Article VI Blog

The Arizona Republic doesn’t like Huckabee’s approach to his campaign. Their critique includes this:

His seemingly off-the-cuff comment about how little he knew of Mormons - “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” - was positively cringe-inducing. Huckabee is a candidate who is explicitly targeting a religious constituency, many of whom suspect members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (like, oh, his opponent, Mitt Romney) of apostasy. He might as well have hung a sign in an ad announcing, in wavering white letters, “Fear the Mormon!”

The Republic does like its home state Senator, John McCain.

“Nifonging”

Now there’s an interesting new word for us, born of former prosecutor (and now former lawyer) Mike Nifong’s treatment of the Duke University lacrosse team. Michael Gaynor explains it all for you, and concludes:

Nifonging must be stopped in politics as well as criminal justice. Mitt Romney too deserves fair consideration and the Mormon bashers who would deprive him of it have no business calling themselves Christians or Americans.

Read the whole thing.

Elsewhere around the Web . . .

Another story, this time in Vermont, about what local Mormons think about Romney’s candidacy. I can understand the curiosity, but I don’t understand why no one is asking Southern Baptists how they feel about Huckabee’s candidacy. Isn’t this simply aiding and abetting Huckabee’s use of identity politics? Unlike Romney, Huck’s running as a religious candidate (indeed, as the Evangelical Christian candidate), so it seems much more appropriate to ask Huck’s co-religionists how they feel about his candidacy than to direct those questions to Romney’s fellow Mormons. Then again, maybe it’s just a dumb idea to ask a candidate’s co-religionists how they feel about him or her running.

Then again, maybe it’s just a dumb idea to ask a candidate’s co-religionists how they feel about him or her running.

K-Lo shares a Bloomberg/LATimes poll press release suggesting that the difference between the Huck-Romney race in Iowa and the same race in New Hampshire is . . . religion. John comments: No DUH! Leave us remember Iowa gave us Pat Robertson as a winner and Howard Dean who had his own sort of religious following. But Iowa is giving the press the religion war they have wanted since Romney was a whisper….

Ramesh Ponnuru rebuts David Ignatius’ critique of Romney’s “Faith in America” speech. I think Ramesh wins the argument.

John adds: Ramesh also follows up with some information on the discussion over Article VI by the founders, supplied by his readers. It is great information, but he seems to be arguing that Article VI was never intended to apply to the conscience of an individual voter in the voting booth. That is, of course, strictly true. However, we have argued here several times, that if the individual so does they are exercising their franchise on the basis of a faulty understanding of the relationship between religion and politics, not to mention religion and character.

But a more interesting question to my mind would be, What role did the founders envision for the press in such a distinction? I am not sure they envisioned the kinds of proctological examinations of religion in the press that we are treated to today. They certainly never envisioned an age where technology gave the press the power to shape opinion as overwhelmingly as it can today. I wonder what they would say if they have seen some of the stuff we have in this cycle?

Lowell: Ramesh should know better than to pound on the theme that Article VI does not apply to voting. Charles Krauthammer said it best:

The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government action, the law is also meant to be a teacher.

In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race — changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next — so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American.

I’d like to see someone attempt a credible rebuttal to that argument. We haven’t seen such an attempt yet.
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