Well, at least Orrin Hatch does.  The left keeps trying to make a big deal out of it.   They are trying, once again, to drive a wedge in the conservative coalition.  And some are trying to divide Mormons or make some public Mormons less authentic appearing than others.

There are a lot of problems here and one of them is Orrin Hatch not holding the party line very well.  But be that as it may, the real problem is people trying to paint religious people as somehow lock-step robotic ideologues.  We’re not – sometimes we disagree.  The key is how we handle those disagreements.  And here is the thing – Hatch’s comments did not attack anyone, but many have latched on to them and used them as attack fodder.

One of the big mistakes conservatives make is that we assume everyone is as nice as we are – it hurts us every time.  We cannot allow ourselves ever to turn as mean as the opposition, but we do have to protect ourselves against their tactics, and that means learning to manage our messages better.  Hatch is certainly guilty of that sin, but that is about it.  He has a wrong opinion – happens every day, not the issue.

And speaking of mean, from a source other than Christopher Hitchens, this piece would be one of the most offensive I have read in years, and it is unsurprisingly published in Slate.  However, being from Hitchens it is just more of same.  What baffles me is when such an otherwise reasonable man spits such bile – you can always tell there is something personal at play.

The Beck Rally…

…seemed to dominate the political/religious discussion all last week.   We of course had our say, which Hugh Hewitt seemed to like, and which shared a lot in common with Timothy Dalrymple.  But we seemed to hold a minority opinion -  even though the likes of Glenn Reynolds, Maggie Gallagher, John Fund, Jonah Goldberg and James Taranto appear to be in the same ball park with us.  It seems people just cannot understand the difference between a civic religion, an organized religion, a political movement, and a political campaign – or they don’t want to.  Some, of course, wanted to graft a different agenda onto a successful gathering, and the analysts had to analyze even if meant discussing stuff that wasn’t really there.  But no one, it seems wanted to take the thing at face value.

Some were worried that Beck was a “stalking horse” for Mormonism, some think at least on political level – even if they are suspicious of religion in general (think example of the real enemy here).  Some see religious conspiracy.  Some tired to put that question into a proper context, but everybody is asking if Beck is going to help Romney.

But the reliably left MSM is really trying to use it as a wedge to divide us as conservatives between faiths and between conservative and liberals inside Mormonism.  (That reporter keeps going here)  Uber-left Time magazine gets pretty nasty about it.  Even Christianity Today is forced to ask about it.

Politically, who knows where this thing is going to end up, (as I said last week Beck is likely to blow the momentum he has gained here - he may have started to do so already) but when there are this many people talking about something this defensively, political change is in the wind – in this case maybe a hurricane.

The Field…

Tim Pawlenty has some polling problems.   And some people think it’s a big deal.  Actually you will read it about most governors as they leave office.  I don’t put much stock in such polls.  The same was true for Romney and he is still standing.  Pawlenty did make what to this eye seems like one very smart move.  Obamacare is a line in the stand that no Republican that wants the job can afford to cross.  He also is making a mistake too.  The VVS is a mixed bag politically and how to best utilize it is a tough call, but avoiding it is giving away votes.

Mitch Daniels – Chris Cilizza says it ain’t over until its over.  Maybe not, but like Pawlenty he is stepping on some toes that matter – they may not be determinative, but they mater.

Mitt Romney - political comments from children should be taken with a grain of salt.  Of course, the MSM will miss no shot at the GOP frontrunner.

Religion In the News…

Now FOXNews has picked up the Mormon ad story as a stalking horse for Romney.  Give it a rest people, the church still has to be the church, they cannot fold up their tents completely just becasue one of their own is running.

Vanity Fair is using Sarah Palin to make fun of all of us.  I keep telling you – they are after all of us.

Is Glenn Reynolds making fun of us?  I feared the story line he mocks would catch on, but apparently not – Thankfully.

Not sure this is a smart argument, but it is compelling.

Unsurprisingly, religion is everywhere.  But it is only an issue when someone wants to hammer conservatives.

©2010 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Well, frankly, it was all of the above.

The United States of America has always been a religious nation without a specific religion.   We have always had something variously called the “civic” or “civil” or “public” religion that was pious, moral, believed in a supernatural and an objective good, but was insufficiently defined ever to rise to the level of an actual, organized religion.  It was a banner under which many religions united to work together as a nation.  This compromise has served us well because religion has flourished in our nation like no other place in history.

The civic religion has served as “battleground” that defined the rules of conflict between competing specific religions, and by keeping that conflict civil, forces that have ripped apart virtually every nation in history have been held at bay.  But some aspects of the civil religion are beginning to fray.  The belief in a supernatural and objective good seems no longer to be part of the common understanding of our nation.  One would think that in such a circumstance those of us that still hold such would unite under a banner to restore it – if we do not, the consequences would be disastrous.  NO religion will survive.

Ross Douthat’s analysis of the Beck rally is both insightful and problematic.  Insightful in this:

Latter Day Saints and evangelical Christians arguably share enough affinities to belong in the same “cultural family,” as Weigel puts it. But you’re more likely to find them in competition, from the streets of American suburbia to the mission fields of the developing world to the 2008 election’s great Mike Huckabee-Mitt Romney throwdown. It’s a case of theological differences trumping cultural commonalities: The two faiths occupy opposite sides of a theological chasm that makes the gulf between Catholics and Protestants look narrow by comparison, and many evangelicals bristle with hostility for what they regard as Mormonism’s cultish pseudo-Christianity.

The problems arise when he then goes on to seemingly fan the flames of the conflict rather than try to quell them.  Yes, we do compete in the mission field, but if our nation cannot maintain its civil religion and accompanying religious truce in governance, there will be no mission field on which to compete – all religion will find itself banned, or an “official” religion will squeeze the rest of us out.

Some, worried that capitalism and politics will become a god, sound warnings that lead others to send for the wrong message at the wrong time. The forces that deeply oppose, those that do not believe in the supernatural and objective good, will – when they get the story straight – use our religious differences to split a coalition that could otherwise preserve the civic religion.  They will try to make us look foolish.  They will look calm and cool and collected while we will look like religious thugs.

The analogy is old and tired, perhaps to the point of triteness, but that does not rob it of its essential truth – It was necessary to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler.  There was an imminent and violent threat that had to be dealt with before the subtle and quiet threat of communism.

