Gary Farber has a nice piece about John Ashcroft’s recent remarks, in which our breastphobic Attorney General says
“Civilized people — Muslims, Christians and Jews — all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator. Civilized people of all religious faiths are called to the defense of His creation. We are a nation called to defend freedom — a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God.”
Ashcroft groups Christianity, Judaism, and Islam under the “civilized faith” umbrella a few more times in the prepared statement.
I find it very interesting that people like Ashcroft now seem to be going out of their way to include Muslims when speaking positively about religion and people of faith. Anyone else remember when the watchword among the religious right was “Judeo-Christian”? Well, apparently Muslims have made the big leagues. I’m willing to bet that while this lexical change began before 9/11, it’s really become noticeable since. One can take this as sincere outreach by people who have traditionally had a very narrow view of morality, or one can take it as crass pandering to a group of voters that generally went to Bush in 2000. Either way, it’s interesting.