So reads the head­line of a New York Times arti­cle about Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Vir­gil H. Goode Jr.‘s let­ter to his con­si­tu­tents warn­ing that the elec­tion of Keith Elli­son, a Min­nesota Demo­c­rat who con­verted to Islam when he was a col­lege stu­dent, is just the begin­ning of a wave of Mus­lim influ­ence in the United States that will under­mine “the val­ues and beliefs tra­di­tional to the United States of Amer­ica.” (You can read the full text of Goode’s let­ter here and here.) What got Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Goode so upset was Ellison’s deci­sion to use the Quran dur­ing his pri­vate swearing-in-ceremony. (The offi­cial swear­ing in of law­mak­ers takes place with­out ref­er­ence to or use of reli­gious texts of any kind.)

The full quote from which the above excerpt reads as follows:

if Amer­i­can cit­i­zens don’t wake up and adopt the Vir­gil Goode posi­tion on immi­gra­tion there will likely be many more Mus­lims elected to office and demand­ing the use of the Koran. We need to stop ille­gal immi­gra­tion totally and reduce legal immi­gra­tion and end the diver­sity visas pol­icy pushed hard by Pres­i­dent Clin­ton and allow­ing many per­sons from the Mid­dle East to come to this coun­try. I fear 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 and to pre­vent our resources from being swamped.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that Elli­son was born in the United States and, accord­ing to the Times traces his Amer­i­can ances­tors back to 1742. Think about the way Goode tries to tie Ellison’s deci­sion to use the Quran to xeno­pho­bic posi­tions on immi­gra­tion. Con­sider what it means that, in a coun­try where gov­ern­ment is not sup­posed to priv­i­lege one reli­gion over another, one of our elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives — and I doubt Goode is the only one who feels what is expressed in his let­ter — has protested in such bla­tantly racist and xeno­pho­bic terms another elected representative’s expres­sion of his faith. Then read this clos­ing state­ment from Goode’s letter:

The Ten Com­mand­ments and “In God We Trust” are on the wall in my office. A Mus­lim stu­dent came by the office and asked why I did not have any­thing on my wall about the Koran. My response was clear, “As long as I have the honor of rep­re­sent­ing the cit­i­zens of the 5^th Dis­trict of Vir­ginia in the United States House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, The Koran is not going to be on the wall of my office.”

There is, of course, no rea­son why a non-Muslim offi­cial should dis­play any­thing from the Quran on the walls of her or his office, but to answer a Mus­lim stu­dent in the way that Goode did? It leaves me speechless.

If you were Mus­lim, would you dis­miss Goode as being on the fringe or would you see it as fur­ther con­fir­ma­tion that you ought to be wor­ried about your sta­tus in this coun­try? From where I sit, the lat­ter would be the wiser think to think, as Dr. Seuss would have put it.