There is an imminent and violent threat to religion in America right now – and it must be dealt with before the religious “cold war” between the faiths can be fought.  The Beck rally in Washington this weekend past was about that pressing threat.  I’ll take any ally I can get.

©2010 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I want to address Carter’s comment on three levels:

There is a big difference between the university and the conservative political movement.

Carter seems to think that arguments Buckley applied to Yale University somehow apply with equal force and reason to a political movement:

God and Man is a polemic with a simple, inflammatory proposal: Because Yale actively undermines the students’ faith in Christianity and the free market, the alumni should withhold financial support from the university. The corollary was obvious: Yale should do something about these professors.

[...]

How remarkable that the thesis of a book that helped launch the conservative movement could, less than half a century later, be completely repudiated by people who claim to be the author’s intellectual heirs. But that is not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that they repudiated only part of it. They’ve foolishly discarded Buckley’s emphasis on Christianity but retained, as they should, his love of free enterprise.

A university is intended to be both an educational and an ideological institution.  One reason universities are founded is to preserve and expand an ideology, and in some cases a religion.  Our government is designed to be without inherent ideology, and it certainly is not purposed to preserve any particular ideology or faith.   It is intended instead to be the battlefield on which ideologies compete and to preserve the rules of that battle so that it does not result in the abuses and failings that the Founders had seen in the colonial era.  Our nation is an experiment to find out if those of differing ideologies can exist as a nation and have that nation continue to function well.

One cannot simply assume the same roles and purposes for a university and our government.  That our government did, for a lengthy period of time, serve to preserve and promote a specific Christian ideology is a function not of the government itself, but of the citizenry it serves.  The fact of the matter is that the specific Christian ideology that the government did preserve for all those years won, over and over, the battle the government was designed to host.  Simply put, most Americans subscribed to the Christian ideology that the government preserved and promoted.  They also managed to apply pressure by many means – some of which Carter rightly names – to their ideological opponents not to fight back

That simply is no longer the case.  Polling shows that most people still claim an adherence to Christianity in one form or another, but what it means to be Christian has grown expansive and those that do not claim to be have become increasingly adept at fighting on the governmental battlefield.  Which brings me to the second level I want to address.

The failures of faith that Carter rightly points out are better laid at the feet of the church than at a political movement.

Carter seemingly makes this point himself:

Buckley understood that Truth not only does not always trump falsehood, but it can never win unless it is promulgated.

Indeed, Christianity must be promulgated, over and over and over again – but that is not, nor was it ever, the job of government.  Such promulgation is, however, the job of the church and the university that Buckley was battling for in his book.  The fact that Christianity’s authority in public debate has waned so lays at the feet of the church failing to maintain it as the prevailing ideology of the land.

The church has done so in many ways, and this blog is not the appropriate place for me to air my many criticisms of how the Christian church generally has abandoned its duties in this age.  However, among those abandonments is the large scale abandonment of responsibility for education.  My own alma mater gave up its church foundations many decades before I attended – Why did the church let that happen?

Politics, the necessary first step of governance in our nation, demands the building of a coalition sufficiently large to prevail at the polls.  If that coalition is to be exclusively, or even predominantly, of the Christian ideology then it is up to the church and its many arms like the university to see to it that there are enough people holding that ideology to constitute a majority.  The fact that such a majority cannot be pulled together now means the church has fallen down on that job.

The question becomes what to do in light of the current political realities.  You see, the fact is that as our ideological opponents continue to get better at the battle, they are using their increasing political power to remove our opportunities to even enter into the debate.  Whereas we historically applied pressure in many social and educational ways to suppress opposition, they appear unafraid to use the power of law to completely eliminate opposition.  If those in politics and governance that adhere to our Christian ideology must remain meek about that ideology in order to build the necessary coalitions, then so they must to even have the opportunity to preserve our ability to fight back.

But those in politics and governance should not be fighting alone.  As they fight to preserve our access to the battleground, we should be working to promulgate our Christian ideology – different fronts and varied battle plans, but the same war.  They can only do their job if we do ours.

Veiling personal attacks makes them no less personal.

Finally, Carter’s previously quoted sentence:

How remarkable that the thesis of a book that helped launch the conservative movement could, less than half a century later, be completely repudiated by people who claim to be the author’s intellectual heirs.

cannot be interpreted as anything else than a direct swipe at the good people of National Review – the magazine started by Buckley.  The magazine is known for its fiscal conservatism, but its faith is equally apparent.  It is ironic that Carter’s post appeared on the same day as NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez’s “God and Women at Harvard” appeared at that site.  K-Lo’s interview with a female Harvard grad entering a convent is quite spiritually uplifting and does not in any way shy from being a bold pronouncement of faith.

Carter comes dangerously close to calling into the question the genuineness of the faith of those at NRO and those that agree with them.   What political issues one considers most important and the political strategies one employs to carry the day simply is a not a measure  of one’s commitment to his or her religion – any more than it would be reasonable to say that the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl under Tony Dungy because of his very vocal commitment to his faith while they lost under Jim Caldwell because he was not so loud about his.

©2010 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

What mix?  Well for starters, Mitt Romney (God forbid anyone would be allowed to forget he’s a Mormon!) is polling very well and came out with an awesome op-ed in the Boston Globe.  Secondly, the religious angle to the Nevada Senate race is getting really ugly. (Pun intended – and for the record, while Sharon Angle did pathetically open this can of worms, it’s Reid that has gone all “attack dog” over it.)  There are religion angles in other mid-term races as well.  And finally, the Ground Zero Mosque controversy just keeps rolling along, despite some enormously silly comparisons. (I don’t get the comparison at all, frankly.)  So, what do we get out of all of this?  (I am not going to go near the “Obama’s a Muslim” meme – it’s just silly.  See some reasonable commentary from Slublog and a CSM blog points out that the man’s lack of convictions creates a vacuum that needs to be filled – but give me a break, some vacuums need to remain empty.)

There are a lot of cries that Romney should be be “out front” of the GZM issue.  After all, he’d be a “hypocrite” otherwise.  Funny how all these calls have come from the left, like Newsweek and CNN.  Allahpundit looks wisely at the political wisdom of Romney’s play here.  Ramesh Ponnuru used the controversy to point out that Evangelicals are not really biased against Mormons so much as they are identity voters.  (Not sure that’s true in Iowa, Ramesh, but you are probably right about the rest of the country.)

