Conservatives suddenly want less religion in political discourse

November 3, 2007

On Wednesday night, former Arkansas Gov. and presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee chatted with Bill O’Reilly, and the Fox News blowhard had only one subject on his mind.

O’REILLY: I understand, I understand this, I am on your side. But I also understand that if you say — indicate that you don’t believe that we are descended from primates, then you are going to have a hard time, because they are going to brand you. They are going to brand you and they already have. And I don’t know how you fight that. But I want to get this clear. Do you believe in Adam and Eve? Do you think Adam and Eve were around?

HUCKABEE: Yes. I think they were a real person, Adam and Eve. I have no reason to doubt that.

O’REILLY: But so you believe that God just said, OK, here is the man, I’m going to take his rib, and there is Eve. And then everybody evolved from there.

HUCKABEE: As I said that night with Wolf Blitzer, I do not know how he did it. Honestly don’t know how long it took. Wasn’t there. I could not give you the details. But I just believe he did it. And so, you know, if it turns out that I am wrong, I have lost nothing. If it turns out I’m right, it is a good thing.

It went on and on from there. Adam and Eve, evolution, religious minorities getting into Heaven, school prayer, tolerance for Mormons … O’Reilly didn’t ask a single policy question, choosing instead to focus exclusively on Huckabee’s theological beliefs.

Oddly enough, Hugh Hewitt makes the case that all of this should be entirely off-limits.

…Bill asked the governor if he really believed in Adam and Eve. The answer doesn’t matter to me so much as what the question represents: A huge breach in the previously widely respected understanding that such questions are not asked of presidential candidates and, if asked, politely turned aside as inappropriate in a nation built on the premise that religious tests are unconstitutional in law and that politics is best kept very clear of theological disputes appropriate to church debates and academic settings.

I wrote at length about the dangers of theology as a guide to presidential qualifications and as a subject for close inspection by journalists covering candidates in A Mormon In The White House. One part of the argument was that demands on Romney to explain his LDS beliefs would set evangelicals and Catholics at the top of a very steep, very slippery slope. O’Reilly’s interview questions confirms that my concerns were justified, and the slip down the slope begun.

Hewitt went on throw O’Reilly in with the “MSM,” which I find terribly amusing, and to lump his questions to Huckabee in with “theological inquisitions.”

It’s hard not to appreciate the irony of all this. The right wants the secular media to ask Republicans fewer questions about religion.

As Andrew Sullivan noted, Hewitt has been “one of the main architects of turning the GOP into a sectarian, fundamentalist organization, and demanding adherence to a set of religiously-based propositions as a condition of being a GOP nominee. Now, of course, he needs a Mormon to enforce theoconservatism, doctrinal issues are suddenly verboten. Alas, they’re not. You fuse politics with religion, you have to live with the consequences.”

If Hewitt and other conservatives want to take theological questions off the table entirely, I’m delighted. It’s a shame they’re a little late in arriving at this conclusion, though, since they’re the ones who broke down the door in the first place.

All I can say is “Thank God they want religion out of politics”.

If only our founding fathers had been so wise…….

  • Dear me, could it be the bed Mr. Spewitt made for himself is full of nails?

    Tough shit. Spew highlights one of the reasons I don’t mind the frothing of the Talevan as much as I used to. The more they talk, the more time they spend in front of the cameras the more they nauseate the average person. They’ve become an embarrassment and a dead weight to the ReThuglican Party (much like GWB), but the GOP has gotten so venal and stupid no one dares tell them to take a hike. I think an honest historian will look back at this time and say the christianists killed the GOP.

    I think Huge is aware of this too, but because he’s a hack and a coward even he can’t say “Boy, courting Das Base was a huge mistake, the GOP should avoid them like herpes.” Instead he has to blame all this talk about religion on The Librul Media.

    Plus, the more time the Talevangicals and their lackies spend in front of the cameras, the more likely it is they’ll be caught dressed in women’s undies or offering cops cash for sex.

    Popcorn?

  • Andy Sullivan strikes home. The Republicans are feeling really in a dilemma with the Romney v. Giuliani thing and are struggling with what to do. But, they still have time.

    Huckabee said:

    I think they were a real person, Adam and Eve.

    Uh. . . “a” real “person”? Was s/he a dual-spirit / tranny?

    I have no reason to doubt that.

    Uh . . .

  • There’s a difference between pushing a religious agenda into politics and government, and ascertaining something about a candidate’s worldview. At times, the two can cross, as when we ask which candidates don’t believe in evolution. When I hear Huckabee is a creationist, I want to be satisfied that he’s not going oppose the teaching of science, or impede scientific and medical research, that he supports separation of church and state as articulated in the First and Fourteenth Amendments and subsequent Supreme Court rulings.

    I also think it’s perfectly valid to ask about a candidate’s worldview, although I don’t think we’ll get an honest answer from most because they have to pander to the 90% of the electorate who are religious.

    I don’t understand why these Adam and Eve folks never comment on the creation of man and woman on the sixth day in Genesis I, which seems to contradict the creation of Adam on the seventh day in Genesis II, and Eve sometime after. Doesn’t seem like there’s an Adam and Eve at all in Genesis I, just some generic folks who are told to go forth and multiply. That would seem to alleviate the problem of inbreeding somewhat, which has always bothered me. ‘Course you get into that again with Noah, and all the other species, too. But I’m not a student of the Bible.

