New York Times editor calls for tougher questions for religious GOP candidates, sparks 'hailstorm'

On Sunday, New York Times outgoing executive editor Bill Keller asked the following question in a

On Sunday, New York Times outgoing executive editor Bill Keller asked the following question in a column: "If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him?" Keller says he wouldn't dismiss the candidate outright, but would "certainly want to ask a few questions." For Keller, the same goes for presidential candidates with religious affilitations.

As one might expect, his column, "Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith," set off a "hailstorm of online criticism among religious bloggers and conservative activists," according to Dan Gilgoff of CNN's Belief Blog.

Michael Medved called it a "wildly controversial column."

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby added, In 2007, a prominent Florida televangelist named Bill Keller condemned Mitt Romneys religion ...If you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan! ... that was ugly, offensive, and intolerant. So was another diatribe about religion, published by a different Bill Keller last week.

Among other things, Keller wrote that "Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a 'cult' and that many others think is just weird," and "Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are both affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity," while "Rick Santorum comes out of the most conservative wing of Catholicism — which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction."

Keller argues that the GOP candidates vying for the Presidency should be asked tough questions regarding their faith, especially since many of the potential presidential candidates are affiliated with "churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans."

Keller continues:

"I do want to know if a candidate places fealty to the Bible, the Book of Mormon (the text, not the Broadway musical) or some other authority higher than the Constitution and laws of this country. ... I care a lot if a candidate is going to be a Trojan horse for a sect that believes it has divine instructions on how we should be governed."

Keller followed his column with a blog posting of the questionnaire he sent the candidates. The questionnaire consists of nine general questions, and specific questions for Romney, Huntsman, Bachmann, Perry and Santorum.

A prominent writer for getreligion.org, Mollie Ziegler, actually gasped when she read Keller's column. "Considering I've been reading dozens of religion stories a day for years, it's hard to surprise me," Ziegler wrote, "I'm not saying I haven't heard these types of comments uttered against religious believers, be they Pagan or Mormon or Catholic. And there's even a counter-Jihad movement that says similar things to what Keller has said, only about Muslims. But it's not like Pamela Geller is given space in the New York Times to share her views about creeping Sharia. Far from it."

Ziegler was so surprised at Keller's piece that she wrote, haf-jestingly, that Keller's column must be an attempt at satire — "If the piece isn't satire, why would he claim that 'many Americans' view Catholicism, Protestant Christianity and Mormonism as 'mysterious or suspect'? Does he have any concept of what percentage of Americans fall into one of those three categories? Of course he does. It's clearly satire," she wrote. "Why would (Keller) traffic in the type of crude stereotypes about Mormons that result in condemnation from liberals?"