Anti-Catholicism Lives with El-Sayed in Michigan

I t’s been called a “Viral Takedown of MAGA Heckler.” But when Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was asked if he “would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood,” he shot back, “Why are you asking the question?”

“Because they are a terrorist group,” the young man, who identified himself when pressed as Tommy, responded.

“No, no. But what are you implying?” El-Sayed insisted. “Do you assume that I wouldn’t?”

When Tommy explained “yes” because he hasn’t heard El-Sayed disavow them, El-Sayed shot back that he had not heard Tommy disavow them.

“Here’s the thing. You are asking the question because implicitly you assume that I will have dual loyalties, right? You assume that somehow, I wouldn’t disavow. Or that I’ll have some higher-order allegiance than to the Constitution, correct? Tommy, is that what you imply?”

Tommy replied, “Yes.”

“No, no, no, no. Why would you think that about me?” the candidate pressed. Tommy went back to his disavowal point. “But I just did,” El-Sayed said. “But why would you actually think that? Why would you? . . . Have you asked everybody in your life if they disavow them?”

It went on like this until El-Sayed pivoted to his point: He wants to paint anyone who would ask such a question as a bigot. Once upon a time, Americans tried to do this to Catholics, he says, presenting himself as if he is being persecuted for his religion. As he has said elsewhere: “When JFK ran, they said the country would never elect a Catholic president.”

He said to Tommy, “I also know that I tread a long history of this: when John F. Kennedy ran for president, he was asked about whether his allegiance would be to the Constitution or to the pope and the Vatican.”

El-Sayed waxes historical and philosophical — a bad imitation of the former Senator Ben Sasse, who was the best civics teacher the United States has had in a long while. “The Constitution guarantees me the right as I choose to pray or any of us, to pray as we choose to pray or not to pray at all,” El-Sayed said. “Nobody understands how important that document is like somebody who has their rights constantly threatened and so I will stand for that Constitution.”

I’ll give El-Sayed one thing. He is very much like Kennedy when he promises, essentially, to be a bad Muslim. In that “viral takedown,” he asserts that “it’s a crazy thing to assume that somehow I’d have dual loyalties as somebody who’s avidly running to protect the right to choose, who’s running to protect LGBTQ rights, who’s running to protect religious freedom.”

That is, in fact, some of what Kennedy wanted to assure us. As George Weigel, the greatest living expert on Pope John Paul II, recently wrote: “While some biographers contend that JFK became more religiously serious in the wake of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the August 1963 death of his infant son Patrick, there is little evidence that Catholicism ever shaped Kennedy’s political thought. For JFK, Catholicism was more of an ethnic marker than a matter of personal conviction.” In his famous speech to Protestant ministers in Houston, Kennedy laid the groundwork for a generation of Catholic politicians who would say they are “personally opposed” to abortion but that those values have no impact on their public life.

And in a midterm election year where one might say the silence has been deafening from candidates avoiding talking about abortion, one of El-Sayed stands out. In a closing campaign ad titled “Rights,” he wants voters to know that his commitment to legal abortion is has not just one but two gold seals of credibility: as a medical doctor (albeit one who has never actually practiced) and as a girl dad, he will make sure the lives of the unborn will not be a given outside of their mothers’ wombs.

I don’t like hypotheticals ever, and especially in the heat of political battle, but I always do want a moment for reflection at moments like this, with supposed creds like that flung at us as al-Sayed has done. What if your wife decided she did not want the girls? Should you have had no decision in the matter? Would it simply be “her body, her choice”? Surely, as someone with a medical degree, who used the “Dr.” honorific, even if you are not quite practiced in saving lives, you at least know there are two patients on some biological level — if not legal or political, unless, of course, in the case of a homicide — when a woman is pregnant?

El-Sayed’s attacks are bigoted. There is an obvious anti-Catholicism to pretending that somehow asking about the Muslim Brotherhood is anything remotely like asking about the pope in the Vatican. It’s even more absurd now that the pontiff was born in Chicago. All this Kennedy talk is one long distraction from the fact that the reason El-Sayed should get asked about the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization, is because he himself wrote a defense of their possible rise to power in Egypt in 2011 for the Huffington Post. Then there are the donations he’s received with the taint of the Muslim Brotherhood and his own mother’s reported ties. There’s more than enough reason to ask questions.

Michigan should not reject El-Sayed because he is Muslim, but rather because he’s a chameleon, blending into some of our most harmful euphemisms and distractions. And, honestly, it’s more than reasonable — and entirely unbigoted — to still wonder what he really thinks about the Muslim Brotherhood.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.