“If you wonder why a desperate Mitt Romney rushed to lie about President Obama’s handling of crises in Cairo and Benghazi and make the ugly claim that Obama’s first response was ‘to sympathize with those who waged the attacks’, the latest poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life helps fill in the blanks.

“Unbelievably, the poll finds that the percentage of Republicans who believe that Barack Obama is Muslim, not Christian, has doubled since October, 2008.”

There are two questions that come to mind when reading this post on Salon.com by Joan Walsh.

First: Why do so many Republicans think that President Obama is a Muslim when all of his religious affiliations have been Christian?

Second: What’s so bad about being an American Muslim that it’s considered a slur?

These are questions — especially the second — that we must address.

“It’s impossible to ignore the way that Romney’s accusation not-so-subtly plays into that pervasive GOP belief that the president shares a religion with our enemies.” Walsh writes.

What’s your response to this dilemma?