{"id":13464,"date":"2007-11-03T11:50:17","date_gmt":"2007-11-03T15:50:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/13464.html"},"modified":"2007-11-03T11:50:17","modified_gmt":"2007-11-03T15:50:17","slug":"conservatives-suddenly-want-less-religion-in-political-discourse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/conservatives-suddenly-want-less-religion-in-political-discourse\/","title":{"rendered":"Conservatives suddenly want less<\/i> religion in political discourse"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

HUCKABEE: Yes. I think they were a real person, Adam and Eve. I have no reason to doubt that.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, Hugh Hewitt makes the case<\/a> that all of this should be entirely off-limits.
\n<\/p>\n

…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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

It’s hard not to appreciate the irony of all this. The right wants the secular media to ask Republicans fewer<\/i> questions about religion.<\/p>\n

As Andrew Sullivan noted<\/a>, 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<\/i>. Alas, they’re not. You fuse politics with religion, you have to live with the consequences.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}