A Muslim President of the USA

Americans have been arguing bitterly over religion since before the founding of the independent nation. The Colonists came by it honestly. They arrived from Europe with a legacy of several hundred years of wars with the infidels, the Papists and fellow Christian reformers.

A few early Colonists died for their religious beliefs, or for lack of them. Others were jailed or exiled.

Then Vice President Thomas Jefferson, a decade after the nation’s founding, became the first presidential candidate — but not the last — to be falsely characterized as a Muslim.

John Quincy Adams, advocating for the re-election of his father, “exposed” Jefferson as “a Turk,” that day’s euphemism for followers of Mohammad, which in 18th century American eyes made him more unfit than a Jew, or even a Roman Catholic, to head this Protestant nation.

Why can’t a Muslim be the President of the US?

This question has plagued the American people, as much as it did the founding fathers as it does now. 200 years ago presidential contenders accused their opponents of being ‘Turks’, for at that time Muslim and Turk were synonymous. More recently President Obama was accused of being a Muslim.

Original Source: Buffalo News