Newt’s Outrageous Package Deal: Secularism and Islam

By Joshua Lipana

_CBS) that presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said that he is "convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America” by the time his grand-children are his age, America will be “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."

A spokesman for Gingrich said that he forgot to add the “or” in the statement. But still, to treat secularism and Islam as equally anti-American is absurd and outrageous.

Secularism merely denotes ideas that are non-religious; it does not specify whether those ideas are rational or irrational, pro-life or anti-life. Islam, on the other hand, specifically denotes irrational and anti-life ideas—ideas that lead people to fly passenger jets into skyscrapers, execute gays, stone adulterers, enslave nations, and seek a sharia-ruled world.

Equating secularism with Islam is like equating a liver, which can be healthy or unhealthy, with a cancerous tumor.