Analysts are sorting through the results of last weeks election looking for any trends that might tell us about where we’re headed as an electorate. One of the first observations to emerge is that religious attacks are tending to boomerang back on the attackers. Case in point, the “Aqua-Budha” attacks on Senator-elect Rand Paul of Kentucky:
“Nearly four out of five Kentuckians who voted in Tuesday’s election said they felt Democrat Jack Conway unfairly attacked Paul by running a TV ad that asked why Paul was a member in college of a secret campus society that mocked Christians and claimed his god was ‘Aqua Buddha,’ according to exit polling conducted for The Associated Press.
Paul denounced the ad as false and chastised Conway for running it. The spot triggered a public outcry across the state and nation.
The Paul campaign aired an ad in response in which he said he keeps Christ in his heart. And former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a past Republican presidential candidate and a Baptist minister, went on Christian radio calling for Conway to repent.
‘I think that you shouldn’t attack a person’s faith, and I think it did backfire on them,’ Paul told the AP on Wednesday. ‘My hope is that when someone loses and that issue appears to have had an influence that maybe it discourages people from those attacks.'”
But that’s just one small incident. There’s a discussion of the larger issues by a panel of experts on the Social Science Research Council.
For instance this point by a Muslim scholar Ebrahim Moosa of Duke University:
Throughout the electoral campaign Muslim Americans and Islam were dehumanized in rhetoric ranging from Islam being the enemy, opposition to the building of a mosque in lower Manhattan and mosques elsewhere in the country, Qur’an-burning publicity stunts, to conspiracies that Sharia law will displace the US constitution. Here is the bad news: Decent politicians frequently swallowed the Islamophobia pill in different doses. Claims by Sharron Angle that Sharia law will govern US cities infected Senate leader Harry Reid’s campaign and he too voiced opposition to the building of the Manhattan mosque to cite only one example.
But something more pernicious has been unleashed in this electoral campaign that exceeds previous levels. Anything said about Islam and Muslims, the more bizarre and disgusting the better, has become believable. When it comes to Islam, our civil discourses fish in the sewers. The main culprits are not only Fox and Rush Limbaugh but also left leaning comedians like Bill Maher who are equally culpable. Maher added to the dehumanization of Muslims when he copied Juan Williams’ paranoia by claiming that he was spooked by babies named Muhammad in Britain. And, when the prosecutors in the trial of the Canadian-born Guantanamo inmate Omar Khadr can offer testimony of a Danish psychologist that Muslim inbreeding “may have done catastrophic damage to their gene pool” and this passes without a murmur then surely we are swimming in the sewers of dehumanization.
You can read all the reflections here.