Yesterday, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) delivered “a lecture on Islam” at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Santorum argued that the American public knows too little about the Islamic faith, and to prove his point, he asked the students whether they knew the difference between Sunnis and Shias. Only three audience members raised their hands. He continued:

Santorum said he believes Muslims’ religious views cannot be changed or altered, so Middle Easterners reject American, democratic ideals.

“A democracy could not exist because Mohammed already made the perfect law,” Santorum said. “The Quran is perfect just the way it is, that’s why it is only written in Islamic.”

As a self-anointed scholar of Islam, it’s surprising that Santorum would assert that the Qur’an is “written in Islamic.” It is, of course, originally written in Arabic. Islam is not a language, but rather a religion. Santorum concluded, “I think that if every citizen was fully informed about the war, it would create a commonality between faiths.” Indeed, much work remains to be done.

Today, the Utah state legislature “dealt a final blow” to the last of five gay rights bills taken up under the Common Ground Initiative, when it defeated a bill that would have granted gay couples rights of inheritance and medical decision-making. Yesterday, the state House rejected bills that would have allowed gay adoption and protected gays from housing and employment discrimination.

Last night, Utah’s local ABC station received leaked portions of an interview with state senator Chris Buttars (R), which will be highlighted in an upcoming documentary on Proposition 8. Buttars is an outspoken opponent of gay rights; in the latest interview, he compares gays to alcoholics and Muslim terrorists, and warns that gay people are “probably the greatest threat to America.” Some excerpts from the interview:

– To me, homosexuality will always be a sexual perversion. And you say that around here now and everybody goes nuts! But I don’t care.

– They say, I’m born that way. There’s some truth to that, in that some people are born with an attraction to alcohol.

– They’re mean! They want to talk about being nice — they’re the meanest buggers I ever seen. It’s just like the Moslems. Moslems are good people and their religion is anti-war. But it’s been taken over by the radical side. And the gays are totally taken over by the radical side.

– I believe that you will destroy the foundation of American society, because I believe the cornerstone of it is a man and a woman, the family. … And I believe that they’re, internally, they’re probably the greatest threat to America going down I know of. Yep, the radical gay movement.

Listen here:

Buttars bragged that he “killed” every piece of gay rights legislation in Utah, and said that President Bush — “like him or love him” — “saved” America “for the foreseeable future” by appointing conservatives to the Supreme Court.

Buttars discussed how the Mormon church would never give in on gay rights. Indeed, Mormons contributed nearly 40 percent of the more than $40 million raised to defeat marriage equality in California. He helped kick out Gay Straight Alliance clubs in Utah schools, claiming they were “criminal” and threatening that gay people’s “greatest target is your kids.”

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During the debate over the stimulus, President Obama accused his critics of wanting to “do nothing” about the economic crisis. Republicans complained that it wasn’t true. “I know of no Republican in the Congress of the United States who wants to do nothing,” Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) said. But with the focus now shifting to the credit and housing crises, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) (who led the opposition to the stimulus) is advocating a radical prescription of “allowing private markets to run their course” and let banks fail:

“There’s a crisis of confidence throughout the market — throughout the world — even though the government has thrown nearly $1 trillion at the financial system,” DeMint said. “We’ve started this vicious cycle. We don’t have enough money — we can’t borrow enough money to take all the toxic assets off the books.

“We’ve got to let the market begin to absorb them at a loss, but they can absorb them. We just have to decide do we want a government-controlled economy, or do we want the private sector to work?”

Last night, the Center for American Progress hosted a discussion between PBS’s Gwen Ifill and CAP President John Podesta about Ifill’s new book, “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” After the event, Ifill sat down for an interview with ThinkProgress, where we asked her about the Republican party’s efforts to reach out to African-American voters.

During her talk with Podesta, Ifill said that she didn’t believe that RNC Chairman Michael Steele’s race was the motivating factor behind why Republicans elected him. In the interview, Ifill said that “they weren’t so caught up with the idea of Barack Obama being black that they were going to sacrifice their need to come back just to elect a black guy.”

“They needed someone that could articulate what the Republican brand still is,” said Ifill. “And he did that better than the other guys running for office.” Asked if she saw any “breakthrough” candidates in the Republican party, Ifill responded bluntly, “not yet”:

IFILL: In fact, we seem to have gone backwards. I mean, we used to have J.C. Watts in the House, but now there are no black Republicans in Congress. At all. That’s a step back. In order to change that direction, there has to be recruiting going on. I think there is recruiting going on at some lower levels, but they’ve got some ground to make up.

Watch it:

Former Oklahoma representative J.C. Watts, whom Ifill mentioned, retired from Congress in 2002. Since then, no African-Americans have been elected to Congress on the Republican ticket. According to Pew Research in March 2008, the share of African-Americans identifying themselves as Republican has stayed steady this past decade at around 4 percent.

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