News reports over the weekend said that President Trump would host a dinner tonight in honor of the Muslim Ramadan observance, during which Muslims fast until sunset.
The White House issued a statement that Ramadan “reminds us of the richness Muslims add to the religious tapestry of America.”
Two matters sprang instantly to mind upon beholding that news.
One was that we need to check Trump’s birth certificate. Appearing to accept the free exercise of the Muslim faith could mean Trump was born in Kenya, as was the last president, also a Ramadan host and Muslim appeaser.
The other memory was of one of the epic moments in American oratory. It came at a Tea Party rally on the Arkansas state Capitol steps in 2011. The oratory was delivered by the great monument-builder, state Sen. Jason Rapert of Bigelow, though I blame Conway.
Rapert said on that occasion, and I quote, because it’s on a video and you can see for yourself: “It says, ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.’ And I wonder sometimes when they invited all the Muslims to come into the White House and have them a little Ramadan supper. When your president could not take time to attend a National Prayer Breakfast, I wonder what he stands for. … I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don’t represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is [sic] not going to save us. We’re going to try to take this country back for the Lord. We’re going to try to take this country back for conservatism. And we’re not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in.”
That powerful sermonette was bull’s-eye except for the part that wasn’t, which was all of it.
Obama never missed a National Prayer Breakfast. He spoke at all of them when he was president.
Presidents before him had regularly hosted Ramadan suppers in the White House, signaling that official respect for freedom of religion was part of the American fabric even before the Kenyan took over.
The first one? Thomas Jefferson invited folks in at sunset in 1805, a so much more advanced time.
And, while many aghast people insisted that Rapert had meant black people when he referred to not letting minorities run roughshod over the rights of his white audience that day, I defend him.
I insisted then, and insist now, that he was not referring to black people. He was referring to anyone who disagrees with him.
He is not a racist. He is a majority-ist, as long as he’s in the majority. What he is is a fundamentalist religious bully, that’s all.
Rapert doesn’t want to keep black people down. He wants to keep down anyone of any color who disagrees with him.
Like Muslims. They’re aren’t enough of them to deserve rights, by Jason’s reckoning.
If the poll says people in Arkansas don’t want gays having any rights, then, by danged, they shouldn’t have any, according to Jason, who believes that, in his opposition to sexual conduct he considers sin, he casts the Lord’s official vote.
I explained to the senator once that we have specific constitutional rights that guarantee protections for the minority from the tyranny of the majority. And he explained to me that the people can, by a majority, vote to amend the Constitution. So, he reasoned, the power is not in the temporary wording of the U.S. Constitution. It’s with the permanent editors — us.
So, take that, James Madison. Your fancy freedom prose of a more advanced time lives only by our leave. We can take out your big-shot Bill of Rights whenever we darned well please.
Anyway, as Jason reckons, we don’t need freedoms as much as we need commandments, “thou shalt nots,” 10 of them, now displayed at the state Capitol, thanks to him. One of those commandments is not to have any Ramadan suppers in the American White House, unless I misread, as I may have. That commandment might have been about your neighbor’s wife and that you ought to quit looking at her like that.
Shall I be serious? Or at least less snarky?
The point is that Trump and Rapert are often full of malarkey, and, given time, they’ll inevitably reveal it.
Last year Trump refused to have a Ramadan observance in the White House and insisted that his official statement on the occasion invoke terrorist violence as something religions should avoid.
He wasn’t honoring the role Muslims play in an American religious tapestry when he presumed last year as president to ban people from entering the United States from a few majority-Muslim countries.
This year it’s been explained to him that he was full of it before and should have a Ramadan dinner.
My view is that this is simply Trump’s cycle — mouthing empty nonsense for the unwashed one day and acting differently the next because things are more complicated. But a fellow the other day was suggesting to me that Trump must have some pending private business dealings with a Muslim whom he does not wish to offend.
Those are the options in this regressed American era.
Rapert, for his part, probably won’t assail Trump for doing as Obama did. The senator is a conventional politician and situational condemner. He’s also a grandstanding blowhard whose words lose meaning faster than his first Ten Commandments monument crumbled under the force of Satan’s automobile.
We should take the opportunity of today’s White House Ramadan supper to resolve to pay less attention to words spewing from Trump and Rapert and others like them, if there are any.
The words are fleeting. The bombast vanishes.
There may be no collusion this year. But there’s always next year.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.