“Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” – Mike Huckabee, New York Times
By the way, the answer is yes. To put it in more understandable parlance, it would have been equivalent to him asking, “Don’t Eastern Catholics create icons?” with the implication that there is something odd about that. Many will go ahead and assume the answer is ‘no’ to the question. For a media that has been begging for Huckabee’s opinions about Mormonism, they sure seem to be able to turn faux offense awfully quickly when he actually brings up a Mormon belief in an innocuous question. Of course this campaign season has been all about the odd straddle between concern that a man who holds beliefs in the supernatural might wish to be President and the concern that someone would find a less than 200-year-old minority belief set anything less than on par with Christianity, Judaism or even Islam.
Update: Daniel Larison of Eunomia weighs in on the controversy:
He [Mike Huckabee] has had opportunities to say publicly whether he thought Mormonism was Christian or not, and he demurred. He could have very easily said something else, but chose not to do so. If you find all the talk about Mormonism disconcerting, you really don’t want to get things to the point where Huckabee feels compelled to start answering those questions by labeling Huckabee, pretty much baselessly, as a “sectarian” who is playing “the Mormon card.”
More bizarre yet is Romney’s reaction. The question that Huckabee asked actually reflects Mormon teaching with a reasonable degree of accuracy. (You can say that it takes this view out of context and implies something that the LDS church does not teach, but I think this is a reach.) If, in fact, Huckabee doesn’t know much about Mormonism, his question might reflect something that he has heard over the years and was asking in the natural give and take of conversation. Now you can argue that he shouldn’t have said it, or you can argue that Chafets shouldn’t have included it, but Romney’s reaction doesn’t really make sense unless he finds the tenets of his own religion so embarrassing and strange that the mere mention of them constitutes an “attack” or unless you are a candidate, as Romney is, in need of something, anything, you can use to tear down your opponent.
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