Lowell Brown and John Schroeder write the Article 6 blog article6blog.com where they discuss the interface of religion and politics. They began this blog when Mitt Romney was running for the Presidency and their varied outlooks ( Lowell is LDS and John is Evangelical) provided a provocative discussion.     

All weekend long John and I have been reflecting on Friday's Washington Post piece, ‘The Mormons Are Coming!' John found it almost funny (he comments below); I found it both fascinating and revealing.  The reporter, Karl Vick, seems pretty clear-eyed about what is happening.  For example, Vick notes that Proposition 8 likely would not have passed in California without the support provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  He then matter-of-factly adds that some gay marriage advocates on the East Coast are shouting that fact in the streets, calculating that on an issue that eventually comes down to comfort levels , more people harbor apprehensions about Mormons than about homosexuality . [Emphasis added.]

Well.  That makes the point pretty clearly, doesn't it?   Playing on the electorate's fears about a minority religious faith can help you win an election.  It sure worked for Mike Huckabee in Iowa , but no one came right out and said that the way Karl Vick did here.

In a way this is helpful because the tactic is now out of the shadows:

“The Mormons are coming! The Mormons are coming!” warned ads placed on newspaper Web sites in three Eastern states last month. The ad was rejected by sites in three other states, including Maine , where the Kennebec Journal informed Californians Against Hate that the copy “borders on insulting and denigrating a whole set of people based on their religion.”

That language “borders on insulting and denigrating a whole set of people based on their religion.”  You think?

Apply my favorite test for bigotry, which John and I have often used here:  Insert “Jew” or “Muslim,” or even “Catholic” in the above-quoted ad language and ask yourself if the advertisers could ever get away with such a tactic.

Nope, they couldn't, could they?  Vick, to his credit, continues with a clear-eyed view of what is going on:

But the demographics tempt proponents of same-sex marriage : Mormons account for just 2 percent of the U.S. population, and they are scarce outside the West. Nearly eight in 10 Americans personally know or work with a gay person, according to a recent Newsweek survey. Only 48 percent, meanwhile, know a Mormon, according to a Pew Research Center poll.  [Emphasis added.]

So now that we know what's really happening, we get to the real question:  Is that tactic legitimate?   One political expert quoted in the article doesn't address that question, but focuses on the tactic's effectiveness :

“Is it fruitful to use the Mormon bogey?” said Mark Silk, a professor of religion and public life at Trinity College in Connecticut . “My sense is that there aren't great risks to it. Once a religious institution is going to inject itself into a public fight, which the LDS did in a straight-up way, then I think people are prepared to say, ‘Well, okay, you're on that side and we're against you.'”

In other words, once a church takes a position on a public issue, and urges its members to exercise their political rights as voters and citizens to support that position, using that church as a bogey man can be very effective.  No surprise there, and there's nothing unlawful about such a tactic.

To me, however, the real questions are these: Should we as a society sit still for such behavior?  Isn't the Kennebeck Journal's position more consistent with what we've come to call “the American Way ?”  And if we do not stand up against such bigoted political discourse, isn't it a very short step to using any candidate's religion against him or her?

And do we really want to go there as a nation and as a society?

Our reader Carl H. has commented below, and we find his thoughts so useful that we are adding it to the post:

Mollie at GetReligion takes up Vick's article–and the important issues– here,and considers the elephant in the room that only one side of the debate is willing to discuss:

I also find it fascinating that this entire story aims to support the notion that Americans will be less comfortable with Mormons than gays (if forced, somehow, to choose). We learn all sorts of things about the Mormon church in this story — much of it very fairly written. But we never explore whether it's true that the more people know about gay activists, the more comfortable they'll be with them.

Take, for instance, the woman who organized California 's “Meet in the Middle for Equality” march held Saturday in Fresno . Her name is Robin McGehee and she seems by all accounts to be a very nice and capable woman. Here's an absolutely fawning profile of her in the San Francisdo Chronicle from last fall. I sure hope it was written by her mother — it's just that biased. Anyway, she is one of four partners in the raising of her children — two partnered women and two partnered men. I'm sure that what I'm about to write is considered shocking inside the Washington Post … but I bet quite a few people in America think that such a family arrangement is less than ideal. They might even feel more, dare I say, “comfortable” with the Mormon family next door (not that I, again, think this should matter regarding marriage policy). But we never really see any hard-hitting looks at why society considers families led by two parents of opposite sex to be best for children. It's almost considered impolitic to discuss this reality.