  • The republican conservatives have drawn themselves into a corner with their hypocrisy.
    “Values voters”…as if neocon conservative religious right voters are the only ones with values. They really mean “their” values.

    “American Family Institute”? What American family would that be. Certainly not mine or most people I know yet we are American families but we disagree with nearly everything this organization stands for.

    “Christianity”? That only means a believe in Jesus as Christ but you can be a Christian and disagree totally with the Bush administration’s policies, and with most of the so called “Christian” leaders in this country.

    Morality is universal and that matters in politics but all the other “religious” type questions are inappropriate and should not be a part of our political process. The only time it should be an issue is if it interferes with the candidates ability to perform his duties…Like saying he must follow the bible rather than the constitution.

  • Hey! if they want to say that they believe in WMD apples and talking snakes, let them.
    The more they expose their tiny brains the more people with get out and vote against them.

    By the way, since Homo sapiens are primates, why would Huckabee be unwilling to admit that he is human??

    O’Reilly can’t even get his misquote correct, and missed twice in one statement . The usual accusation against evolution is that it claims 1) Homo sapiens descended from monkeys.
    The current scientific belief is that 2) monkeys and primates descended from a common anscestor, probably similar to today’s lemurs.

  • Religion is a divisive force in American and world politics. I would strongly oppose any religious “test” for a political candidate for any office. However, respectfully questioning how a candidate’s religious beliefs might inform his or her decision making and actions is not necessarily out of bounds religious intolerance.

    The US Government cannot eliminate a candidate from running for office because of religion. However, individuals are free to apply any standard of measurement they wish when deciding who to vote for. Romney has stated that he believe the American people want a “person of faith” in the White House. If so, then the details of that faith are open to discussion.

    The LDS church maintains a racist doctrine which teaches that blacks were “less valiant” spirits in what Mormons believe to have been a pre-existence. Church leaders have taught for 175 years that being born with black skin and features (the mark of Cain) was punishment by God for their “less than faithful” actions. Based on this doctrine, the Mormon Church prohibited blacks from holding the LDS Priesthood until 1978 when it lifted the ban following tremendous public pressure including a threat to revoke their tax exempt status.

    Romney has publicly stated that he is not a “cafeteria” Mormon who picks and chooses which doctrines he will accept. Romney was 31 years old at the time the Church lifted the ban which means that for a significant portion of his adult life he accepted his church’s teaching that blacks are inherently inferior.

    Does Romney still believe that he is more “valiant” or “worthy” than blacks and other non-whites by virtue of being born Caucasian? If he didn’t believe that people of color were inferior during his adult life before the ban was lifted, then why did he remain a member – tacitly supporting the ban and its doctrinal underpinnings? Why did he support church leaders who repeatedly taught black inferiority as doctrine? Did he counsel members to not accept this church teaching when he was a church missionary, bishop or stake president? Did he publicly criticize or renounce any of the racist statements made by his church leaders? Did he lobby his church leaders to disavow the doctrine and change their teaching?

    Please note that while the church has changed its policy of prohibiting blacks from holding its priesthood, it has never renounced the doctrine that led to the ban in the first place. It has never disavowed or removed from the church cannon the scripture that the doctrine is based upon (i.e. Book of Abraham). It has never renounced or apologized for racist statements made by its leaders. It is interesting to note that while nearly 30 years have passed since the ban was lifted, not a single black face appears in the upper echelons of Mormon church leadership.

  • O’REILLY: I understand, I understand this, I am on your side. But I also understand that if you say — indicate that you don’t believe that we are descended from primates…

    ??????? As Marnie states above, humans *are* primates. I might make an exception for O’Reilly, however.

    Anyhow, more shades of inane (ie, focusing on stuff that is not relating to policy) interviews (as Hannah Storm’s with the Kucinichs) by people who are hacks, not true journalists.

  • This is from the Wikipedia page about April Fools’ Day:

    Alabama Changes the Value of Pi: The April 1998 newsletter of New Mexicans for Science and Reason contained an article written by physicist Mark Boslough claiming that the Alabama Legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi to the “Biblical value” of 3.0. This claim originally appeared as a news story in the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.

  • Spew Hewitt is the tip of a new iceberg; the religious wingnuts are threatening the GOP frontrunner, and now the first counterstrike has occurred. Give this a few more weeks—maybe even until the end of the year—and we’ll likely see more of this. Too many within the GOP rank-&-file are fanatical anti-Mormon evangelicals; that takes out Smitten Romney. Too many won’t look at McCain, and nearly all of them are decidedly anti-Paul. UnAware Fred is—well, “unaware.” He makes the classic Reagan mid-morning nap look like a Rambo “kill everything” scene.

    This thing’s going to turn into a RooDeeFest—and Hewitt’s going to start pummeling those in the Party coalition who are the greatest threat to RooDee:

    The Religious Right.

  • Well having been raised a Mormon myself, I’d like to take this opportunity express a note of personal gratitude to Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church, for having dreamed up a theology so far-fetched that even a reasonably intelligent 12-to14-year-old, having learned the basic principles of critical thinking and applied them conscientiously them to the question, would have to conclude it was all in fact nothing more than an elaborate con job. That experience really gave me the intellectual tools at a rather early age to discern that pretty much all other religious mythology is in fact equally absurd and my life has been much richer for it. So thank you, Joe and thank you, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I really owe you one for that.

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