1115.org

Tim Grieve on Romney:

Mitt Romney was reportedly asked the other day whether, as president, he’d consider naming a “qualified American of the Islamic faith.” He said no.

“Based on the numbers of American Muslims … in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified,” the Christian Science Monitor quotes Romney as saying. “But, of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration.”

Now, we weren’t aware that Cabinet positions were supposed to be doled out proportionally by religious faith or other demographic qualifiers …

But now that we know, we’re trying to get ourselves up to speed. It turns out that there are 16 members in a president’s Cabinet — the vice president plus the heads of 15 executive departments — which means that each individual member represents 6.2 percent of the Cabinet.
[…]
If the next president were to fill Cabinet seats based on religious demographics, neither Jews nor Mormons, at 1.3 percent of the population each, would have any chance of getting a seat in the room.

Tim Grieve’s exposition of Mitt Romney’s math is very clear: by Romney’s Rules of Proportional Entitlement, Jews and Mormons are entitled to roughly one-fifth of a cabinet position each.

But it grieves me to see Tim jump to the Romney-esque conclusion that Jews or Mormons do not therefore qualify to receive a cabinet position.

How cruel is it for that fraction to be rounded off to zero by every President? Fractions can surely be carried forward? Why shouldn’t we have at least one Jew and one Mormon in the cabinet every five presidential elections? In a truly enlightened America, isn’t that what we would do?