A Most Important Message from Professor Paul Eidelberg

With the permission of my dear friend Robert R. Reilly, a renowned scholar who served in the Reagan Administration as Director of Voice of America, I am privileged to convey to you his profound remarks concerning Dr. Ben Carson’s controversial statement about a Muslim competing for the office of President of the United States. Here is what Mr. Reilly wrote:

“[There] should be no religious test for office, but there should be a test as to whether you subscribe to the Founding principles of the United States and its Constitution.

“If your religion prevents you from agreeing that ‘all people are created equal’ and therefore should be equal under the law, then you are ipso facto disqualified. Orthodox Islam teaches that all people are not equal and that there are religious tests for just about everything, including citizenship.”

“Therefore, an orthodox Muslim could not serve as President. That would not be Ben Carson excluding them; they would be excluding themselves.”*

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*Mr. Reilly is the author of one of the most profound, as well as one of the timeliest, books on Islam, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2010),