Religious objections to Muslim politicians in Congress rhetorically reframed as immigration and values threats

Evidence

Congressman Virgil Goode of Virginia condemned the act as “a threat to the values and beliefs traditional to the United States” in an op-ed aptly titled, “Save Judeo-Christian Values.” In a letter to his constituents, Goode expressed his fears “that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.” Dennis Prager, Bush’s appointee to the Holocaust Museum Board and a conservative columnist, also disapproved of Ellison’s actions because of his belief that the Bible is the repository of the nation’s values. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 813

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the GOP’s Islamophobia and the ‘secularism as Western’ frame in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, where Changez’s otherness is tied to both religion and nationality. — connects to: U.S. lawmakers framed devout Muslim practice as treasonous grounds for military exclusion — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 285; Lawmakers distinguished individual Muslims from Islam itself as the incompatibility target