If I were not teaching rhetoric, I would not have found Michael Medved’s column on Sgt. Patrick Stewart’s pentacle memorial while looking for a good political column for my students to analyze.

After insulting the religion–“it’s a trendy, phony potpourri of druidical, primitive and New Age elements that’s more a pagan cult than an organized faith”–Medved grudgingly admits that “the Constitution leaves no room for the government to discriminate against its adherents.”

Uh, OK, thanks, I guess. And we are a Pagan cult, in fact, if you want to be technical about it.

Meanwhile, his fellow Townhall.com columnist Dennis Praeger, who has been bent out of shape over a Muslim Congressman wanting to take his oath of office on the Koran, responds to his critics and adds,

I am a Jew (a non-denominational religious Jew, for the record), and I would vote for any Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Mormon, atheist, Jew, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Wiccan, Confucian, Taoist or combination thereof whose social values I share.

A couple of nights ago I guest-lectured via telephone to Jeffrey Kaplan’s class in new religious movements at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

I said that I thought that Paganism–Wicca in particular–was becoming the new designated Other on the American religious scene–and these columnists bear me out. Get used to “What about Wicca?”

However, I expect that it will be a long time before the first Wiccan elected to the House of Representatives has to worry about on which book to swear an oath. For the record, no holy book is required anyway.