The "Mormon Money Network" story is now officially very old - this time it is told about by the Denver Post.  Now, I have little doubt that Mormons are hugely donating to Romney, it is natural and expected.  But has anybody noted just how thin the thread is in these pieces?  He is getting a lot of money from locales with a high percentage of Mormon population, but even Utah is only 62% Mormon.  These highly trumpeted conclusions are not, in fact, conclusions, but logical speculation.  Just thought that needed pointing out.  There are no actual statistics as to the religious affiliation of Romney's donors.

The LATimes says Evangelicals like Guliani.  Blog "eyeon08" does some analysis and concludes:

In the end, we don’t know.

I admit, my evidence is anecdotal, but every time I talk to "Republicans on the street," particularly Evangelical ones, who are all fired up about Guliani - when I point out where Rudy stands on abortion, stem cells and same-sex marriage their tune seems to at least soften significantly, if it does not change completely.

Christianity Today, the magazine edited by yesterday's interviewee, had an editorial yesterday, ostensibly on the global warming issue and how large the evangelical umbrella is.  It concludes:

So let's stop questioning each other's evangelical credentials and just do the work we believe God has called us to.

There is quite a bit of wisdom in that conclusion!

In response to last week's question at On Faith, "Do you think Islam is a violent religion?" Eboo Patel, who is the founder of something called the Interfaith Youth Core, writes a post entitled "Blame the Individual, Not the Faith."  Once again, wisdom.

Hotline looks at Romney as "the message candidate."

Normally, when a campaign claims to run a "message" campaign, they're usually covering for the characterological deficits of the candidate. And generally, presidential races — even primaries — are contests of attributes, not ideas.

 

But Romney's relentless focus on messages strikes us as necessary. Aside from the hippety-hop flip-floppery — that's still a real problem — Romney is a great attribute candidate. The man is the message: a reformer, who, by the way, has detailed proposals to reform X, Y, and Z.

Uh, guys … it is also a very "necessary aside" from The Question.  With the MSM relentlessly attempting to make his faith the narrative of his campaign (see the statistics in this Reading List from last week), he cannot afford to make himself the issue; that would be playing directly into their hands.  As you point out what he is doing is describing himself in terms of his message not his religion.  It is sad he has to work at it so much harder than other candidates.

Yesterday, we noted an editorial cartoon that was a blatant attack on religion regarding last week's SCOTUS decision on partial birth abortion.  Well, editorial cartoons are bad enough, but LAW PROFESSORS?!    Says Hugh Hewitt about this blog post:

To brand the five member majority in this case a "faith-based majority" is clearly just spleen, an invitation to the haters of faith, and an explosion of bigotry not seen in respectable circles for decades.

 

[…]

 

Stone is, in short, an inciter of religious bigotry.  And an intellectually dishonest one at that.

 

When Stone wrote "[h]ere is a painfully awkward observation: All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Catholic. The four justices who are either Protestant or Jewish all voted in accord with settled precedent," he employed a religious stereotype every bit as repulsive as the racial animus that informed Dred Scott or Plessy.  He asserted that the five justices served their church and not their oaths.

 

[…]

 

Geoffrey Stone is a bigot, and a vicious one at that.  Few if any will rally to his view.  But I fear that most if not all law professors will simply say nothing, which is an indictment of the legal academy. [Emphasis added.]

Is Hugh right?  Yesterday, in the same Reading List where we noted the cartoon, we noted the emerging trend of articles saying one should not allow Romney's faith to be an obstacle to voting for him, and yet going to great lengths to described the "gulf" between creedal Christians and Mormons. This strikes me as a parallel action to the lack of condemnation likely to be aimed at Geoffrey Stone.

To my Evangelical brethren, I honestly do not care if you vote for Mitt Romney or not, but to sit idly on the sidelines while his religion is attacked, or to describe that religion derisively, while refraining from direct attack, is to invite, nay encourage, the kind of bigotry seen at this law school blog.  Attacks on Romney's religion ARE attacks on our religion as it actys in the political arena.  Do you think the left cares about the details of trinitarian viewpoints or atonement theology?  Do you think people like Geoffrey Stone would ever take the time to distinguish between the Joseph Smith story and the miracles of St. Francis?  If you do, you are fooling yourself.

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