In the interest of fairness, I would urge you to take a gander at
Snopes on Obama, which goes through the numerous emails we have all recieved saying Obama is a radical muslim. If you want fodder, get a little background on his church for the past 20 years -
Trinity Church of Christ. I think you will find that both the claims that Obama is Muslim and the claim that there were no Wahabists in Indonesia in the '60's are stretching the truth.
On the other hand, saying that Obama had religious training in Muslim
and Catholic schools while growing up are apparently both true. Concluding that he is thus a Muslim or a Catholic based on that schooling is simply unwarranted (and contradictory)! That would be like concluding that because I drove a tractor and hoed a lot of cotton and maize on my grandparents' farm during summers while I was growing up, I must be an Aggie. Furhter, even though I like Brother Bob and, perhaps even more damning, I married a "former student", I can say without apology that I am not an Aggie, regardless of whether you think that is a good or bad thing.
As a practical matter, while I recognize that background has some value, I want to know what the man thinks and believes, not what he was exposed to as a kid. At this point I know he believes in platitudes, but I haven't seen sufficient substance or sufficient value statements to determine if I could support him. I haven't seen anything that would cut either way terribly much yet, so he is, in my book, somewhere between the extremely undesireable (in my opinion) Billary and the mixed bag McCain presents. Thus, when I started trying to figure out who to vote for, I ended up with rankings of the then front runners from least desireable to least undesireable (and none fit into the desireable category), whittled down to the three current frontrunners, of Billary,Obama, McCain. For those of you who want to say that is a party line up, I note that Rudy was between Billary and Obama in that initial list and McCain was not at the top of the list either.
Given that ranking, I am torn between whether to vote in the primary for Billary on the basis that she is more likely to lose the general election or Obama on the basis that he is the lesser of the two evils in the primary or to try to figure out what vote will cause the biggest problem within the Democratic party come convention time and whether that is a sufficient reason to vote one way or the other. But to say that you can't vote for Obama because he is Muslim makes me discount your opinion dramatically. I'm not looking solely for Christian candidates (although I confess that I have a preference for those who are practicing the Christian faith), but rather looking at whether their policy positions are consistent with there I believe they ought to be.
I think a lot of voters are in that same boat, which is why Romney's Mormon faith (which I do NOT consider to be Christian) was not a big hurdle for me but did give me pause to consider what the policy ramifications of that belief system would be. If Obama were a practicing Muslim, then I would give the same consideration to how that fictional hypothesis would be manifested in his policy decisions too. But for those of you who give us all this fictional mudslinging, it simply causes me to want to thrash you since those on this board are more willing and able to wade through the trash to find the truth than 99.9% of the general populace. But then again, there is a reason politics gets ugly sometimes.
Now: How did this relate to Rice athletics again? Oh, yeah ... the rally was on one of Rice's home away from home courts.