{"id":13732,"date":"2007-11-27T15:40:48","date_gmt":"2007-11-27T20:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/13732.html"},"modified":"2007-11-27T15:40:48","modified_gmt":"2007-11-27T20:40:48","slug":"romney-clarifies-his-support-for-religious-discrimination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/romney-clarifies-his-support-for-religious-discrimination\/","title":{"rendered":"Romney ‘clarifies’ his support for religious discrimination"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following up on an earlier item<\/a>, the Christian Science Monitor ran a report today from diplomat Mansoor Ijaz who recently asked Mitt Romney whether he would consider a Muslim-American for a cabinet post. Concluding that Muslims are too small a religious minority to qualify for a cabinet post, Romney said he would not.<\/p>\n

The report quickly made the rounds, and at least at first, the Romney campaign didn’t deny<\/a> the accuracy of Ijaz’s report. Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said this morning that “they weren’t focused on the composition of a Cabinet … but the governor does not believe that in order to effectively fight radical jihad you need to have Muslims serving in the cabinet.”<\/p>\n

It was an odd explanation — according to Ijaz, that wasn’t the question at all. Apparently, though, Romney and his campaign have decided they like their version of the question better, so they’re going to go with it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At an availability with reporters [in St. Petersburg, Fla.], Romney answered questions about today’s report suggesting that he would not appoint Muslims to his Cabinet. “No, that’s not what I said. His question was, did I need to have a Muslim in my Cabinet in order to confront radical jihad, or would it be important to have a Muslim in my Cabinet?’ And I said no, I don’t think you need a Muslim in the Cabinet to take on radical jihad any more than we needed a Japanese American to understand the threat that was coming from Japan or something of that nature.”<\/p>\n

Romney continued, “It’s something I rejected, number one. And number two, point out that haven’t given a lot of thought to the people I would have in my Cabinet. I don’t have boxes I check off in terms of ethnicity, and it’s not that I need a certain number of people representing ethnic groups. Instead, I would choose people based on their merits… I’m open to having people of any faith, ethnic group. But they would be selected based on their capacity and capabilities and what they could bring to the Administration, but I don’t choose people based on checking off a box.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Depending on whom you believe, Romney appears to be playing fast and loose with the facts.
\n
\nHere<\/a>, again, is Ijaz’s account:<\/p>\n

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that “jihadism” is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, “…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If this account is accurate, Romney a) expressed support for religious discrimination; b) endorsed a religious quota system for his cabinet; and c) is now lying about what he said. Indeed, there’s a huge difference between Ijaz’s account of what Romney said, and Romney’s new version of what he said.<\/p>\n

To clairfy, there’s nothing particularly wrong with Romney’s “revised” answer. Indeed, if he had said this in response to Ijaz’s question in the first place, there wouldn’t be a controversy.<\/p>\n

The Romney campaign, at least this morning, wasn’t prepared to challenge the original quote because campaign officials didn’t have a recording or a transcript. Within a few hours, though, they changed direction, and argued that an entirely different exchange occurred in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n

Who’s right? I have no idea, but I can’t wait to find out if Mansoor Ijaz happened to record the exchange. I get the sense the Romney campaign either assumes Ijaz doesn’t have a recording, or is willing to gamble on the possibility.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following up on an earlier item, the Christian Science Monitor ran a report today from diplomat Mansoor Ijaz who recently asked Mitt Romney whether he would consider a Muslim-American for a cabinet post. Concluding that Muslims are too small a religious minority to qualify for a cabinet post, Romney said he would not. The report […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}