Ann Althouse really has a bee in her bonnet. She’s so mad about a New York Times piece on Mitt and Ann Romney that she’s sputtering about the president being a “Muslim by inheritance through his father.” She says it’s a cultural matter. Obama’s a Muslim by inheritance because the children of Muslims are considered Muslims.
So, you know, if a pollster calls you and asks if you think the president is a Muslim, it’s perfectly acceptable and correct to answer in the affirmative. After all, it’s true in a cultural sense.
Even for Ann Althouse this is depressingly stupid. I wonder if Althouse knows that the president’s grandfather was Catholic and worked with missionaries before he converted to Islam. Does she know that Obama’s father was an atheist? How come those Catholic and atheistic values didn’t transfer culturally? Surely, Althouse knows that the president only really spent time with his father once in his life. I have an idea, let’s make it a rule that all children are culturally members of the adopted religion of their grandparents. If there’s a conflict among grandparents, choose the ones whose child abandoned the kid and had nothing to do with them.
That does’t help with me though. My parents stayed together. One grandfather was an atheist and the other dropped Catholicism for Episcopalianism. What does that make me?
Answer: whatever the hell I want to be.
