Speaking to a crowd in Ohio yesterday, Rick Santorum invoked fear of The Other and implied that President Obama bases his policies on some shadowy text or belief system rather than the bible. The obvious implication being that he is a secret-Muslim.
The “president’s agenda” is “not about you,” he said. “It’s not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your job.
“It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology,” Santorum said to applause from the crowd. “Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology, but no less a theology.”
Not a theology based on the bible. Is Santorum implying he bases it on the Quran? The Necronomicon? The Similarion?
Santorum probably isn't familiar with the later, so I can only assume this is his way of intimating that President Obama is a secret-Muslim who bases his presidency on the Quran rather than the bible. And while the Santorum campaign insists he was referring to secularism rather than the president's religion, I find that hard to believe because one month ago Santorum smiled and looked the other way as one of his supporters said the president was an "avowed Muslim" right in front of him.
Concerning the inspiration for the president's policies -- I don't believe he does, or needs to, base his policy on any particular religious or creationist text. Because what Republicans see as a matter of faith and theology, the rest of us see as simply a matter of competent governance. Supply-side economics relies on faith that it will work rather than hard evidence, because the hard evidence doesn't exist. What the evidence we do have supports is what the president's economic team is basing its diagnosis on.
There is a big risk for Republicans in continuously equating President Obama's policies with secularism. The risk being that people are going to decide they like secularism, just as they are learning that a little socialism isn't so bad either.
And while we're on the subject -- the president's economic philosophy and economic agenda, contextualized in his budget, appears far more Christ-like to me than the Republican agenda of giving to the rich and fucking the poor. And I am a non-believer, but it seems to me that if you actually follow the lessons of the bible rather than slap it on a bumper-sticker, you would necessarily fall in line with the Democratic world-view of economic fairness.