Last Friday, I reported that former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty had encouraged private companies to offer Sharia-compliant homes through the Emerging Markets Homeowner's Initiative. The Pawlenty team reacted with panic, insisting that only three loans had been issued through the program and that Pawlenty had shut it down. This was the statement issued by Pawlenty's spokesperson:
This program was independently set up by the MN state housing agency and did not make any mention of Sharia Law on its face, but was later described by critics as accommodating it. As soon as Gov. Pawlenty became aware of the issue, he personally ordered it shut it down. Fortunately, only about three people actually used the program before it was terminated at the Governor's direction.
Steve M. notes, though, that Minnesota Public Radio followed up and asked the Minnesota Housing Finance Authority whether the program was shut down because of the nature of the program, rather than lack of interest as I originally reported. The MHFA confirmed that it was lack of interest.
Is that what really happened? A program was a little too friendly toward Islam and had to be shut down? Not exactly.
"The new markets program was running for about a year and it happened at the same time a credit crunch hit the country," Megan Ryan, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, told MPR's Jess Mador today. "The program had only three loans. There was a lot of interest, but many of the borrowers weren't credit ready. In conversations with the governor's office at the same time that the program wasn't being very successful, we did close the pilot program down and shift the funds to other loan programs."
Pawlenty spokesperson Alex Conant told Ben Smith there was no discrepancy.
"According to this post, the agency spokesperson said it was shut down after 'conversations with the governor's office,'" he emailed. "That's what I said yesterday -- Governor's office said it should be shutdown, and it was. Maybe MHFA would have shut it down anyways since nobody was using it, but the Governor personally ordered it shut down as soon as he learned about it. "
There's an obvious discrepancy here, and I'm not really sure why Smith let it go. In the initial statement, Conant gave the impression that Pawlenty shut the program down because it offered Sharia-compliant mortgages. In the second statement, he lets that impression stand, even thought the MHFA explicitly says the program was shut down because of lack of interest, rather than any worries about "creeping Sharia." It's also worth pointing out, as Igor Volsky noted, that Pawlenty is hardly a radical secularist -- his selective embrace of strict establishment-clause restrictions doesn't apply to Christianity.
I'm not sure how much farther I want to go with this, because I really don't want to reinforce the impression that the problem was that Muslims were able to get housing loans. The larger issue here is that it's toxic for a Republican with presidential ambitions to be seen as tolerant of Muslims, and Pawlenty's reaction only reinforces that.
