Muslims and the Presidency

Ben Carson and Donald Trump were both questioned as to whether a Muslim should be president.  Ben Carson said, no, a Muslim should not be president.  Trump said "fine" but he did say there was a problem with Muslims, implying he wouldn't like to see one as president.

Both answers, in my opinion were correct, but Trump's was the cleverer of the two.  To clarify what Mr. Carson said -- when he said a Muslim shouldn't be president of the U.S. -- he was expressing his own opinion.  (He later clarified his statement by saying that if it were a Muslim that shared this country's values, he would have no problem with a Muslim president.)  Either way he did not call for a legal restriction barring a Muslim from the presidency, which, of course, would be unconstitutional.

Trump avoided the PR pitfalls of this question by simply saying that, of course, a Muslim could be president but Muslims did present a problem.  That answer may not make Muslims happy, but it prevented the kind of brouhaha that Carson got into.

So what's the bottom line?  Here's my take:

All religions create a problems for democracies that have mixed ethnicities in their population.  Let me explain.  Sweden, before it opened itself up to a massive influx of Muslims from the Middle East, was a very homogeneous place.  It had little or no experience with assimilating different ethnicities.  It now finds it has to learn -- and learn fast.  The Japanese are an even more insular country than Sweden.  This is a country that accepts no one other than another Japanese.  They once tried to encourage people of Japanese ancestry who had lived in Brazil for some period of time to return to Japan.  It proved an unsuccessful venture.

The U.S. has been assimilating more people from all over the world longer than any other country.  And, truth be told, we've been the most successful at it.  There are several reasons for this.  When the country was created it started off with people from different parts of Europe.  We had those with an English heritage, with an Irish heritage, German, Scandinavian, Italian, French, Spanish and a smattering of others.  It included Protestants, Catholics and Jews.  Some rough spots were encountered.  But we smoothed them out with reasonable success.  The first thing we did was to add to our Constitution an amendment separating Church and State.

But, even with this fix to our founding document, opening the minds of the citizenry took a bit longer.
There was early hostility to the idea of a Roman Catholic person as President.  That was dealt with by JFK.  Another barrier broken down was letting a black man become presidenct.  And, now we face the entry of Muslims onto the political scene.  But this problem too will be resolved.

The key to dealing with the question of a Muslim president is the realization that Muslims, like Catholics, or, for that matter, Protestants and Jews, espouse different values.  What country is more Catholic than Italy?  And, yet, Italians practice birth control to the same extent as non-Catholics in less Catholic countries.

It's immaterial whether a candidate is Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu.  What we want to know is whether embodies American values.  "American values" are something we can debate, but clearly they do not include polygamy, restrictions on women, hostility toward gays and mandates such as those included in Sharia.

Let me leave you with one last question: How would you feel about a candidate who self identified as a Scientologist?