And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson — kept in his personal library.

Of course some cretins — yes, we’re thinking of you, Dennis Prager! — took this as a threat to traditional American values.

Clockwise from upper left: Prager, Hewitt, Medved, Paulsen, Bachmann, Coleman

The so-called “Three Tenors” of talk radio — conservatives Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager — spoke before a crowd of 3,000 at Minneapolis’ Orchestra Hall in an event attended by Republican candidates Michele Bachmann, Norm Coleman and Erik Paulsen, as well as Gov. Tim Pawlenty. While the speakers hold hardline conservative views — Prager sparked outrage in 2006 by stating that by being sworn in on a copy of the Qu’ran, Rep. Keith Ellison would “embolden Islamic extremists,” and by telling Ellison he shouldn’t serve in Congress if he’s “incapable of taking an oath on” the Bible — Coleman and Paulsen have been veering to the center in hopes of eking out wins on Nov. 4.

The speakers heaped praise on GOP candidates and lashed out at Democrats. While Medved said that “there is no finer senator than Norm Coleman,” he called Al Franken an “emotionally disturbed … liar … lowlife … leftist,” a “disgrace to your state” and the “most despicable and disgraceful candidate ever nominated by a major party for the United States Senate anywhere.” He compared Franken to onetime GOP candidate and neo-Nazi David Duke and called Franken “trash on the ballot.”

Prager, mentioning “Minnesota Nice,” hailed Coleman and joked about the Star Tribune’s endorsement of the senator: The Strib endorsing Coleman is “like Pravda endorsing Eisenhower,” he said.

Bachmann took the mic briefly, thanking the audience, mainly listeners to the AM station The Patriot, “for watching my back this last week” — during national blowback over her comments that she fears Barack Obama and others in Congress hold “anti-American views.”

Prager, who calls Bachmann a “wonderful, wonderful extraordinary human being,” addressed the brouhaha by telling how he would’ve dealt with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews — by asking Matthews if he believes there are “American values” in the first place; if Matthews agrees, then “logic 1.1″ dictates that some people must hold anti-American values.

He added that both parties once upheld the “American value system” — the Democrats in the era of Kennedy and Truman — but the “Sixties Generation, the radicals, have taken over one of our two parties. They must be stopped!” People who “vote blue,” he added, “don’t know they’re voting radical.”

No fan of the Enlightenment, Prager added, “Equality, which is the primary value of the left, is a European value, not an American value.”

Prager’s most fiery rhetoric was against Obama’s message of change. “The left has built up a caricature of the United States over the last six years … a grand edifice of lies about America — about how pernicious it is … how fascistic it is. … [The left] believes ‘Bush lied, people died.’ These are all untruths. … Bush did not lie. This must be said over and over and over. … They may have been mistaken, but they didn’t lie.”

Watch Prager’s presentation:

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If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? (”Divinity” does not necessarily mean “literalism.”)

I do not ask this about “the Bible” as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the New Testament and generally confine divine revelation even within the Old Testament to the Torah and to verses where God is cited by the prophets, for example. But “Bible-believing” Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.

And they line up together on virtually every major social/moral issue.

Keith Ellison posing for a photo with the Quran instead of the Bible is apparently about some mythic “culture war” going on in America   Prager goes on, and hangs himself on his own words:

Very often the dividing line in America is portrayed as between those who believe in God and those who don’t. But the vast majority of Americans believe in God, and belief in God alone rarely affects people’s values. Many liberals believe in God; many conservatives do. What matters is not whether people believe in God but what text, if any, they believe to be divine. Those who believe that He has spoken through a given text will generally think differently from those who believe that no text is divine. Such people will usually get their values from other texts, or more likely from their conscience and heart.

If the goal of organized religion is to establish dominance of one creed over another, then Prager is right, Ellison should pose with the Bible.  However, if the goal of organized religion and the texts held in reverence by each is to give people something higher than themselves in which to believe, then Prager has just admitted that Ellison ceremonially swearing on a Quran is no problem. 

Ellison, a Muslim, holds up the Quran as the word of the same God as that of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  He prays to that God five times daily.  America’s values, however, did not come from the Quran, or the Bible, or the Torah, or any other holy text.  American religious values came from a desire to protect ALL religions from governmental or otherwise majoritarian pronouncements on their free practice.

Prager is trying to use fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the course of our nation’s values to prove himself right about an issue gone by. Using big concepts and expert-sounding prognostication about a “new civil war” in America does not make his essay any less a veiled attempt to insert religious bigotry into our national and political conscience.

Shame, Mr. Prager.  Shame.

