Attack on LDS Romney is return to bigotry

On Feb. 12, 2002, Denver Post columnist Woody Paige unleashed one of the most controversial columns in the history of his paper. His article blasted the Winter Olympics then under way as a "massive Mormon marketing scheme," and went on to lampoon The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with a gusto that shocked not just Mormons.

I was reminded of the Paige controversy when I read a piece last month by Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, the online magazine owned by the Washington Post Co. titled simply "A Mormon President? No Way." The Dec. 20 column is, simply put, an exercise in bigotry.

"If he gets anywhere in the primaries," Weisberg declared, "Romney's religion will become an issue with moderate and secular voters — and rightly so." And as if realizing that he has just declared open season on religious belief, Weisberg quickly added: "Objecting to someone because of his religious beliefs is not the same thing as prejudice based on religious heritage, race or gender."

Thus does the left casually open the door to the baldest sort of bigotry, a first cousin of the anti-Catholicism thought buried in 1960, or the anti-Semitism that continues to plague Europe and, of course, the Middle East. The not-so-deft substitution of "religious heritage" for "religion" is supposed, I guess, to protect Jews willing to abandon the outward display of their faith, but for anyone believing in the miraculous of any sort, well, those days of the great tolerance in American politics are over.

Not that he would have the courage to do so, but imagine if Weisberg had assaulted Rep. Keith Ellison's Islamic faith in the same terms, or Sen. Sam Brownback's relatively recent conversion to Roman Catholicism or even Sen. Joe Lieberman's faithful practice of his Jewish faith. Weisberg argues, lamely, that "a few eons makes a big difference," and that the "world's greater religions have had time to splinter, moderate and turn their myths into metaphor." In other words, Weisberg simply assumes that practitioners of these other faiths don't really believe in the miraculous.