RE: Republican sworn in with Quran -
01-04-2007, 10:10 AM
Reggie,
Keith Ellison is a Democrat, not Republican.
>after alot of bytching that congressmen should be sworn in
>using a bible, they finally budged and allowed Keith Ellison
>,a muslim, to use his own holy book.
There are 2 swearing-in processes for Congress. The first one is the official one, where the 435 members are sworn in en-masse. That's the only ceremony that matters, and no Bible or holy book is used in that one.
The other is a private ceremony which congressmen can do however they want. In fact it's not even mandatory, you can chose not to have it since you've already been officially sworn in. In this one, you can even chose to dress like Peter Griffin and swear on a "Family Guy" DVD and have a midget dressed as Stewie to swear you in if you wanted to. You can even have 20 of these swearing-ins if you wanted to, one in each strip-mall in your district. I hope you get my drift, that the second one doesn't matter at all. So most congressmen use this one as a photo-op, and hold it in their districts (coz the official swearing-in is in DC) and therefore they have their wife, kids, parents, assistants, etc, on hand, and of course they swear on the Bible.
So I don't get who it is that "finally budged and allowed Keith Ellison, a muslim, to use his own holy book" since nobody had any right to stop him from swearing using whichever book he wanted to use.
BTW even the US President doesn't have to swear using the Bible, some presidents have done it bila Bible, one used the constitution, etc.
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