During the 1960 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Richard Nixon received the endorsement of Martin Luther King, Sr. solely because the Democratic candidate, Sen. John F. Kennedy, was a Catholic.
When King’s son, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was jailed in Georgia, Kennedy called Coretta Scott King to express support for her husband and his brother Robert intervened with a local judge to have Dr. King freed.
{mosads}King’s father then reversed his position, saying, “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion. But now he can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is.”
On hearing this, an amused Kennedy commented, “That was a hell of a statement, wasn’t it. Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father.” Then, perhaps thinking of his own father’s anti-Semitism, Kennedy added, “Well, we all have our fathers.”
Republican Ben Carson had his Martin Luther King Sr. moment when he said over the weekend, “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.” After severe criticism, he later added a meaningless qualifier that he could support a Muslim as president if the Muslim candidate rejected “all tenets” of Sharia, the canons that govern a Muslim’s life, in other words, gave up his religion entirely.
Religious bigotry, like ethnic or racial bigotry, is ugly and harmful. Such bigotry is rooted in stereotypes that characterize an entire group of people, solely on the basis of faith, as the “Others,” who are then assigned negative characteristics out of ignorance and fear. Thus, the stereotype goes — Muslims hold extreme, if not violent, beliefs and therefore an American Muslim should never be president.
The result of Carson’s remark was to unfairly stigmatize millions of American Muslims as an alien group in our midst whose members have few individual characteristics other than the ones that we fear. Already, as polling has shown, a majority of Americans admit to being ignorant about Islam or not personally knowing an American Muslim. Some 65 percent of the American public believes Islam to be “very different” from their own religions and 40 percent believe that Islam is more likely than other religions to incite violence. One-third of the American public, in turn, believes that American Muslims should be ineligible to run for President and nearly 30 percent believe that they should be barred from sitting on the Supreme Court.
In fact, as Gallup’s “Muslim Americans: A National Portrait” found in 2009, American Muslims are “one of the most diverse religious groups in the United States, reflecting the economic, racial, and political diversity within America itself.” American Muslims achieve higher educational levels than the American average and have higher employment rates.
Contrary to the stereotype, Muslim Americans are even more opposed to violence than their non-Muslim countrymen. Gallup’s polling confirmed that, in contrast to other faith groups, Muslim Americans are more likely to say that military attacks on civilians are never justified.
Stereotyping does a lot of damage. A 2014 poll found that Muslims are more likely than Americans of any other major religious groups to say that they have personally experienced racial or religious discrimination in the past year. FBI statistics show that, after 9/11, hate crimes against Muslim Americans rose to 27 percent of all such crimes and have remained at high levels since.
Carson’s remark also obscured the contributions of American Muslims to this country. An American Muslim served as ambassador to the United Nations under President Bush (Zalmay Khalizad), one won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (Ahmed Zewail), another was chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company (Muhtar Kent), and yet another was Miss USA (Rima Fakih).
Carson did great disservice to the approximately 60 American Muslims who died in the 9/11 attacks and the 3,500 American Muslim soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, seven of whom died serving their country.
The night of his release from the Georgia jail, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech declaring that “religious bigotry is as immoral, undemocratic and unchristian as racial bigotry.” American Muslims should not be declared unfit to seek the presidency because of their religion. But a presidential candidate who, out of religious bigotry, would bar an entire group of Americans from holding the office he seeks, should be disqualified.
Wallance is a writer and lawyer in New York City and the author, most recently, of “America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of An American Aristocracy.”