The point Ramesh makes is applicable here as well, there is no bias at play in the GZM controversy – it’s not a First Amendment issue at all, it’s a land use/zoning issue.  No one is saying that Muslims cannot worship freely and openly in Manhattan, just not on that spot in Manhattan.  In the ‘08 cycle, so many were quick to point out that despite Article VI of the constitution they were free to exercise their privilege in the voting booth as they saw fit.  That’s something we never contested.  We, like Ramesh, wondered about the wisdom of voting by identity, but never abouit the right to do so.

There is little Romney can do to help himself here.  Should he step out on GZM on a Constitutional level he will elevate the issue to a place that it clearly does not belong and blow his excellent conservative credentials on matters legal and constitutional.  Should he attack it on a zoning/land use level he will fuel those that did exercise anti-Mormon bigotry last time to do so again.

Besides, it’s really a local matter, not a federal one.

Also-rans…

People run for POTUS for a lot of reasons – they want to inject a specific issue into the campaign; they want to accumulate personal power for other political purposes; they want to accumulate public recognition for a career in media in some fashion – the list could go on for a while.  The point is that the simple descriptive “former candidate for president of the United States” buys a person quite a bit.  Right now, the media-discussed Republican “field” is full of such people.

This can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing.  It is a good thing when they bring something to the campaign that might otherwise not be picked up. That’s probably why a Rick Santorum run continues to become a higher probability.   Santorum will never get elected, but a credible run on his part will keep social issues somewhere in the mix in an election where they could be off the table altogether.  With the economy in the state it is in, they certainly should not be front and center, but they are important.

The presence of Haley Barbour in the mix may be good or bad.  He is a formidable fund raiser and his presence in the race, at least for a time, can increase that ability – which can certainly aid other more viable candidates.  He also, as Santorum, can serve as a target for some of the more cartoonish attacks from the left leaving the serious players a more open playing field.  However, problems can arise if in his desire to use his fund raising prowess to serve as “kingmaker” he ends up being more self-serving rather than party-serving. (Lowell interjects:  Barbour is a former RNC Chairman who has a history as a party man.  So I like to think – hope? – he would not be self-serving.)

Need an example of the whole self-serving model?  Look no further than our old “friend” Mike Huckabee.  He is polling well in Iowa, but that is about as surprising as ice in Antarctica.  We will not review here (we’ve done it already) how Huckabee, by hanging around like he did without an iceberg’s chance, mucked up ‘08.  Huckabee is currently billing himself as “a preacher who accepts all, a politician that never plays politics and a host unlike any other.”  Do I think he’ll run?  At this point, yeah – I do.  Which means the serious players will have to make Iowa unimportant which will neutralize him for the rest of the campaign.  Huckabee will be aided by a press that desperately wants Iowa to matter – which will be fine for Huckabee since media is really what he is after.  But we cannot let him serve the party another mediocre candidate.

Inside Evangelical Politics…

Last week we pointed out that it seems like it is always the left that gets truly rhetorically nasty.  That rule seems to hold true inside Evangelicalism as well as out of it.  Last week Jim Wallis did an interview and he turned absolutely uncharitable on Marvin Olasky.   At the Corner, Jay Richards said:

What to say at this point? At the very least, Wallis has abandoned even the pretense of civil discourse here. Olasky has evidence of Soros grants to Sojourners, so the most that Wallis would be justified in saying is that Olasky is mistaken and that the evidence is misleading or fraudulent (which seems unlikely). Instead, he says that Olasky is lying for a living.

Hugh Hewitt said:

So Marvin Olasky was slandered by Jim Wallis, as was Glenn Beck.  Wouldn’t a man seeking to represent Christians be quick to apologize to both?  If Wallis has done so, I haven’t seen it.

Wallis has corrected his incorrect factual assertions, but his tone and demeanor have remained unchanged.  Is it any wonder people do not like us so much?

And while we are on the subject – R.R. Reno had some interesting thoughts on civility.

Those Mormon Ads…

Are still being discussed a bit – mostly by bitter, unhappy people.  The CJCLDS continues to make the “Romney denials.“  I do want to comment that it takes a very narrow view of a church, any church, to think that advertisements for the church are about presidential candidates from within the church – or even about Prop 8.  Jan Shipps has argued again and again that while the Mormons were historically more ethnicity than church, they have transformed since WWII with the geographical diaspora it created among them,  into pretty much a standard American “come on in on Sunday” church with some rather idiosyncratic theology.

Religion Generally…

…is under attack. (Hey! – we told you so.)  “On Faith” is recycling the same old question in new circumstances.  It’ll be interesting to see how different the answers are with a different person and religion.  The fact that there is a difference is the actual heart of the problem.

Patheos, the new religion site that has been getting much buzz lately with collections of essays on the future of Catholicism and Evangelicalism has now done such a collection on Mormonism.  This one seemed particularly interesting.  Patheos may prove to be a great resource, but so far they are resisting our technical attempts to monitor their content remotely – this is not good when you try to track as much info as we do.

The line between sports humor and religious/political attack is a fine one.  Is Keith Olberman a trailblazer?  Far as I know, he has never been near Portland.

Some are saying American Protestantism is the most destructive religion in history.  Call me when a Presbyterian flies an airplane into a skyscraper.

Some say the Shakers are “sinister.“  Wrong on some things – perhaps, but “sinister?!”  Nah, no bone to pick with religion here.

The courts are at it again.  I wonder if soon we are going to have to disguise churches that can be seen from highways?  And what about this puppy? – I saw it a few weeks ago – it is big!

And in Australia, the church/state line is getting way too blurry for my taste.

Lowell adds . . .

For those who missed it, Hot Air offered an interesting twist last week on the news media’s apparent double standard on presidential religion.  The whole post is worth reading.  A key paragraph:

As I’ve said, I don’t really care what Obama believes. What bothers me is that the press only seems to think a president’s religion is important when his faith can be used to question his policy priorities. If those priorities go against the views of those in the media, then Christianity is a scary fringe faith that needs examining. If the president is progressive, then his faith is pure and he’s only trying to do what’s best for the country. No reason to ask uncomfortable questions.

The writer’s  point is that the news media expressed great discomfort, concern, and curiosity about G.W. Bush’s faith and its impact on his actions as president, but seem to think Obama’s Christianity is simply admirable, normal,  and pretty much beyond inquiry.

