Perhaps seeking to parlay the Nice terrorist attack into a last-ditch opportunity to unseat beady-eyed Mike Pence as Trump’s VP pick, Newt Gingrich went on the Sean Hannity show last night and proposed staging an Inquisition right here in the USA:
Gingrich: Western civilization is in a war. We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia, they should be deported. Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization. Modern Muslims who have given up Sharia, glad to have them as citizens. Perfectly happy to have them next door. But we need to be fairly relentless about defining who our enemies are.
First, an aside: I’ve been fortunate enough to not lay eyes on Sean Hannity in quite a while. Has he always looked exactly like a penis wearing a coonskin cap or is this a recent development?
Second, Gingrich doesn’t specify to what location he’d deport American-born Muslims who believe in Sharia law, and Peeny Crockett doesn’t follow up. Maybe some reporter could ask the would-be Grand Inquisitor who is on the GOP nominee’s VP shortlist that question. Seems important.
Third, I also find it obnoxious when people insist on giving their invisible friends’ made-up edicts force of law in a constitutionally secular republic. I might be willing to get on board with the Gingrich plan if God-bothering assholes like Kim Davis, Mike Huckabee, Maggie Gallagher, et al, were also rounded up and shipped off to a deportation site to be determined later along with the Sharia-believers.
Yeah, no. As pleasant as it is to imagine an America denuded of its religious nutbags — like a Rapture minus the supernatural intervention, and all us sinners left behind to pick over their stuff! — people are allowed to believe profoundly stupid shit here. That’s one of the things I like about us. Insofar as the word has any meaning at all, Gingrich’s proposal is fundamentally un-American.