Can Herman Cain go a month without saying something incendiary about Muslims in America? Signs point to no.
At a campaign stop in Murfreesboro, TN yesterday, Cain sounded off on the mosque project in the city that kicked up some anti-Islamic fervor — and a little apparent hate crime action — last year.
Asked about the project by reporters after a rally in Murfreesboro, Cain took up the party line of the opponents, who say the mosque is pushing sharia law on an unsuspecting populace in the home of Middle Tennessee State University.
Critics of the new mosque project, which is an expansion of an existing Muslim community center in Murfreesboro that’s existed for 30 years, are trying to stop it from being built. They claim the congregation is practicing sharia and wants to impose it on the world around them. A local judge shut down their argument that the center is perpetrating terrorism, but has allowed a fight over whether open meetings laws were obeyed when the planning board approved the new site to continue.
Cain stands with the folks who fear the congregation’s goals.
“It is an infringement and an abuse of our freedom of religion,” Cain told reporters when asked about the case, according to the AP. “And I don’t agree with what’s happening, because this isn’t an innocent mosque.”
“This is just another way to try to gradually sneak Shariah law into our laws,” Cain said, “and I absolutely object to that.”
Cain burst into the nation’s intellectual discussion over religious freedom and tolerance with his promise to be wary of any Muslim who applies to be in his administration, lest he or she turn out to be a terrorist. He later backed off of that and said that a Muslim applicant for a Cain White House would be treated the same way as anybody else.
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