Last week
Donald Trump, in his usual inimitable fashion, again made an incendiary comment
that aroused great anger, from fellow Republican presidential candidates, and
almost everyone to the left of Trump. But not to his supporters; they loved it.
They can’t wait to have Trump banning Muslim immigrants...actually anyone they
don’t like...and ignoring established U.S. laws, policies and regulations….”Give me your
tired, your poor, your huddled masses...and turn them away."
But as wrong
as I think Trump is, he may have stumbled onto a very good idea. It just isn’t restrictive
enough.
Let’s run with his idea of banning a religious group. If I agreed with his position, then we
shouldn’t stop there; we should go even further. Let’s not just ban Muslims
from entering the U.S., let’s ban ANY religious person. Yes, ban them all…
until they’ve passed a test indicating they understand the separation of church
and state, that they will uphold and defend that separation, and that our
Constitution supersedes ANY law that's in someone’s
holy book.
This ban would
not just apply to foreigners hoping to resettle in America, but also to anyone
who already lives here. For example, if Christians promote an interpretation
of their God’s laws as somehow overriding the Constitution, they need to be
removed to another place, say, the Vatican, until such time as they take a
test proving they understand this is a secular nation and the Constitution is
the ONLY law of the land. They can practice whatever religion they want in
their own homes or in a place of worship (that would no longer be tax-exempt),
but they cannot claim their God’s law is higher than Constitutional law.
It doesn’t matter if the believers are
Hindu, Mormon, Buddhist, Shinto, Zoroastrian, or they worship of a pile of rocks.
They must show, via both written and verbal testing, that they acknowledge their
religious laws stop at our border. They do not supplant any U.S. law at any time…period!
If they are Muslim and disagree; Iran, Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, and even ISIS are all trying to implement Sharia. Let
them live there and practice their faith. Or if they are Mormon and believe that what Elohim says overrides U.S. law, expel them to one of the uninhabited islands of the Alaska archipelago
until testing confirms they fully understand and comply with the Constitution.
Trump's not the first. Whether anti-British, anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, anti-black, or anti-Commie...down through history, Americans have loved vilifying and repressing others.
Now, far be it
for me to point out to the oh-so-wise and well-informed Trump, who clearly hasn’t
studied U.S. history, we already tried banning certain groups…the Chinese
in the late 1800s, the Japanese in World War Two, and Communists during the 1950s.
It just doesn’t work, and won’t work, even if we turned this nation into a completely fascist dictatorship like, say, Nazi Germany. So rather than banning, the best step is to make sure everyone understands we are not bound by the religious laws of any gods, or any religious sects.
Trump’s pandering
to squeamish, anxious white xenophobes gets great press, but it won’t get him elected
president. However, if he’d go along with a test given to every religious person immigrating here, or living here, so we can get them up to speed on how the Constitution works, then he and I might have some common ground to discuss ideas.
Know your Constitution
