Today’s Reading List – July 19, 2007
[T]hough faith must be reclaimed as a valid font of policy and participation in the public square, it does not follow that faith and the faithful should be rendered immune from critique within that square. Full participation is both benefit and burden, both to the faith itself — and its adherents. It means that Catholic officeholders may rightly be asked what they will do when their Church and their politics conflict; and it means that we may fairly discuss Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and what it signifies for his governance. We may further discuss Mormonism per se and its role in public life.
I believe the rum in question . . . goes back to 1884 and Cleveland vs. Blaine. The Republicans tagged Cleveland's as representing "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." The phrase apparently resurfaced in 1928 because Al Smith, Herbert Hoover's opponent, opposed Prohibition and of course was Catholic.
Actually a decent pun, but terribly arcane: You need to be quite familiar with the details of the 1884 and 1928 elections to get it.
Fred Thompson, Joe Carter, and Lobbying
This is only tangentially related to religion, but it now seems clear that Fred Thompson did lobby for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA), a pro-abortion organization, in 1994. He billed 19 hours to that client over the course of a year, despite "categorically" denying that he had done so. His spokesman told the L.A. Times, "Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period." I am a lawyer, and I am pretty sure I would remember 19 hours of work I did in 1994, but I don't know the circumstances here well, and Thompson has done a lot of things besides practicing law since then, so he might have sincerely forgotten. Why is this relevant to Article VI Blog? Because, as we wrote yesterday, there appears to be an Evangelical push to get behind Thompson as a conservative alternative to Mitt Romney without the Governor's unacceptable religious background. (HT: Joe Carter, who's one of the Evangelicals mentioned in the Nation story we linked to yesterday.)
Vast Evangelical Conspiracy Revisited
Speaking of that Nation story, Joe Carter also has some comments about its conspiratorial nature, about which we expressed skepticism yesterday. I am still unsure just how much "there" is there, but I trust Joe a lot more than I trust The Nation.
Elsewhere Around The Web
So much for Mormons sticking together. Of 16 currently serving in Congress (how did that many get elected?) only 4 support Romney.
Bill Keller, described here as "the world’s leading internet evangelist and the head of Liveprayer.com with over 2.4 million subscribers to his Daily Devotional," is fast reaching the level of shrillness that makes him pretty much irrelevant, but it's useful to know what the nutter element is saying.
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