They think Obama is a Muslim … because he is the colour of one? Because his father, however much of a no-show, was one? Because there is some ascetic sense about the president that seems to indicate he has the self-discipline of a Muslim? (Americans seem to believe teetotaling and much-praying Muslims have a lot of self-discipline.) Because the land is ripe with conspiracy theories? Because Fox News keeps suggesting it might be true? Because Americans are stupid? All of the above?

I haven’t yet seen a demographic rundown of the large and growing number of Americans who think he’s a Muslim — but this seems like important, revealing, and useful information.

It’s a sort of reverse profiling.

If you believe the president is a Muslim that suggests, reasonably, various points about your own character — a certain credulousness, to say the least. I assume it indicates a geographic disparity. I’m betting an educational gap, too. Anybody want to argue for the Muslim-believing faction’s IQ?

Let me go out on a limb: People who think Barack Obama is a Muslim are older; they don’t travel very far from home; they read almost nothing at all; they have less technological wherewithal; they watch Fox News.

This is awfully snobbish of me, but that’s the point: The Muslim question gives us a way to separate, on an empirical basis, the reasonably logical and cognisant from the morons.

The Muslim question has the virtue of an earth-is-flat test. The people who understand that the earth is not flat can rationally agree that the people who think it is are deficient.

It’s the kind of measure that the country, awash in cultural relativism and political posturing, has been without for a long time. The smarter people have not had an accepted standard upon which to judge the dumber people.

We used to have such norms, such cut-offs, such educational criteria. But the value of intelligence gave way to money, religion, fashion, and, often, bad taste as a measure of virtue and superiority. Truly, a demographic profile of Muslim-believers can be an opportunity to reclaim a definition of intelligence and, perhaps more importantly, to define lack of intelligence.

We can say, these people — identifiable and quantifiable — who believe that this ordinary, middle-class president is a Muslim are, ipso facto, numbskulls. This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for: an obvious, incontrovertible, perfectly objective way to mark the stupids.

Liberals, of course, recoil from such name-calling and putdowns.

But, really, come on. These people are stupid. Hopeless. Beyond saving. And maybe they ought to be rounded up.

This post first appeared on the Newser website.