I think we see a variation in the same phenomenon with Romney and even Huckabee.  Long-time readers of this blog will remember a news reporter’s confession that while on a visit to Romney’s home she actually snooped around his bathroom, hoping to find a sample of his uniquely Mormon underwear.  (I can tell you it would have been hard for her to tell it from anyone else’s Fruit of the Loom.)   Huck, despite being my least-favorite Republican in the 2008 cycle, drew my sympathy because his Baptist faith was constantly under the microscope and treated as a real curiosity and a matter of serious public interest.

Which is my way of saying that in the presidential arena, religion has become a reporters’ tool that is too often used to shape the narrative – but mainly by the MSM and the liberal punditocracy, and only when it suits their favored candidates’ purposes.  As we’ve often said here, a presidential candidate’s religion is important only about 10% as often as the news media seems to think it is – and even that may be an exaggeration.

©2010 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.

The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They’ll be richer or more educated, they’ll have a better job or a better house, they’ll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. “The richest family in town,” they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It’s all about trying to rise.

[...]

When the adults of a great nation feel long-term pessimism, it only makes matters worse when those in authority take actions that reveal their detachment from the concerns—even from the essential nature—of their fellow citizens. And it makes those citizens feel powerless.

Inner pessimism and powerlessness: That is a dangerous combination.

Th whole piece is fascinating, you should read the whole thing.  It set me wondering if the huge increase in people staying with their parents well past the age where my generation did is not evidence of same.  Frankly, I don’t blame the kids, but I have always wondered why the parents make it so easy on them.  But this piece I think explains it – parents no longer think they are releasing their kids into something good.  The parents no longer have faith that if they let the kids go, the failure will be small and the success big.  Hence the kids stay in the basement and play video games well into their 20’s and even their 30’s.

But here is the real insight that I had while reading this – government has never been the source of hope in this nation – the lack of it has.  More specifically the freedom of religion that we have enjoyed has provided hope unlike any other place on earth or time in history.  There is nothing I know of that can provide hope in people save a sense that there is an Almighty in control.  Part of the great American civic religion is that while we disagree on the specifics of the Almighty, we know there is one and that He has our destiny well in hand.

And yet, we live in an age when our courts tell us that religion causes harm.  We live in an age where expressions of that hope when rooted in the Almighty are forbidden from public view.  And worst of all, those of us that share a sense of a benevolent and hope-inducing Almighty turn on each other in our civil debates because in the pessimism and powerlessness that we feel, we feel that we must fight someone – and in doing so we only make the situation worse.

Moreover, in the pessimism and powerlessness we feel, religious people turn to government for hope rather than realizing that we hold the solution in our own hands.  Rather than build a soup kitchen, we lobby for more food stamps.   Rather than build a shelter, we lobby for “affordable housing” laws.  Rather than spread the hope that our faith should give us, we wallow in our hopelessness.

But I am not yet ready to abandon my hope, for I cling tightly to the Almighty as I understand Him – and I hope you do to.  The road back to a hope filled nation is not straight, short nor simple.  It involves reforming both government and religion.  I know it starts by uniting in our hopefulness despite our differences in understanding that hope’s source.  I know that someday we will have to resolve those differences, but today is not that day.  Today we fight together for a nation where we can resolve those differences rather than have them resolved for us.

What say you?  Comment moderation is off for the weekend.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for his link and comments on the same article.

©2010 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

And yes, that is most definitely a “failure to communicate,” he said completing the famous and almost trite movie quotation.

Breaking from his vacation, as I am from mine, my friend Hugh Hewitt points out, in this week of way too much race-based news:

Did any of the JournoList participants rebuke Spencer Ackerman’s suggestion that Fred Barnes or Karl Rove be made a target of a manufactured “racist” charge?

Ackerman will be carrying the burden of that despicable suggestion for the rest of his “career” such as it is, but it may even be worse to have been a participant in the list and to have said nothing when such an assault was proposed.  Even if the “journalists” on the list hated Karl Rove as an extension of Bush and thus talked themselves into this repulsive group-think, many of them know for a fact that Fred is among the most decent and large-hearted of journalists.  To have said nothing when a colleague or far worse, a friend, was nominated for the worst sort of slander is an extraordinary personal failure.  Whether any of those who were party to it step forward to apologize will be interesting to watch.

[...]

When Andrew Breitbart posted the NAACP video, he did not know it had been edited. Journalists who commented on the story did not know of the editing either.

But everyone on JournoList knew that Ackerman was proposing a Big Lie in the service of a political agenda –Ackerman admitted that himself– so they all stood by and said nothing. The only defense that any of them have is that Ackerman was an insignificant loon or that they missed his post, even though it appeared in the middle of the biggest story of the time period.

Just this morning, over my hotel breakfast, FoxNews was discussing newly leaked JournoList postings from campaign ‘08 trying to paint the Palin VP nomination as “sexist.”

There are two terribly important lessons for this blog that can be taken away from this scandal and the USDA atrocities of the week.

The first is that the press, at least a significant portion of it, is all too willing to discuss the use of label/identity based spin to aid the Democratic side of the aisle.  It confirms something that people have known all along.  The lack of discrimination is born not in monitoring the use of identity labels, but in being blind to them.  When considered, whether in base discrimination, such as Jim Crow, or in the type of “reverse discrimination” we are seeing from the JournoList crowd they are political weapons, and they are poltical weapons that our common understanding, and in some cases our constitution place off limits.

Religion is one of those identity labels that our constitution places strictly off limits.  The reason for that is very straightforward – all it can do is serve to create conflict when what we need is the finding of common ground to move the nation forward.  The USDA events of the past week show that the opportunity for mischief with identity factors is just too great to use them AT ALL.

Which brings me to this very interesting piece by Kenneth Anderson on the Volokh Conspiracy (HT: a reader that sent it forward.)  Anderson argues that there are some things about religion that should be a part of the public discourse:

But of course, the problem is how to parse the difference between that which is acceptable for inquiry concerning someone who proposes to lead the polis and what is genuinely personal and irrelevant.  My one regret is that the nasty fireworks at the beginning of that long essay tend to obscure the quite serious argument about how to draw those lines that occupies the second half.  (It is not, by the way, a regret for having ridiculed the two principals — I think that it is important, actually, for people to understand the affective side of this and not pretend that it is purely mild cognition, and that was one way to do it.)  But this issue is going to resurface, certainly with Romney, and with others.  The problem, at its most general, is that religion bears certain characteristics of immutable characteristics, like race or ethnicity — marks of identity that one could not change about oneself, but which — again, like skin color — are morally irrelevant, and so cannot, by themselves, be cause for either accepting or rejecting a person as a political leader in a liberal society.

