Sorry for the eerie silence last week on the blog. A much needed vacation pulled my fingers away from the keyboard. In between the biking, the roasting in the sun, and frolicking in the waves, I did happen to see this poll showing that only one in three Americans can correctly identify President Obama’s religion. One in five believe he is a Muslim. Which gets the big red X on your test paper.

Here are some snippets from Obama’s 2008 interview with Dan Gilgoff, then of Beliefnet:

“Let me just sort of be as clear as possible in terms of what that the background is.

You know, I was raised basically by my mother, who came from a Christian background – small- town, white, Midwesterner. But, she was not particularly religious. My father, who I did not know – I spent a month of my life in his presence, otherwise he was a stranger to me – was raised in a household where his father had converted to Islam. But my father, for all practical purposes, was agnostic.

My mother remarried an Indonesian and we moved to Indonesia. But for two years I went to a Catholic school in Indonesia, and then for two years went to a secular school in Indonesia. The majority of children there were Muslim. But it wasn’t a religious school.

So almost all the facts that have been presented in the scurrilous emails are wrong. And I’ve been a member of my church now for almost 20 years and have never been a person of the Muslim faith.”

He could have stopped there, but to his credit, Obama continued:

“…I absolutely believe that having lived in a country that was majority Muslim for a time and having distant relatives in Africa who are Muslim, that I’m less likely to demonize the Muslim faith and more likely to understand that they are ordinary folks who are trying to figure out how to live their lives and raise their kids and prosper just like anybody else. And I do think that that cultural understanding is something that could be extremely valuable.”

Sounds pretty rational and reasonable to me. I wish we had What He Said in Bunch of Grapes this past week. We just might have made a sale.