“A campaign that in future took on the Catholic hierarchy for its tolerance of child abuse while denying grown people marriage rights would be a promising start. Ads reminding people of the Mormon church’s long, long history of racism would also be salient. We’re new to this, and we’re learning.”

So Mr. Sullivan is urging supporters of same-sex marriage to learn religious bigotry.

Other posters can do a better job than I of defending the Catholic Church, but Mormons should not think that the old policy of withholding priesthood ordination from men of African descent makes modern Mormons “racist”, any more than America’s history of racial segregation makes modern Americans racist. As of 2009, some 300,000 Africans in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Cote d’Ivoire, and other nations are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Are they “racist”? Did they join the church because they thought it was “racist”?

How about the million Mormons in Brazil, many of whom have African ancestry? The million Mormons in Mexico? The hundreds of thousands of Mormons in Asia, from Mongolia to Japan to the Philippines? The hundreds of thousands in Polynesia, including one third of all Tongans? The leaders of all those thousands of congregations are not white Americans, but local people, all unpaid volunteers.

Sullivan seems unaware that over half of Mormons live in 150 nations outside the US, and over half of Mormons speak a language other than English, and that US Mormons, including those of European ancestry, fan out at a rate of 25,000 new ones a year to nations of all races, living among them and learning their languages and teaching them about their religious beliefs. I am sure it would be a startling thought to Mr. Sullivan to contemplate that, not only are Mormons more racially and ethnically diverse than the US, but also Mormons are collectively among the most internationally traveled and culturally aware people in the country, reflected in the international makeup of the students at BYU campuses, especially BYU-Hawaii. Would a “racist” church look like this?

Since the true picture of Mormons can be easily obtained by a visit to lds.org or mormon.org, it is clear that Mr. Sullivan feels justified in practicing willful ignorance about the objects of his prejudice. Apparently the awful example of religious bigotry run amok at Fort Hood a couple of days before, whose victims included a young Mormon soldier from Utah, did not give Mr. Sullivan any pause about his own rabble rousing.