Kennedy didn’t defend his faith as a way of distracting from his own extremism and that of people around him.
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, thinks he’s another JFK, not in terms of charm or wit, but as a fellow victim of religious bigotry.
When he ran for president in 1960, Jack Kennedy indeed encountered anti-Catholic prejudice, including the preposterous claim that he’d take orders as president from the Vatican. This was irrational conspiracy-theorizing, whereas the questions that El-Sayed is facing about his family’s ties to extremist groups are well-founded.
It wasn’t a right-wing smear artist who first said that El-Sayed’s mother was with the Muslim Brotherhood, but his own half sister. She tweeted in 2012, “Had an amazing ...