December 11, 2012 7:53 AM

If you're going to trash the President, could you at least pick something legitimate?

Sharia law means women have to have head coverings, have no rights — and you don’t hear the President say a word about Sharia. You haven’t heard him condemn Sharia law or radical Islam.

There are few issues in this country that can’t be demagogued via the simple act of Rick Santorum opening his mouth and attempting to voice an opinion. Clearly having never learned the “Better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt” rule, Santorum seems beyond willing to jump in on voice his opinion on any number of issues he knows little to nothing about. It’s as entertaining as it is proof that Santorum, who was at least smart enough to somehow get a J.D., possesses the intellectual candlepower of a beagle.

For the sake of argument, how about we start with the defintion of Sharia, courtesy of Dictionary.com.

sharia or sheria (ʃəˈriːə)

n

the body of canonical law based on the Koran that lays down certain duties and penalties for Muslims

[Arabic]

Granted, that definition is so broad that it doesn’t begin to characterize what Sharia is. It’s also likely more than Santorum has bothered to learn about Islam’s canonical law. Being steeped as he is in the “everything I need to know about Islam I learned on 9.11” paean to ignorance and hatred, Santorum understands neither the true meaning of Sharia, nor has he bothered to fact-check his statement about President Obama’s alleged refusal to condemn radical Islam.

Sounds like somebody’s getting a big lump of coal in their stocking this Christmas….

Ready. Fire. Aim….

The notion that Obama hasn’t condemned radical Islam is absurd: the President told a Muslim audience in Cairo that “the first issue that we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms” and that “among some Muslims, there’s a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of somebody else’s faith,” among many other instances. He also has a particularly aggressive record of taking military action against Islamic extremists.

Obama hasn’t aggressively attacked “Sharia law” because, in the most basic sense, Sharia is the code of conduct that defines how Muslims ought to live, something reasonably similar to the same religious ethical codes that people of all faiths hold to. It doesn’t say that women “have no rights.” Hyperbolic rhetoric about the dangers of Sharia law is commonly employed by an Islamophobic activist network that has pushed through discriminatory anti-Sharia legislation in several states.

That there are people who measure their own faith by rejecting someone else’s is hardly news. What zealots and haters like Santorum won’t admit is that Christians are also guilty of this behavior. There is nothing charitable or Christian about Santorum’s comments; they just betray an incautious, inflexible intellect unwilling to recognize and accept that not everyone shares the same flavor of imaginary friends. It’s not a matter of equivalence, and I’m not about to wade into the moral quagmire, but refusal to recognize that Christians are every bit as capable of religious/ideological violence is as absurd as it is offensive.

And what of the sort of radical Christianity that Santorum and his fellow uber-Christian zealots ignore (and thus condone)? What of the criminals who blow up abortion clinics, shoot doctors who provide abortions (as part of a menu of women’s reproductive health care services), and harass pregnant women attempting to enter an abortion clinic? How is that behavior any more reprehensible than the murderous excesses engaged in by radical Islamists? Killing in the name of one’s religion- whatever your flavor of imaginary friend be- is disgusting and intolerable…and yet Santorum and his ilk are perfectly willing to give radical Christians a free pass.

Beyond that, I have no problem with the idea of criticizing the President; it’s a free country and that’s part and parcel of free speech. That said, would it be too much to ask that a critic like Santorum at least do a minimum of fact-checking to ensure that what he’s accusing the President of has at least a modicum of grounding in the firm soil of reality?

Or is looking like a clueless bigot simply something that doesn’t bother Santorum? As long as he gets his face time, do the facts really matter?

Not to Rick Santorum.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on December 11, 2012 7:53 AM.

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