But religion also has a cognitive content — including doctrines — that are and should be subject to reasoned discussion.  The believer who partakes of them as doctrines of faith might not do that, and might not be able to do that, almost by definition.  Yet it would also be a mistake to draw too sharp a line between things subject to human reason and things not of this world and so not subject to human reason; particularly law-based religions partake of both.  Mormonism, for that matter, incorporates this directly into its prophetic traditions  And despite being a thoroughly lapsed Mormon, and so not in the sense that I would presume instruct Mormons on the doctrines of their faith, but rather as a descriptive statement that I do not believe that the elders of the Church would regard it as an accurate statement of the faith, though of course I might well be corrected on that — I would say that Romney’s statement on this matter is not particularly an accurate reflection of Mormon doctrine.  Mormon doctrine regarding human reason is not, so far as I have been able to comprehend, “relativistic” in the sense used in contemporary ethical argument, even if it is more elastic some (including me) would accept.

But irrespective of whether believers are able to participate in the discussion of human reason and prophetic traditions, when adherents go out to offer leadership in the broader political community, then the unbelievers are perfectly warranted to ask that they be discussed in terms that are accessible to public discussion.

Yes, indeed, religion does have a cognitive element, but unless a candidate or elected official insists on making policy based on their religious conviction, why is it necessary to discuss?  All that is really necessary to discuss is the proposed policy, and the stated reasons for bringing it forward.  The attachment of a religious labels, as with race or gender, to either the proposer or the policy itself serves only to turn the reasoned discussion into the kind of vitriolic posturing that we have seen based on race in the last week.  We have seen some very bad decision making based on such labels and we are seeing the public manipulated based on similar labels – they simply do not aid our public discourse.  If reasoned discussion is the goal and the labels serve to override reason rather than aid it – why inject them into the conversation at all?

I am reminded of a Sunday school class I was in a couple of decades ago – it was being taught at the highest levels by a seminary professor of excellent repute.  We were discussing theories of the atonement and at one point a student rose and asserted that the professor’s view of the atonement was “too masculine.”  I objected in the most strenuous of terms and set forth the proposition that I am emphasizing here today.   The theory of the atonement is neither masculine nor feminine, it simply is truth.  Yes, men and women my arrive at that truth by different paths, but that matters not, what matters is that we arrive at the truth – together.  Inserting the labels serves only to make the truth relativistic.

When it comes to public policy, what matters is that we arrive at the best possible policy.  People will come to their policy choices by a variety of methods and thought processes.  By definition, there cannot be different policy for one group or another – that is the definition of discrimination.  Therefore, group identity entering the discussion serves no purpose other than to prevent arriving at a policy at all, or to arrive at a policy that, rather than providing maximum benefit for the most people, benefits mostly the group that can best claim victimization – again, the very definition of discrimination.

In a week of claim and counterclaim based on race, I am deeply saddened that in many ways our nation is no different than it was when I was a child spending summers with extended family in Jim Crow Mississippi.  But we have clung to our labels too hard.  We have to let go of them.

Lowell adds . . .

Professor Anderson’s Volokh post is remarkable on more than one level.  I do not think it will move the discussion much, because it is mostly impenetrable.  Consider these two statements:

The problem, at its most general, is that religion bears certain characteristics of immutable characteristics, like race or ethnicity — marks of identity that one could not change about oneself, but which — again, like skin color — are morally irrelevant, and so cannot, by themselves, be cause for either accepting or rejecting a person as a political leader in a liberal society. . . .

And despite being a thoroughly lapsed Mormon, and so not in the sense that I would presume instruct [sic] Mormons on the doctrines of their faith, but rather as a descriptive statement that I do not believe that the elders of the Church would regard it as an accurate statement of the faith, though of course I might well be corrected on that — I would say that Romney’s statement on this matter is not particularly an accurate reflection of Mormon doctrine.

Each one of those is a single sentence.  I teach young lawyers that if a sentence must be read more than once by an educated reader to be understood, the writer is in trouble; more than twice, and the sentence should be rewritten.

But enough about style.  Anderson’s post is a dogged argument that it is desirable – nay, necessary and proper - to make a candidate’s most private religious beliefs matters of public discussion and inquiry.  We have rejected that argument on this blog dozens of times, so I won’t rehash those posts.  I’ll simply refer our readers to John Mark Reynolds’ analysis, which John and I think is the perfect approach. Here’s a summary:

Freedom of religion does not mean I have to think every religion or irreligion is great! In fact it is demeaning to religion to behave this way. My Catholic friends know that I think the Pope is not the sole head of the Church and my Baptist friends know I think their view of the Eucharist inadequate. They honor me by strongly disagreeing with me. If I thought these ideas had public policies implications that would lead to bad social policy by the state, I would want to examine the views of any Catholic of Baptist politician.

That is not bigotry, just common sense.

So if we assume religious traditions are, at least in part, knowledge traditions, then being wrong about religion does matter. How wrong does one have to be before losing credibility in the public square?

Let me propose a few tests and suggest that Mormonism easily passes all of them.

First, the religious beliefs of the candidate should be held by a significant number of people and by a group willing to defend them (even if unsuccessfully) in a rational manner. . . .

Second, the group in question should not have religious claims that will naturally lead to horrific, or at least far out, public policy. . . .

Third, the group should have a long track record of generally playing by republican rules in areas where it is dominant. No group is perfect, but the Presidency is too powerful a prize to trust to a new group that might have secret authoritarian leanings.

If you want to know why Prof. Reynolds thinks Mormonism passes all three tests, read his post.

©2010 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Faith still sticky issue as Romney mulls run

I expected the worst.  While there is little doubt in my mind that the Globe intended to stir up trouble on an issue that has been largely laying dormant of late, the piece itself is not pure hit piece, which is surprising.  There are a couple of good take-aways from it:

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Hunter is right: Religious conservatives who make “reclaiming the culture” their political goal are doomed to fail; more modesty and a tighter mission focus are essential. For politics to be an effective tool, values must be transformed into a political objective, i.e., something a politician can vote for or against (partial-birth abortion, conscience protection in health care legislation, waiting periods for abortions, parental notification).

