Alternate Idiot of the Week: Herman Cain

Here's a double-whammy from the pizza entrepreneur turned candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Herman Cain has endorsed the right of local communities to ban the construction of mosques. He justifies this exception to the First Amendment on the ground that Islam is an exceptional religion.""Islam is both a religion and a set of laws -- Sharia laws," Cain told Fox News, "That's the difference between any one of our traditional religions where it's just about religious purposes."

It is more likely that Christianity is exceptional among the world's religions in being "just about religious purposes." Christianity, in Protestant form especially, is considered an orthodox religion for its almost exclusive emphasis on right belief, as opposed to an orthopractic religion, which insists on right conduct or practice from adherents. Islam is not alone as an orthopractic faith -- Judaism has a "sharia" of its own, for instance -- nor is it exceptional in the insistence of many adherents upon the enactment of scriptural law into statutory law. While one extreme of Protestant Christianity treats repentance as a "get out of hell free" card that effectively enables lifetimes of sin, another extreme, the "reconstructionists," insists that "Christian nations" be governed according to the statutes of the Old Testament. Would Cain forbid a recontstructionist denomination from building a church because its doctrine is politically incorrect? I doubt it, since he falls back later in his interview on fears about terrorism as his ultimate justification for refusing mosques. He would have been idiot enough had he left his opposition at that. For adding a rationalization that is, in fact, irrational, he deserves to be an idiot of some week or other. The rest of the field has almost an entire week to try and top him.