Party Above All

Hugh Hewitt, a clever polemicist who knows you have to stay on offense in politics, is calling anyone who questions Mitt Romney’s Mormonism a “bigot.”

Mike Gallagher notes,

As we learn more and more about Mormonism, we are forced to confront the fact that the church clearly has some peculiar and unusual beliefs. If the belief that the Garden of Eden is in Jackson County, Missouri doesn’t get your interest, how about the conviction that people will be gods and goddesses of their own planets in the hereafter? Or the sacred undergarments many Mormons wear, believing in some kind of protection against spiritual or physical harm? And more importantly, how about their belief that God is a person of the flesh and that the Bible needed to be altered and updated by a man named Joseph Smith who was visited by an angel named Moroni in the early 1800’s?

It looks to me like Mormonism is an early example of what we now call a cult, but because it has been around long and has many adherents, we accept it as a religion.

Me, I think you can question any religion, from Christianity and Judaism down to Shirley MacLaine’s latest emissions without being a bigot. They’re all false. They all lack any evidence in this world supporting their mythology.

Hugh Hewitt is, of course, thinking only of what’s good for the Republican Party. He believes Romney has a good chance at being the Republican nominee for President in 2008. Hewitt saw early on that Romney’s Mormonism would produce questions such as Gallagher asks and decided the best strategy would be to label the questioners as bigots the way the New Left calls anyone who questions multiculturalism a racist. Hugh Hewitt is happy to ape the left and degrade the national conversation a little more if it helps to elect a Republican.