Christmas day doesn't always bring you the present you want. (As a Cleveland Browns fan eagerly anticipating an NFL championship since 1964, I can attest to that.) But you may just get the gift you really need. And sometimes, you receive something truly special, something you didn't deserve.
For those dismayed and disheartened by the unusually ugly and sadly sinister tone of American politics in 2015, Abraham Lincoln is the gift that keeps on giving. After a year in which xenophobia, naked nativism and religious bigotry became the new normal for the Party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator remains a potent antidote to what ails us.
When Donald Trump slanders Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists, he is only saying what his supporters are thinking. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that almost half of Republicans back his call for deporting the 11 million undocumented immigrants (85 percent of whom have been here for over five years) currently in the United States. But in the face of this new Know Nothing movement, remember what Abraham Lincoln had to say in 1855 about the original one:
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].
A second survey two weeks ago showed that a majority of Americans oppose Donald Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States. But among Republicans, almost 60 percent support the GOP frontrunner. Despite the history and the data showing that Muslims in the United States are as American as apple pie, reactionary Islamophobes like Frank Gaffney are now front and center in Republican politics. As the slanders and incitements escalate, so do the attacks against American Muslims and their houses of worship.
But during a far more dangerous time for the United States, one when then nation's very survival was at stake, President Lincoln had a clear message in support of a group despised by most North and South. In August 1863, months before he used the Gettysburg Address to declare America "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," Abraham Lincoln defended his Emancipation Proclamation as inextricably linked to the preservation of the Union. Noting reports from some of his commanders that "the emancipation policy, and use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion," Lincoln reminded his critics:
"You say you will not fight to free the negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you."
A hundred and fifty-two years later, the same must be said for American Muslims.