Congressman Bill Sali (R-Idaho) recently criticized the attempted opening of a session of the U.S. Senate with a Hindu prayer (which did not go well for reasons having nothing to do with him: see Anna’s post). He also openly lamented the presence of a Muslim Congressman, Keith Ellison. As Sali puts it, “Those are changes, and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers.” Now he’s made another statement clarifying the earlier remarks to the Nampa Press Tribune:

Friday, Sali said multiculturalism is in conflict with the national motto “E Pluribus Unum,” or “out of many, one.” He said multiculturalism would mean “out of the many, the many.”

“The question is, is multiculturalism good or not?” Sali said. “I don’t think the Founding Fathers were multicultural. Multiculturalism is the antithesis of (the motto).” Sali said the United States was founded on principles derived primarily from the Scriptures. And he said drifting away from those principles could put the country in danger.

“If we’re going to move away from those principles … we better consider the blessings of God that have been bestowed on this country and the protective hand of God that’s been over this country,” Sali said. (link)

Wow, he just gets wronger and wronger. Sali is confusing, in a fundamental and embarrassing way, the idea of religious freedom, which is unambiguously written into the Constitution, and the fuzzy contemporary concept of multiculturalism. For Sali, a Muslim Congressman or a Hindu prayer in the Senate can be sneered at as “multiculturalism,” when in fact it is simply Americans exercising their First Amendment rights to freedom of religion.

Relatedly, Sali is dead wrong when he says that the Founding Fathers were operating on “principles derived from the Scriptures.” (He’s trying to pull a fast one with that sneaky word, “derived.”) Like other conservatives who want to impose their idea of “God’s law” on us, Sali is flagrantly ignoring who Thomas Jefferson was and what he believed.

(For even more painful wrongness try this: last year Sali argued that the rate of breast cancer in the U.S. is linked to abortion — in a speech he gave on the House floor.)

Fortunately, not all Republicans are like Sali. Yesterday I stopped by the India Day celebration at Penn’s Landing, Philadelphia. It was a perfect August day, and the bright saris and salwar kameezes were flapping in the breeze — while massive rusty barges moved down the Delaware, headed for China. On stage, the endless array of high school girls doing Bollywood dance numbers was briefly interrupted by Al Taubenberger, Republican nominee for Mayor. In front of a crowd of 300-400, including a number of non-desis, Taubenberger patted Indian Americans on the back for “working hard and playing by the rules.” Amidst the sipping of mango lassis and the many voices whispering “who’s this guy again?” in at least a dozen Indian languages, there was a smattering of applause.