Donald Trump and the "Muslim Problem"

I have been thinking about the fact that Mr.Trump has reinvigorated the birth certificate issue and I am tending toward making it another reason why I do not support him in his bid to be the Republican candidate for President of this country. I have stayed away from this issue ever since some on the hard right attempted to make it a part of the campaign against President Obama last time around, fearing that to engage it would give it legs. It is a very dangerous issue not just for the President, but also for this country. Unfortunately, it now looks like it is going to reemerge in the 2012 electoral campaign. I find that most unfortunate.

There is no doubt in my mind that Mr. Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and thus is qualified to be our President. There is also no doubt in my mind that his father was a follower of the Muslim faith. My assumption is that the birth certificate states that the child's religion is Muslim. It is also my presumption that the adult Obama saw his association with Islam as a child to be detrimental to his political career. As an adult, he has made repeated statements to the effect that he is a Christian, and I see no reason to doubt him on that score. He has a long and very public record of having been associated with Reverend Wright's church. That association opened another can of worms, but it too is understandable, given his work within the black community in Chicago.

Please understand that I do not want Mr. Obama to be our President, but my reasons do not relate to the word that his parents wrote on a piece of paper in his infancy. Neither do they relate to the fact that he attended a Muslim school in Indonesia as a child. In fact, I agree with him that the Muslim's evening call to prayer is a beautiful sound. I think that he made a serious mistake when he tried to cover all of this up because it raises questions about his core values. That is about the only part of this that does concern me, but my main opposition to him is for the bad things that he is doing to this country as President.

When I first heard The Donald raise the issue with the ladies on The View, I assumed that he just got his mouth out ahead of his brain, but the fact that he is continuing the campaign makes it clear that it is a calculated part of his bid for the Republican nomination. I note too that he is loud and clear that he opposed the Ground Zero Mosque and agrees with Bill O'Reilly that America has a "Muslim Problem." I believe that this is an effort to appeal to the current visceral fear of Islam that is alive and well in the body politic. This is not what or who we need to lead the conservative cause in 2012.

We do not have a "Muslim Problem" in America just because a large number of very dangerous radical Islamic terrorists are attacking us. If that were to be true then we do indeed have a "Christian Problem" when Christian idiots shoot people in schools, post offices, and super markets. Heck, some of them even cite the bible when they kill people, just as the radical Islamists cite the Koran. That there are large numbers of Americans that are unable to distinguish between our true enemies and those that are not is depressing enough, but that we have people who want to lead us into more of that kind of lunacy is dangerous.