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It was one of the best things that I ever did as a person, and, if the world knew why I did it, I would be branded a jerk.

I give Tom Tancredo a lot of flak… and there's good reason for it: he's an easy target. In my opinion, you don't get more batshit insane than this man. Yet, somehow, he manages to be an lead contender for the position of Governor of Colorado… or, as a state employee, my boss. Common sense would dictate that I be careful what I write about, but I don't believe in common sense until it becomes useful to me.

The media has covered his ridiculous stunts ranging from calling Miami a third-world country¹ to threatening to bomb Mecca in the event fringe Islamic terrorists launch a terrorist attack² to calling for a civics literacy test as a requirement to vote³. Jon Stewart describes him as “the man Mexican parents tell their kids about to get them to eat their vegetables”⁴. Other bloggers call him the leader of the lunatic fringe. You'll get no argument from me.

During Tancredo's tenure in congress, one of his bills that he sponsored was the Jihad Prevention Act⁵. This act would make any person trying to advocate implementing a Sharia-law system in the United States inadmissible for immigration and calls for a revocation of naturalization for anyone advocating the Sharia as well. If you don't know what Sharia law is, the short answer is that the Sharia is Islamic religious law. There are probably just as many interpretations of the Sharia as there are Muslims, so to describe it would be futile.

Certain non-Islamic-majority countries do happen to implement the Sharia. For example, in England and Wales, if both parties agree, they can have a matter resolved under the Sharia similar to independent arbitration. In Israel, Sharia judges are paid by the state to arbitrate personal and family law among Muslims. However, Tancredo thought it so evil that he thought we need to forbid it from being installed in the United States.

Whatever. He's worried that we'll all be subject to religious law in the United States. That's never going to happen. It's more fear mongering on his part. I'm certainly not going to sit here and defend the Sharia. I'm not a fan of implementing religious law for civil matters on a populace that might not belong to the religion in question.

So, Tancredo is our valiant crusader against religious law? Wrong! Take a look at the platform of the political party that he's running on:

The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.⁶

Holy shit! “…restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations”? Well, there are two problems with that. Firstly, what biblical foundations? If Jefferson, Franklin, Madison or Washington were alive today, what church in their right mind would want one of them to speak in a service? Where do you find the concept of a republic being mandated in the Bible? No, the ideals contained in the founding documents are derived from political scientists such as Locke, Blackstone and Montesquieu as well as the Magna Carta and Græco-Roman philosophy. Any knowledgeable scholar knows this; it's no secret that Enlightenment philosophy played the influential role. I'm not complaining about that by any means.

Secondly, how does it work to have a political party that wants to establish religious jurisprudence and a candidate running with that party that wants to stop it? Still, there's a difference: Tancredo is trying to ban Islamic jurisprudence; his party is trying to establish biblical jurisprudence. That's my point. Muslims in this country have every right to practice their religion and are entitled to every right in this country that non-Muslims have. We do not promote one group of citizens at the expense of another. Christians do not own America unlike what Tancredo's political party believes.

This great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been and are afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.⁶

No, it's really not, and there is clear documentation that the Senate voted that the United States is really, honestly not a Christian nation. The reason that we afford religious freedom in this nation to other non-Christian faiths is not because of some benevolent act of mercy on the Christians' part but because this nation belongs equally to every person who lives in it.

I'm not talking about peaceful proselytisation of which Christianity and Islam are the religions that are most prone to practice, but it's barbaric to mandate non-secular religious customs and practices of one religion on people who practice another. Christians whine and complain when it happens to Christians in other countries around the world. Good. They should. However, many of these same Christians have no scruples when they do it in kind. It's called hypocrisy.

Tancredo is no different from any garden-variety bigot except he cleverly disguises his prejudice towards people who think differently as an appreciation of “Western civilization”. I'm not buying it. Say whatever you want about the man, but I believe President Clinton said it best when he talked about racial intolerance, but it still holds true when we talk of religious or cultural intolerance:

The divide of race has been America's constant curse. Each new wave of immigrants gives new targets to old prejudices. Prejudice and contempt, cloaked in the pretense of religious or political conviction, are no different. They have nearly destroyed us in the past. They plague us still. They fuel the fanaticism of terror. They torment the lives of millions in fractured nations around the world. These obsessions cripple both those who are hated and, of course, those who hate, robbing both of what they might become.

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1. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53023
2. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45298
3. http://www.denverpost.com/carroll/ci_14368067
4. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/27/stewart-hammers-arizona-f_n_553157.html
5. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.6975:
6. http://www.constitutionparty.com/party_platform.php#Preamble