This morning a woman called in to C-SPAN to say she heard from her niece’s husband’s mother’s third cousin, or some such, about a rumor she heard concerning a rite performed in the Mormon temple and boy was it awful! Let me see if I got this right. Someone who knew nothing about a subject heard a rumor about something from another person who knew nothing but heard it from a third person who may or may not have gotten it correctly from someone else but the caller thought it was important enough to warn the rest of America about it. Is that what they wanted to us to know?

The ignorance and obvious bigotry of the caller is only eclipsed by C-SPAN’s willingness to allow it on the air. The point is, discussion of religious belief has sunk so low that even the paragon of American tolerance and political neutrality has abandoned good sense in order to accommodate religious sleaze.