Tuesday, March 13
Text from “In South, GOP Voters Balance Faith, Defeating Obama”
LEWIS: Mitt Romney is a Mormon, an unfamiliar faith here. But his religion didn’t come up among the dozen attendees I spoke with. Instead, for people like Judy Sellers, it was Mr. Obama’s faith.
SELLERS: I really don’t think that a nation that falls on Muslim leadership, potentially, is going to be a nation that is going to survive.
LEWIS: Barack Obama is a Christian not a Muslim. It’s an issue that came up four years ago when he ran for president. And it’s not the only topic that made a return appearance last night. John Gentile of Crossville, Tennessee still doesn’t believe Mr. Obama is allowed to be president because his father was born in Kenya.
JOHN GENTILE: I just don’t like the directions that he’s headed in, and personally, I don’t think he qualifies to be president and a natural born citizen. And the Constitution states that you have to have two parents that were born in the United States. So there’s no alternative allegiance by any member of the family.
LEWIS: The Constitution actually doesn’t say that. But it gets to the complicated nature in the deep South of Republicans picking a presidential candidate they think can beat Barack Obama in the fall. That’s the choice voters in Alabama and Mississippi face today when they go to the polls.
Russell Lewis, NPR News, Birmingham
