November 10, 2015

Ted Cruz Explains Which Religions Are OK for American Presidents

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From Ted Cruz, explaining his own personal religious test for political candidates:

Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief of this nation.

Atheists are taking offense at this, but as I understand it, Jews don’t kneel when they pray. So….I guess Cruz doesn’t think Jews are fit to be president either.

That’s ridiculous, of course. Cruz was just using a metaphor for praying, so Jews are OK as long as they pray every day. It’s only nonbelievers who are unfit for public office.

And that’s no metaphor at all. So here’s my question: the press threw a fit when Ben Carson suggested that Muslims weren’t fit to be president. Will they throw a similar fit now that Cruz has suggested atheists are unfit to be president? This is, of course, a rhetorical question, so there’s no need to answer. I think we all know this will be treated as a meaningless pander because, you know, atheists. Who cares about them?

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THE BIG PICTURE

You expect the big picture, and it's our job at Mother Jones to give it to you. And right now, so many of the troubles we face are the making not of a virus, but of the quest for profit, political or economic (and not just from the man in the White House who could have offered leadership and comfort but instead gave us bleach).

In "News Is Just Like Waste Management," we unpack what the coronavirus crisis has meant for journalism, including Mother Jones’, and how we can rise to the challenge. If you're able to, this is a critical moment to support our nonprofit journalism with a donation: We've scoured our budget and made the cuts we can without impairing our mission, and we hope to raise $400,000 from our community of online readers to help keep our big reporting projects going because this extraordinary pandemic-plus-election year is no time to pull back.

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