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Sarah KaplanNYTOn Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said he would not support a Muslim president.It was only a matter of hours before others were clamoring to say that they would not support a presidential candidate who wouldn’t support a Muslim president.Lindsey Graham said that Carson should apologize to American Muslims. Ted Cruz reminded Carson that “the Constitution specifies there shall be no religious test for public office.” John Kasich said the most important qualifications to be president were unrelated to religion. Bernie Sanders was “disappointed” in Carson’s statement and Keith Ellison, the country’s first Muslim member of congress, issued a statement condemning Carson and Donald Trump, whose past comments about Islam prompted Carson’s anti Muslim president assertion in the first place....He’s hardly the first person to say so, about Muslims or any other religion. Despite the fact that religious tests for public officials are outlawed by the Constitution (Article VI: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”), there’s a long and fairly ugly history of declarations that certain faiths should disqualify people from public office.When drafting constitutions in the 18th and 19th century, several states saw fit to include a requirement that office holders declare belief in God or a “supreme being.” It wasn’t until 1997, when considering an atheist notary public’s right to keep his job, that the Supreme Court ruled such requirements unconstitutional. Plenty of presidential candidates were accused of atheism, including some of the most revered — Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln....The first and arguably the most viciously attacked was Al Smith, four-time New York governor and the Democratic nominee in 1928. Smith’s Catholicism became the target of a vitriolic campaign against him. Fliers warned voters that Smith, if elected, would null their marriages and confiscate their bibles, Smith biographer Robert Slayton wrote in the New York Times in 2012, and opponents claimed that a photo of the newly built Holland Tunnel, which links Manhattan and New Jersey, was actually a secret passageway between Washington and Rome. An anti-Smith political cartoon showed the Pope and several bishops seated at a table while Smith, wearing a bellboy’s uniform, waited on them. The cartoon was captioned: “Cabinet Meeting — If Al Were President.”
Carson is about 8 years too late with that one...
