On Monday night, one day after the deadly church bombings in Sri Lanka, CNN hosted five back-to-back, hour-long town halls with five different Democratic presidential candidates. Not one of them was asked about the anti-Christian terrorist attack that left nearly 300 people dead.
The conservative watchdog Media Research Center tracked the five-hour marathon event, which featured Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D), and witnessed not a single question about the Sri Lanka bombings, one of the deadliest attacks on Christians in recent history.
It’s noteworthy none of the candidates were asked about or addressed the massive assault, which Sri Lankan authorities determined Tuesday was an act of retaliation against the mosque attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, when 50 Muslims were brutally killed.
Despite the CNN hosts’ failure to ask any of the five Democratic candidates questions about the Easter terrorist attack, Sanders did answer an inquiry from a student who wondered whether convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — a terrorist — should be able to vote from his prison cell.
“You have said that you believe that people with felony records should be allowed to vote while in prison. Does this mean that you would support enfranchising people like the Boston Marathon bomber, a convicted terrorist and murderer?” Harvard University student Anne Carlstein asked the self-avowed socialist senator.
She also asked Sanders if he would support allowing convicted rapists and sexual predators to vote from prison.
The senator told Carlstein he supports restored voting rights “even for terrible people” because placing limits on convicted terrorists and sexual predators props up a “slippery slope” that could lead to disenfranchising other voters in the future.
“I do believe that even if they are in jail, they’re paying their price to society,” he said, “but that should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy.”
Even though Christians are, by the numbers, the most persecuted religious demographic in the world, none of the five leading Democratic presidential candidates weighed in Monday night on Christian persecution. According to data from the Pew Research Center, Christians face persecution in 144 countries around the globe, followed closely by Muslims in 142.
This is an issue that’s only getting worse, and it’s critical our next president — should Donald Trump lose re-election in 2020 — tackle it head on. But if Monday night is any indication, it appears each candidate questioned (as well as CNN’s hosts) are asleep at the wheel.