You go to culture war with the army you have — and then you figure out what you really need, or you lose.

She, via James Davison Hunter, comes at this argument a little differently than I would – but then, it is essentially the same argument.  There are a couple of salient points that bear emphasis.  The first from from Hunter:

One cannot “engage the culture” by converting individual hearts and minds or accumulating majority votes. Culture simply does not work like that. Culture is the power to “name reality,” and that power is in itself inevitably intertwined with high cultural status. Culture is a product of elites, not of moral majorities.

The second point, which Gallagher makes:

You go to culture war with the army you have. The reason people with traditional religious and sexual moralities gravitated into politics is that structures of the political elites are among the most open and easy to penetrate. To put it another way, politics is one field of culture-making that secular elites do not control. Political power thus operates in a partial and limited fashion as a break on elites’ cultural power, since it raises the potential costs of attempting to de-legitimize those who disagree with them in the public square. The risk of backlash tempers Harvard’s dreams for America.

[...]

Politics is only one tool of cultural power, and not the best. But it is a potentially useful tool.

Gallagher concludes:

My own complaint about the religious right is not that it is too much in politics, but that it is not enough. In too many cases, religious conservatives talk like they are in politics, make demands like they are in politics, issue threats like they are in politics — but they do not create the institutions that are at the heart of politics: organizations that raise money and spend it electing politicians who will vote for their cause.

Now, I look at this and conclude that there are two essential lessons for religious people.  Firstly, we do not do politics very well.  That is Gallagher’s conclusion about organizations, etc.  I would add to her list of complaints in this department theological based bias when political action is the goal.  Winning the culture war does not mean winning converts.

Note Hunter’s comment about “naming reality.”  In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis called this “pre-evangelism.”  The book C.S. Lewis in a Time of War by Justin Phillips, cites some correspondence Lewis wrote while preparing the radio lectures that became “Mere Christianity:”

At this time, he had begun to correspond regularly with an Anglican nun called Sister Penelope. She was a prolific writer herself and was preparing some talks. C.S. Lewis explained to here what he hoped to achieve in his broadcast work for the BBC. The purpose was pre-evangelistic rather than direct appeal. Writing to her on 15 May 1941, Lewis was keen to discuss his scripts with her.

Mine are praeparatio evangelica rather than evangelium, an attempt to convince people that there is a moral law, that we disobey it, and that the existence of a Lawgiver is at least very probable and also (unless you add the Christian doctrine of the Atonement) imparts despair rather than comfort.

In Lewis’ view, and implied in Gallagher’s argument here, there is something a society must agree to before evangelism to a specific religion can occur.  In our battles in the culture war, it is these things we seek to establish.  We seek, through cultural influence to prepare the battlefield for the religious battles – which are fought with different tools and different armies, which leads us to the second point I draw from this.

Gallagher’s point that politics is not the best tool of cultural power is extremely important.  Religious people generally, and Evangelicals especially have chosen to withdraw virtually completely from the other tools of cultural engagement.  We form our own universities rather than teach in the existing ones.  Such segregation places us in a ghetto, outside of culture rather than in a position to influence and change it.  Christian media is largely distinct from other media – again ghettoized.

Many Evangelicals think this withdrawal is necessary to maintain some sort of “Christian purity,” but it is also a form of monasticism.  Monks indeed live very “pure” Christian lives, but how much do they affect culture?  During his lifetime, St. Francis of Assisi fought very hard to prevent his movement from becoming an order – it was in his vision to be simply a community.  His reasoning was because in monasticism the impulse to “Spread the Word.” in generally lost.

I would argue one further point to Gallagher’s that politics is not the best tool in the culture war, and that is that politics alone cannot win it.  In a republican democracy such as ours, politics resides in a strange space between leading and following.  It tends to follow the cultural mores rather than define them, generally at best it codifies that which is already culturally established.  That is why it is so vitally important for religious people of every stripe to engage culture not only politically, but in all the other areas where the “elite” define it.

It also seems reasonable that making politics our sole tool of cultural engagement leads to the sort of inter-religious battles that we have seen in conservative politics.  We seem to think politics is the war when it is but a single battle.

©2010 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

“South Park” and Comedy Central lead “On Faith” to ask:

What is the obligation of a Western, democratic government to protect individual freedoms in light of a realistic terrorist threat? Are the producers of South Park right to forfeit their freedom of expression in the interests of protecting their employees? Are the governments of Europe right to ban burqas in the interest of fostering a more open society?

Frankly, that question is a reflection of why Newsweek is on life support.  In many ways it was asked and answered a century ago.  Yeah, I’m talking about the legal battles over Mormon polygamy.  Simply put, government should not interfere with religious belief, and generally not religious speech, but it can and should interfere with religious practice when said practice harms the normal operation of society.  The problem is not South Park or burqas – it’s terrorism.

Here’s what I know:  We hunt down terrorists – they die in battle, they are executed, or they spend the rest of their natural lives in jail.  Pretty soon Islam will reform to the point where it does not produce them.  Behavioral consequences drive philosophy just as much as philosophy drives behavior, it just takes patience.

Which brings us back to presidential politics.  Because of that very phenomenon, we need worry less about a candidate’s religion and more about his policy.  Think about it.

Spinning…

Sometimes spin is so obvious that it needs to be pointed out just for giggles.  Consider:

HuffPo trying to spin the unspinnable, and

Michael Gerson trying to make an economic case for Tim Pawlenty.  There are a lot of reasons to like Tim Pawlenty, but economics? Over Romney?  Yeah, that’s giggle inducing.

Hubris…

Look, rescinding Franklin Graham’s invitation to pray at the Pentagon is a no-class move typical of this administration.  But Graham’s response is not doing Evangelicals any good either:

Continuing to escalate his criticisms of President Obama for not restoring Graham’s rescinded invitation to a prayer event at the Pentagon, Graham has warned the president that “millions of Evangelical Christians that voted for Barack Obama in this last election” likely won’t “be at the table next time” because Obama is not giving Graham and his allies their due.

There should be a National Day of Prayer, but Evangelical hubris is a large part of why we are in this mess.  When they got exclusionary over Mormons, they almost guaranteed this kind of stuff.  Mormons weren’t going to protest, but you knew someone would.

