Blog from the Capital

Earlier this week, I whined a little about some of the questions asked at CNN's Compassion Forum featuring presidential candidates Clinton and Obama. The two of them did a much better job than the moderators, I thought, in steering the discussion toward the relevant policy issues related to their faith. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance offers an interesting take, via Talk2Action:

Sunday night's Compassion Forum on CNN provided an opportunity to get some relevant answers about the respective stances of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the role of religion in government. Instead, the moderators asked some clearly inappropriate questions about the candidates' religious beliefs, and failed to ask others that would have given the voting public insight into the candidates' positions on these important issues.
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If a potential employer asked you questions about your religious beliefs in a job interview, it wouldn't only be offensive, it would be illegal. The media needs to stop imposing a de facto religious test on the candidates.

The Compassion Forum was essentially a public interview for the job of President of the United States. And if it had been an interview for any other job in America, a good number of the questions asked would have been downright illegal.

I understand people's fascination with candidates religious beliefs. But the spirit of religious freedom - made explicit in the Constitution's no-test provision - highlights the irrelevance, and perhaps even impropriety, of inviting voters to make their decision based on specific religious beliefs unrelated to their potential official duties as President.