…in religious freedom, aren’t we? From a Boston-area local news blog:
Esteemed friend and former colleague Dan Kennedy picks up an emerging theme of criticism of Mitt Romney’s religion speech on his blog, suggesting that Romney is sorting America into believers and non-believers in a “deliberately divisive” fashion, somehow making it clear that the non-believers are unwelcome. Others flogging the same line of argument have pointed with horror to a line in the speech where Romney says “any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.”
Oh, the horror! Unfortunately for this spin, the first part of the sentence is usually omitted: “Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.”
Are we to believe that atheists, agnostics, Satanists, and the other sundry non-believers supposedly shunned by Romney here are opponents of religious freedom? I think not. That was as much of a shout-out to those fringe segments of our society as this speech could reasonably have been expected to include.
Say what you will about Romney, and there’s plenty there to criticize, but if there’s evidence of him plotting jihad against non-believers in any way, shape or form, I must have missed it.