It is time for politically active Evangelicals to grow up just a little.  We have got to learn how to build coalitions and think more broadly – it’s not always “us against them.”  Or more prudently, sometimes what helps us, also helps them.  First we had to beat Hitler, therefore we allied with Stalin.  Eventually we beat Stalin too.  First we need a National Day of Prayer at all, eventually people will figure out whose prayers are best.

Raw Bigotry…

One letter writer to the MormonTimes in re Beck/Liberty University:

“The real question is how the radical LDS right wing is going to live with the evangelical radical right. I think this is the craziest conflict on the globe. Both sides trying to stake out their pure version of the cultural right. Maybe, we LDS ought to rethink our infatuation with that line of political thought. The telestial kingdom will freeze over before Mormons are accepted by ‘those people.’ Just ask Mitt Romney.”

There is some serious wisdom there.

And the next time anybody talks about “right wing hate speech, consider this (forwarded by a reader) from The San Fran Chron:

This is the good news: many of the world’s most powerful, hurtful, wretched old men will soon be dead.

Does that sound cruel? Unkind? I might be OK with that. In fact, I might very much be in the mood to not really mind at all if a whole slew of these nefarious creatures of sociospiritual corrosion were to, say, spontaneously combust, or be struck by lightning, or perhaps accidentally fall into a giant, roiling vat of Astroglide and turpentine and a million duplicitous prayers. Whoops! Sorry, Monsignor!

[...]

Because here we find a very bizarre cluster of powerful, pale, sickly old men who are now sliding back into view thanks to a new documentary, “8: The Mormon Proposition,” the trailer for which is available for your deep sighing and open cringing right now.

While I have no idea as to the overall quality of the film itself, the trailer alone seems to reveal a fine-looking flick that, at bare minimum, details just how ruthlessly, how hatefully the Church of Latter Day Homophobes worked to terrify and intimidate its own uninformed followers into funding — to the tune of nearly $18 million — one of the most detestable pieces of legislation in California’s history, not to mention the church’s own “secretive, decades-long crusade against gay rights.”

You know, I am struck by the fact that only on the left is perceived hatred considered justification for the real thing.  Those of us on the religious right operate by an entirely different paradigm – something about “return no man evil for evil….”

Lowell adds . . .

By the way, Senator Robert Bennett has been ignominiously denied nomination, not in a Republican primary, but by Utah’s caucus-style GOP nominating convention. Like most caucuses, the Utah process produces some pretty extreme results. This was one of those occasions.

But why is Bennett’s public political execution relevant to this blog? Because it gives rise to yet another of Lowell’s Political Prophecies: First, the hard-right in Utah is going to start attacking Romney because he supported Bennett, even coming into Utah to campaign for him. Romney has stated publicly that voting for TARP was the right thing to do, even though he’s not happy with the execution. Bennett’s support for TARP was cited by the ultra-conservative oracles in Utah as a major reason that the 3-term Republican senator had to go. Second, the Utah hard right’s attacks on Romney will give cover to Romney opponent who oppose him because of his faith, or who want to take advantage of discomfort over his faith (think Mike Huckabee). They will simply say, “Hey! Even Romney’s fellow Mormons in Utah think he’s a RINO!” It is certainly not a bad thing that people will be talking about Romney’s position on the issues, and not about his religion, but I don’t think positions will be the real reason that a lot of those folks oppose the man.

John chimes back in…

We sometimes write our Monday posts “thorough the weekend.”   That Lowell was being prophetic above, we both agreed Saturday night, but neither of us knew it would come to pass as soon as Sunday morning.  Consider the NYTimes:

Mr. Bennett, 76, was outmatched in delegate votes by two relative newcomers despite an enthusiastic endorsement and convention speech from Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and local Utah hero, and a political pedigree of deep Mormon roots and public service.

And Politico:

Bennett was dogged by his support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program and for co-sponsoring a healthcare bill with Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.). To help make his case to the 3,452 delegates, he even tapped the star power of former Massachusetts governor – and fellow Mormon – Mitt Romney to make a final pitch.

Well, there you have it – the line has been drawn and now it will just be up to Romney’s opposition to walk it.

But typically, the national press does not tell the whole story.  Consider this from the SLTrib:

Lee’s campaign said it was damaged by a controversial mailer that showed up in delegates’ mailboxes on Friday. It pictured Lee’s picture over the LDS temple and Bennett’s picture over the Capitol, questioning “Which candidate really has Utah values?”

It was sent by a group calling itself “Utah Defenders of Constitutional Integrity,” and was apparently sent from Cleveland, but there is nothing else known about the group. Both Lee and Bennett’s camp denied having any hand in the mailing and Lee condemned the attack ad during his speech.

“Some falsely accused me of accepting illegal contributions. Others that appeared to support me are patently offensive,” he said, denying that they were in any way connected to his campaign.

But Lee’s spokesman, Dan Hauser, said before the final vote that there was no question the Mormon mailer hurt the campaign.

“If you asked us in January if we would be happy with the position we’re in, absolutely,” he said. “Do I think we lost some votes because of the mailers? Absolutely. And I think it was a slow drip over the week of all the false attacks. It was just drip, drip, drip.”

Michael Richards of Herriman who is LDS and a Mike Lee supporter said the ad was “repulsive. “

“It’s not a religious thing. This is not about religion… it’s about who supports the Constitution,” he said.

Normally, we would attack such a thing on its face – playing the religion card in this fashion is repulsive.  But consider it in light of Romney’s plight in this mess as described by Lowell.  “The Mormon Card” was played not against Bennett, but against Bennett’s opposition, regardless of who played it, and yet MSM is trying to use it against Romney who endorsed Bennett.  Talk about trying to have your cake and eat it too!

But I think the best take on the Bennett thing came from Robet Costa in The Corner:

Seeing Romney out on a limb, daring to debate the tea party about the future of the GOP, is refreshing. Right or wrong, he’s at least showing that he can lead.

And just a little more from Lowell:

Amid the chorus of glee over Sen. Bennett’s needlessly ignominious  political execution, let me sound a discordant note:  This event is more about Utah’s caucus-style political nominating system than about Bennett’s supposed sins.  Apparently the Senator’s worst misdeed was to vote for TARP.  Is anyone really suggesting that vote as a basis for throwing out not only Bennett, who is Utah’s Mr. Republican, but the rest of the GOP senators?

