Newt Thinking

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, has proposed that we (the FBI, NSA?) interview every Muslim in the USA and ask if they support Sharia, or Islamic Law.  If so, they should be deported.  When I stopped laughing I started crying.  If this is in any way a good idea on moral grounds, legal grounds or religious grounds then it should be applied in other ways as well.

This is what I propose:  We (whoever that is) should interview every Christian in the USA and ask if they believe the Bible is the word of God, inerrant, and should be taken literally.  If so, they should be deported.  Why would we want folks here who clearly are delusional, uneducated, supporters of child abuse, gender abuse, slavery and the death penalty without trial?  Sounds like a really scary, unhealthy group to me so let’s get them out of here.

I am not sure how far Newt has thought this through, but whatever strategy he has for deporting Muslims should work with fundamentalist Christians as well.  We should deport them to their country of origin whether it be Iraq, Britain, or the Philippines regardless of the number of generations that have lived here as Americans.  We should strip them of their American citizenship because they believe something that we perceive to be harmful to the rest of us.  We should abolish the notion that individuals have the fundamental right to believe what they choose to believe.  If individuals believe something that is not consistent with what we call our best interest we should banish them. 

This perspective is so extreme, so un-American, so immoral, and so un-constitutional that any nation that would take such suggestions seriously is in no way a democratic free nation.  It is a nation that practices “right think” and the consequences of enacting such legislation is more totalitarian than anything we have seen since Adolph Hitler and Idi Amin.  Those men are of the same mind as Newt.

If a recognized leader and spokesperson of a major political party can propose such an atrocity we should be afraid.  Be very afraid.  In terms of philosophy and morality, Newt resides at about the same rung on the evolutionary thought ladder as his name sake amphibian does on the evolutionary animal kingdom ladder.  His proposal is a tail that should not have been generated.