Back the day, 1960 to be exact, John F. Kennedy was running for the office of President. Back in the day, he had a problem; he was a Roman Catholic and no Roman Catholic had ever won the presidency. The opposition to a Catholic president was mainly coming from the southern states and one of the strategies of his campaign was to select Lyndon Johnson as his running mate in the hope that such a choice would bring the Lone State's electoral college votes into the Democrat column. Johnson was in a powerful position at the time as the majority leader of the U. S. Senate, a position far more powerful than that the of the Vice President.
Johnson, with a sense of the macabre, asked his staff to check on the number of vice presidents who had become presidents due to the death of the president. They did. Johnson then decided that the odds were fairly good, so he accepted the offer.(Was he prescient or what!)
During the campaign, JFK, to combat the anti-Catholic sentiment in what was then the "Solid South," arranged a meeting in which he would address a conference of Protestant pastors to confront the issue. But he did more than that. He pointed out that, according to the Constitution, there is to be no religious test for office. To wit:
"Article VI specifies that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” This prohibition banned a longstanding form of religious discrimination practiced both in England and in the United States. It provided an enduring constitutional commitment to religious liberty and equality that has influenced the way Americans have understood the relationship between government and religion over the last two centuries.
"In England, religious tests were used to “establish” the Church of England as an official national church. The Test Acts required all government officials to take an oath disclaiming the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and affirming the Church of England’s teachings about receiving the sacrament. These laws effectively excluded Catholics and members of dissenting Protestant sects from exercising political power. Religious tests were needed, William Blackstone explained, to protect the established church and the government “against perils from non-conformists of all denominations, infidels, turks, jews, heretics, papists, and sectaries.”
"At the time the United States Constitution was adopted, religious qualifications for holding office also were pervasive throughout the states. Delaware’s constitution required government officials to 'profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost.'
"North Carolina barred anyone 'who shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion' from serving in the government. Unlike the rule in England, however, American religious tests did not limit office-holding to members of a particular established church. Every state allowed Protestants of all varieties to serve in government. Still, religious tests were designed to exclude certain people—often Catholics or non-Christians—from holding office based on their faith."
Kennedy also stressed during the campaign that nobody bothered to ask him his religion beforehe fought in WW II.
That was then, this is now.
Enter stage left the current Democrat Senator from the Green Mountain State whose state motto is, "Freedom and Unity," Bernie Sanders. (I would suggest, "We make pancakes tolerable" but that's another story.) And at his entrance, we see that Senator Sanders is angry, nay, enraged because of the man seated before him, a man named Vought.
Mr. Vaught is there before Bernie Sanders and a panel of other senators because Mr. Vaught is seeking to be confirmed to some type of office few people have ever heard of. The senator is enraged at Mr. Vaught because his staff has uncovered some "dirt" on the office seeker. Bernie Sanders is in possession of what the the staff has discovered and he is horrified. It's in the form of a sentence Mr. Vought wrote.
Does the quote have anything to do with recommending child molestation? Was it a posting commending Timothy McVeigh? Or did Vought write something scandalous on a statue of Martin Luther King when he was in college? The answer is "None of the above."
Sanders was livid because he had discovered that Mr. Vaught, on January 17, 2016, had written an opinion piece for a publication called The Resurgent in which he said, "Muslims have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ, His Son, and they stand condemned."
Senator Sanders hammered away at Mr. Vought and then summed up his indignation to the chairman of the committee, saying, "Mr. Chairman, in my view, the statement made by Mr. Vought is indefensible, it is hateful, it is Islamophobic, and it is an insult to over a billion Muslims throughout the world." (One might wonder if the Senator might be upset at the Koran's instruction to "Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal sternly with them. Hell shall be their home, evil their fate.” (Sura 66:9)
How did the confirmation go? Sanders closed by saying the nominee was "Really not someone who this country is supposed to be about. I will vote no." (Vought was eventually confirmed by a 50-49 vote nonetheless.)
The ecclesiastical system of which JFK was a member holds to this tenet: "Chrsit himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and baptism and
thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men
enter through baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be
saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by
God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it." The tenet of Islam states: " "And whoever seeks a religion other than Islaam,
it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers." [Aal
‘Imraan 3:85]
And "There is no-one, Jew or Christian, who hears of me then dies without believing in that with which I have
been sent, but he will be one of the people of Hell." .
Vought simply stated a core belief of the Christian faith which was somehow by some strange twist of logic, used to declare that he hated Muslims. He was expressing his beliefs about the theology of Islam, that it was deficient and stating the result of that deficiency and that was used as a religious test for office by the 48 other senators who voted "No" So, who endures the unconstitutional test of religion? The Christian.
One chapter and verse come to mind: "If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you." (John 15:18)
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