslim baby