If It Bleeds, It Leads

Responding to a column found here.

I have often heard the phrase "reporters don't burn buildings that don't burn". The above column no better typifies that statement. Instead of speaking to something that is actually important to this nation, Prager is creating a controversy where there is none. Presumably, this is to bring readers to his column by hitting all the right buttons of fear, ignorance, and xenophobia.

Aside from the fact that the swearing in ceremony does not use a holy book of any kind, Prager shoots himself in the foot on a very obvious point. Why, in the world would he WANT Ellison to swear on a Bible? Those who take such oaths over a holy book do so because of the reverence for the book and accountability toward its honor they feel. If Ellison is not a Christian, do you want him to be held accountable to that which he does not believe or to his own god?

Then again, maybe that is Prager's point all along. People argued during John F. Kennedy's time that if he, as a Catholic, won the White House then the Pope would be calling the shots in America. This was patently false, of course, but it didn't stop the sentiment from being expressed. In his own, clumsy way, Prager seems to be intimating that an oath on the Koran will bring about what so many people unfoundedly fear from the Muslim religion.

In this time of crusades against "evil-doers", such a building burns very easily.