We reported more than a year and one-half ago that Gary Glenn, Michigan leader of Donald Wildmon’s fundamentalist Christian organization, was anti-Mormon and anti-Romney. Well, Jonathan Martin reports that he is playing hardball in this now very heated race. Clearly in the Huckabee camp, he has released a memo to supporters:

Which churches should we mobilize for turnout Jan 18th?

Assembly of God, Baptist, Church of God, Nazarenes, Lutheran, non-denominational, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Reformed, Word of Faith

Which churches should we leave alone?

According to a Detroit News Poll, Romney leads by a wide margin among Catholics and, obviously, Mormons. Also any church you know to be liberal on issues such as abortion and protecting traditional marriage.

There it is, the man is flat out trying to divide the state on religious grounds, and misrepresenting Romney’s stance on issues while he is at it!

This is shameful and counterproductive. Decades of efforts to overcome religious bias and this guy is not only trying to encourage existing anti-Mormon bias, but is going to reignite anti-Catholic bias.

Worst of all, he fails to see the backfire of his own strategy. He wishes to mobilize only those Christians that he agrees with and quiet those he does not. What’s he going to do when other fire back in a similar manner, but disagree with him?

Religion should not be discussed.

Oh, one more thing - the guy is just wrong on the facts. Presbyterians are pretty liberal as a group and very open-minded about these things.

Lowell: Just to save everyone the trouble of digging up our old posts, here’s some of what we said about Gary Glenn way back in August of 2006:

Gary Glenn, the subject of the the Hotline post, is described as a type of very conservative gadfly with which we are all familiar: “[I]f Glenn is for you, he doesn’t help much. If he’s dead set against you, he can hurt you.”

So who is Gary Glenn? Is he really someone who should be driving voter thinking on these issues? This site gives a little insight into his agenda. Glenn also is the chairman of Campaign for Michigan Families, described as “a group allied with the religious right,” and the president of the American Family Association in Michigan. If you Google those organizations and Glenn himself, you’ll see that Glenn has a history of trying to defeat Republican candidates whom he considers insufficiently committed to a pro-family agenda. Same-sex marriage is one of the issues Glenn follows most closely, so his opposition to Romney seems counter-intuitive at best.

We had some very affable e-mail exchanges with Gary in response to that post, and he may well respond this time too. I am confident that he will insist that his opposition to Romney stems entirely from Romney’s position on issues like life and same-sex marriage, but I must say that after all this time, that smokescreen is wearing thin.

I met Don Wildmon at Romney’s “Faith in America” speech last month and he expressed great gratitude for Mormon assistance in the Proposition 22 campaign in 2000. (The plan fact is, that campaign, which was about same-sex marriage, would have failed without Mormon involvement.) My own view right now is that people like Wildmon and Gary Glenn are happy to have Mormons as allies in such efforts, but when a Mormon gets uppity enough to think he can actually be president of the United States, their response is: “He must be stopped. I mean, we’ve got to keep those people in their place, don’t we?”

I am not surprised one bit that Gary is a Huckabee guy now. He’s a long-time political dynamiter (i.e., an attack man) and has a long, well-documented anti-Romney history. He’s perfect for the Huckabee campaign– someone to do Huck’s dirty work for him while the candidate remains innocently above the fray.
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