In Utah’s caucuses,  the political parties’ base rules the nominating process more than in just about any other state.  Before we get too excited about the significance of Bennett’s ouster as an expression of conservative outrage, let’s note that Representative Jim Matheson now faces a primary.  Matheson is the lone Democrat in Utah’s delegation.  His sin?  Voting against Obamacare.   In Utah’s caucus system, being insufficiently liberal can get you in as much trouble as not being conservative enough.  I like this comment:

Much in the same fashion as what Utah Conservatives accomplished against Senator Bennett, an ideological sense of pureness has overcome Utah Liberals, who want to remove their one chance of representation in Washington, because he isn’t big government enough…. if the Republican Caucus wants to emerge a stronger and healthier coalition come November, I would suggest a gameplan for maintaining a sense of Ronald Reagan’s big tent and his 80 percent friend, not a 20 percent foe approach. If we lose the Ronald Reagan Republican formation, than our movement will shrivel and die, especially if we don’t reinstate the Eleventh Commandment of Republican politics.

Incumbents might be safe in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina and other states, but in Utah they better watch out, because the ideologues are coming for them!

Writers in the blogosphere (including yours truly) often criticize our national political class.  Well, Bennett is one of the good guys: decent, thoughtful,  conservative, classy, and well-spoken.  The hard-core right-wingers in Utah who, amid their gloating, are calling Bennett a RINO have a very heavy lift in winning that argument.  Others, like Dan Riehl, wonder whether the tea partiers are controlling the situation quite as much as they think they are.

The tea partiers are mostly a great and important phenomenon, but excesses are excesses, no matter who commits them, and  the Bennett episode was one.  Excuse me if I don’t join in the celebration.

©2010 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Our friends at EFM attended and campaigned for Romney with the attendees.  Their report on the result quotes Carl Cameron:

As Carl Cameron said to start his report: Mitt Romney won the straw poll and wasn’t even here.

Which is true, and very interesting.  Ed Morrisey pointed out some other interesting facts:

Update: It’s been pointed out in the media filing center that both Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee spent some money to campaign here.  Huckabee has a booth in the exhibitor hall; Palin’s team put out caribou beef jerky with a plug for Palin attached in the main ballroom on Friday.  Romney also made a big push with piggy banks and advertising boards.  For Huckabee, the outcome has to be a big disappointment.

Update II: It’s also worth pointing out that Romney didn’t speak at the SRLC, citing a conflict with his book tour, while Palin, Paul, Gingrich all made appearances.  Huckabee didn’t speak at this event, although he did have a booth here.

It should be pointed out; however, that the “Romney booth” was our friends at EFM (who got some coverage from CBS) – not a campaign thing, just some supporters doing their own thing.  Huckabee’s numbers were so low that “big disappointment” is a bit of an understatement.  D.B. Grady at The Atlantic also had a very interesting point:

In the end, Romneycare was not an issue delegates at the conference worried about.

That’s important as Lowell and I spent the weekend discussing how we think Romney needs to “message” health care because we have been worried about it based on Rich Lowry’s comments from last week.  While the differences between the system in Massachusetts and what Obama just force fed us are significant, they are wonkish and hard to communicate.  But then Lowell and I are pretty wonkish ourselves and therefore prone to over thinking things.

EFM’s David French, quoted in the Atlantic post, thinks Massachusetts health care is not an issue because Romney balanced the state budget before taking it on.  I think it has more to do with how the plan was enacted on a broader canvas.  The Massachusetts plan was done in accordance with the apparent will of the citizens of the state.  There were no protests or Tea Parties, statehouse switchboards were not flooded and there were no special elections where the electorate’s will was made plainly obvious.  In other words, Romney acted like a statesman, unlike Obama and his congressional cohorts who acted like a political thugs.

But the most interesting comments came in the comments on Ben Smith of Politico’s post on the results.  As seems to be typical of Politico, the comments are virulently anti-Mormon when Romney is discussed.  The worst from this post I hesitate to repeat, its an old awful joke that everyone has heard, but it is vile and likely to disappear as I used the abuse reporting system concerning it.  Therefore, I repeat it here in the interest of preserving it for the record:

you know what the Mormons say about women Brigham Young

Not to mention, the name given by the person that left this little gem of a comment is “Jesus.”  We have asked our readers before to police comments and I find we must do so again, especially at Politico where this is becoming a pattern.  There is more there, please check it out and use the report abuse system they have.  We have asked our readers before to police comments at very high profile sites like Politico – see our Online Activism page.  We repeat this call.

Sites like Politico cannot be allowed to have this kind of trash in their comments.  Lowell and I cannot possibly keep up with all of it.  There is little we can do about “Huck’s Army” and dedicated anti-Mormon web sites, but that’s not Politico.   It is apparently Politco’s policy that they do not police comments, they leave it up to their readers, so we need your help in doing what Politco seems unwilling to do.  They also have a bulletin board for discussion that we have not even begun to look through.  If this stuff ends up on blog post comments, I can only imagine what might be in there.

A search through the site could find no comment policy statement of any sort.  We recommend that our readers not only actively review comments on the site, but write to Politico and urge them to formulate, post, and enforce a policy regarding derisive and bigoted comments.  I cannot imagine “n-word” jokes would survive there, even without reader input, but then you never know.

It is; however, nice to know that some people are learning.  This article about a congressional race in Mississippi has this to say about one of the candidates:

Tegerdine is Mormon, a growing and very conservative element in the Republican Party that garnered greater acceptance by evangelical GOPers following the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. A number of Mississippi Republican leaders embraced Romney including then Rankin County Republican Party Chairman – now Third District Congressman – Gregg Harper.

And before we leave Romney altogether, what do you think of the comments on this Chris Cilizza post?  Romney for RNC chair?  What a waste of talent!  Even if he was not considering a presidential run, there are a lot better ways to put his talent to work than that.

Mormon Reporting and Problems With Associations

Get Religion reports on some reporting concerning the opening of a Mormon Temple in British Columbia.  They report, quite accurately, that the story seems more interested in stirring up Mormon controversy than it does in simply reporting on the opening of the Temple.  I really wish the press would get over this.

But they show no tendencies, which is why the Republican convention in SLC would be a loser if Romney is the nominee.   “reporting” would be rife with conspiracy speculation should that come to pass.  We just don’t need the association.

Talking about associations we do not need leads invariably to Glenn Beck.  The Daily Kos pointed out last week that Beck is associating Romney with socialism.  Beck need s a new schtick.

All while there are reminders of bigger fish to fry.

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