Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois didn’t break the record for most lies in a single tweet (always Twitter, never X) last week, but at roughly one lie per sentence, it was a good solid try.
“It’s deeply troubling that a Muslim was allowed to lead prayer in the House of Representatives this morning. This should never have been allowed to happen. America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further from it. May God have mercy!”
While the GOP has abandoned many of its alleged core principles in recent years, it does still love a tradition. And they’ve been fueling the tradition of misidentifying and mistreating Sikhs in headline-making fashion for coming up on a quarter century now.
There was the dude beaten up in Chicago and called a “bin Laden.”
There were the football fans in San Diego who were stopped, eventually admitted to the stadium, but told they couldn’t wear turbans if they ever came back.
And the lady harassed on an airplane because a passenger worried she might be “an extremist.”
Or the literally hundreds of incidents against Sikhs in the days and weeks after 9/11.
Right-wing America: When you care enough to attack someone because of their religion, but don’t care enough to learn squat about other religions.
Surely, they are much more thoughtful as a group when it comes to other policies and governance. Surely.
I love a clever name, so let’s take a second to offer an admiring slow clap to whoever named an anti-bigotry paper published by the Sikh American Legal Defense Fund and Stanford University a while back. It’s called Turban Myths.
ARE YOU READY FOR THE PLOT TWIST?
For a different audience, I’d spend more time on what’s wrong with the Islamophobia that would seem to underpin all of these mistaken-identity incidents in America. And unsurprisingly, Rep. Miller’s team eventually deleted her post.
But before that, they tried salvaging it by replacing “Muslim” with “Sikh.”
Think about that for a second. She corrected the faith of the man she was insulting, but the difference did not change the rest of her statement.
In other words, we may frequently give right-wing bigots too much credit for detailed thought by chalking these things up to post-9/11 Islamophobia. At least some of the time, it’s simply old-school, broad-stroke Christian Nationalist “you ain’t white, so you ain’t right.”
I don’t want to know many Midwest redneck dollars Rep. Miller will add to her coffers by fundraising on this. I’d rather play the post off with some Peter Gabriel.
