Prager is wrong- and Ellison is right

He's usually right on the money. But this time, Dennis Prager is out to lunch.

U.S. Representative-elect Keith Ellison (D-Minn) is a Muslim. He has ties to some very radical and scary people, and I firmly believe that the people of his district were foolish to elect him. But if he wants to be sworn into office on the "holy book" of his faith, that is his right.

The First Amendment forbids an establishment of religion- and besides, what could be more meaningless than to be sworn into office using the scriptures of a religion one does not believe in?

I'm frankly shocked that anyone could be so blatantly, flagrantly, just plain wrong-headed (as well as un-American) as to object to a man taking an oath to support- among other provisions of our Constitution- freedom of religion on the holy book of his own faith! Has Wahabi Islam won Prager and the others who object to Ellison taking the oath on the Koran over to its view of religious pluralism? Have a bunch of conservative Christians and Jews suddenly joined the Taliban?

No, Mr. Prager. This is not about culture. This is about bigotry- and the denial of one of the most sacred rights our Constitution grants. More than that, it is the abandonment of our own values in favor of the intolerance which characterizes government in most Islamic countries.

Finally, whether Ellison is allowed to take the oath on the Koran is about the commitment of the rest of us to the First Amendment- and it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that it's about anything else.

By the way, there is precident. At least one Jewish member of Congress took the oath on a copy of the Tanakh, the Hebrew scriptures, and a Mormon member of the Senate was sworn in on a Mormon prayer book.