Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfathers Pizza and radio host who is weighing a 2012 presidential bid and has a penchant for making controversial statements, offended the Muslim community last weekend when he told a reporter that he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet or to serve as a federal judge at a Conservative Principles Conference in Iowa.

“And here’s why: There is this creeping attempt to gradually ease sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government,” he said. “This is what happened in Europe. And little by little, to try and be politically correct, they made this little change. And now they’ve got a social problem that they don’t know what to do with hardly.” He also said that Muslims in America are trying to force sharia law, a religious code for living, on the rest of the nation.

In an interview with CNN, Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islam Relations, said that Cain’s comments go beyond even “the almost routine Muslim-bashing we see coming from the right wing of the political spectrum."

But Cain could care less what Hooper, or anyone else for that matter, thinks. As he told the reporter in Iowa, citing an expression favored by his grandfather, “I does not care; I feel the way I feel.”

(Photo:  Steve Pope/Getty Images)