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Marco Rubio and the Hebrew Congregation of Newport

Marco Rubio and the Hebrew Congregation of Newport

Last updated on: March 31, 2016 at 6:51 pm by Fred Clark

Marco Rubio and the Hebrew Congregation of Newport 2016-03-31T18:51:19-04:00 Fred Clark

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Yesterday, President Barack Obama spoke at the Islamic Society of Baltimore. It was this president’s first visit to an American mosque, but he wasn’t the first president to do this. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, also visited and spoke at an American mosque. So did President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose 1957 remarks Obama quoted from yesterday: “I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that under the American Constitution … and in American hearts … this place of worship, is just as welcome … as any other religion.”

Obama’s speech in Baltimore is pretty terrific. It’s a good illustration of the American motto of “E pluribus unum,” but if you’re the sort who prefers the later Cold War-era alternate motto of “In God we trust,” you’ll find it’s a pretty good illustration and explication of that, too.

Alas, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio did not care for Obama’s speech or for the president’s visit to an American mosque. Rubio is campaigning for the Republican nomination for president, competing against people like Donald Trump (who wants to ban all Muslims from entering America) and Ben Carson (who wants to create a national registry of Muslims) and Ted Cruz (who doesn’t want American law enforcement prosecuting hate crimes against Muslims).

While Rubio is working to position himself as the reasonable, mainstream alternative to their extreme voices, he’s also made it clear throughout the campaign that he wasn’t going to allow any of them to outflank him on the right when it comes to right-wing Islamophobia. Back when Trump first proposed shutting down mosques, Rubio one-upped him by suggesting that Muslim-American restaurants and businesses should also be shut down. Despite his own growing record of advocating legal discrimination against Muslim-Americans, Rubio also continues to insist that there is “no evidence” that Muslim-Americans face discrimination.

So the supposedly reasonable and mainstream candidate Rubio freaked out again yesterday over the president’s visit and speech in Baltimore. Read Obama’s speech — one conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt called “a very good speech, a superb speech, actually” — and then read Marco Rubio’s Palin-esque response to it:

I’m tired of being divided against each other for political reasons like this president’s done. … Always pitting people against each other. Always! Look at today: He gave a speech at a mosque. Oh, you know, basically implying that America is discriminating against Muslims. Of course there’s discrimination in America, of every kind. But the bigger issue is radical Islam.

So, to Rubio, Obama’s visit to a mosque is “divisive.” Obama’s acknowledgement of the equal rights of religious minorities, to Rubio, amounts to “pitting people against each other.”

It’s probably a good time, then, to revisit President George Washington’s 1790 “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport.” I’d argue that it’s always a good time to do so, as this letter is a proud and important landmark in American history, although it’s message, apparently, is one that Marco Rubio weirdly imagines is “divisive”:

If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people.

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

… May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.

P.S. I hope no one at Wheaton College ever reads Washington’s Newport letter. The first president suggests that Christians and non-Trinitarian Jews worship the same God, and Wheaton administrators will have a tricky time figuring out who to suspend or terminate as retribution for this heinous affront to their Statement of Faith.

P.P.S. Neither our friends at Wheaton nor Sen. Rubio would much care for the Flushing Remonstrance, either, wherein the citizens of New Netherlands — more than a century before the American Constitution — showed a better understanding of its guarantee of religious liberty than supposed “religious liberty” champion Rubio ever has:

The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland, so love, peace and liberty, extending to all in Christ Jesus, condemns hatred, war and bondage. And because our Savior sayeth it is impossible but that offenses will come, but woe unto him by whom they cometh, our desire is not to offend one of his little ones, in whatsoever form, name or title he appears in, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Quaker, but shall be glad to see anything of God in any of them, desiring to do unto all men as we desire all men should do unto us, which is the true law both of Church and State; for our Savior sayeth this is the law and the prophets.

P.P.P.S. You have every right, and every obligation, to read the beautiful words of Washington’s letter while screaming, “What about slavery you self-serving tyrannical hypocrite?” If you’re not screaming that, you’re reading it wrong.

The policy Washington rightly commended as “worthy of imitation” — a policy in which “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship” — was unjustly and illiberally denied to the majority of people in the United States at the time Washington wrote those words. We have two options for dealing with the stark injustice of that hypocrisy. We can reject the policy itself as a sham and a delusion because it was not then, and is not yet now, consistently and universally applied. Or we can seek to expand and extend it, and thereby to ensure that we better live up to it than the flesh-peddling kidnapper Washington ever could.

The latter approach, by the way, is the major theme running through Obama’s speech yesterday.

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