The Council “disassociates itself from Mr. Prager’s statements as being antithetical to the mission of the Museum as an institution promoting tolerance and respect for all peoples regardless of their race, religion or ethnicity,

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Video from The Most:

And Prager states in USA Today:

:”I’m not arguing legality. I’m arguing what you should do,” he said, saying that even though he is a religious Jew, he would take an oath of public office using the Christian Bible, which includes the Old and New Testaments.

“The New Testament is not my Bible but it is America’s Bible,” he said, noting that Jewish officeholders who had insisted on the Hebrew Bible were “secularists” who didn’t believe what was in it anyway.

Someone should probably tell that to Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is a member of both the National Jewish Democratic Council and Hadassah,  who’s mission statement says that they are ” unwavering in [their] devotion to Judaism, Zionism, and American ideals.”

more insideDennis Prager’s words have taken a life of their own, and the reverberations can be heard all the way to…Colorado?

From our sister site at Colorado Confidential:

Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, has found an unlikely ally in Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo who once hypothetically suggested that bombing Islamic holy sites would be an appropriate response to a domestic nuclear attack by “extremist, fundamentalist Muslims.”
…
However, the Littleton Republican’s theologically-enlightened comment resonates quite a bit less when contrasted with his ongoing public feud with the Bible-thumpin’ Catholic Church and mainstream Christian denominations whom he claims are radical activists who employ smear tactics and impugn the motives of his anti-immigration-border-sealing-fence-building supporters with ties to white supremacist groups.

Prager’s also brought conservative radio host Michael Savage into the media scrutiny, as well:

SAVAGE: Keith Ellison won’t swear to uphold the oath of office on the Bible, but on the Quran instead. This is unbelievable to me. So what’s next? A witch gets elected, and she says she’s gonna only be sworn in with her hand over a pentagram? Where does this end? Tell me when this ends, the tyranny of the psycho, whacked-out minority. Tell me when it ends.

And, as many readers have written in to point out, all of this controversy is for nothing, since Congresspeople don’t actually take an oath on anything:

[T]he swearing-in ceremony for the House of Representatives never includes a religious book. The Office of the House Clerk confirmed to ThinkProgress that the swearing-in ceremony consists only of the Members raising their right hands and swearing to uphold the Constitution. The Clerk spokesperson said neither the Christian Bible, nor any other religious text, had ever been used in an official capacity during the ceremony. (Occasionally, Members pose for symbolic photo-ops with their hand on a Bible.)

For those of you who prefer video to reading, here is Dennis Prager on Hannity and Colmes, and another Prager Fox News Interview.

Besides playing on the racist fears of his readers by comparing taking the oath of office on the Koran to “a racist elected to Congress” being allowed to “choose Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ the Nazis’ Bible,”  Prager is completely wrong when he states that “all elected officials take their oaths of office with their hands on the very same book.”

more insideIn our country’s history, four presidents have been inaugurated without swearing an oath on the Bible.  Franklin Pierce was affirmed, and swore no oath, Rutherford Hayes initially had a private ceremony with no Bible before his public ceremony, Theodore Roosevelt had no Bible at his ceremony, and Lyndon Johnson used a missal during his first term.

Despite Prager’s insistence that “for all of American history, Jews elected to public office have taken their oath on the Bible, even though they do not believe in the New Testament,” it is clear that he is wrong.  Linda Lingle, Governor of Hawaii, took the oath of office on a Torah in 2001.  Madeleine Kunin, a Jewish Immigrant and Governor of Vermont “rested her left hand on a stack of old prayer books that had belonged to her mother, grandparents, and great grandfather” as “a physical expression of the weight of Jewish history.”

And in North Carolina, the Notary Public has a written code for swearing in:

“A person taking an oath should place one hand on the Holy Scriptures. This book will vary depending on the person’s religious beliefs: Christians should use the New Testament or the Bible; Jews, the Torah or the Old Testament; Moslems, the Koran; Hindus, the Bhagavad-Gita; etc.”

Perhaps Prager would be best benefited if he spent less time writing columns, and more re-reading Article VI of the Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Minnesota Monitor will be continuing to look at religion and public oaths of office in the upcoming weeks

Update The National Jewish Democratic Council Blog offers this info about Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz:

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) made headlines earlier this month when she could not find a Hebrew Bible for her swearing in; she refused the Christian Bible proffered by House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and eventually borrowed one from Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.).

Updated 11/29/06 Other blogs discussing this topic:

Daou Report
Glenn Greenwald
Liberty Papers
Andrew Sullivan
AllSpin Zone
Madison College Democrats
The Carpet Bagger Report

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