It may very well be that in the process of ingratiating themselves with the groups they need to win the primaries, Republicans will damage their ability to compete in the November 2012 general election.
The fact that Gingrich can proudly advertise his conversion to Catholicism as a personal and presidential asset is a sign of how much progress we've made. But it is profoundly un-American to replace one bias with another.
There is a problem underlying Newt Gingrich's warnings about the dangers of sharia: the assumption that, as a religious law grounded in an unchanging divine revelation, the law itself must be fixed and unchanging.