Since when does the U.S. do deals based on national religion?

The latest flap in the blogosphere is about NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr.’s observation, in an interview with Al Jazeera, that President Obama wants his agency to conduct more outreach with what Bolden called “dominantly Muslim nations.”

“He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering,” Bolden said.

“Fatuousness,” Charles Krauthammer grumbled.

“The space program is being transformed into a tool of Obama foreign policy, which views American national greatness as an anachronism,” Elliott Abrams objected.

Others complained that Bolden had said that Muslim outreach was perhaps his “foremost” purpose, ahead even of space exploration itself.

In a written statement, the White House pointed out that Bolden was just talking about engaging “the world's best scientists and engineers as we work together to push the boundaries of exploration. Meeting that mandate requires NASA to partner with countries around the world like Russia and Japan, as well as collaboration with Israel and with many Muslim-majority countries. The space race began as a global competition, but, today, it is a global collaboration."

Fair enough. But I still found Bolden’s comment troubling, for a reason of my own: since when is it U.S. government policy to offer or refuse cooperation with various nations based on the religion their people practice?