Posted By Stefan Monsaureus

Writing at Salon, Joe Conason discusses the religious intolerance so sadly displayed in recent remarks by leading Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. In the process of pandering to the right wing they imagine to be in control of the Republican party, these two have few qualms in asserting the superiority of faith over reason, and seem to hold the separation of religion and government only in as high a regard as is necessary to protect their own questionable religious beliefs.

But Conason notes that in waving the flag of Christianity, both candidates invite rejoinder on that same subject.

If Romney is going to attack humanists and secularists as “wrong,” then let him explain why they were so far ahead of his church on the greatest moral issues of the past half-century.

As for Huckabee, let him answer a few pertinent questions about his faith, too. Does he actually believe in creationist dogma that insists the planet is less than 10,000 years old, and that humans once walked with dinosaurs? How would that loony idea influence his science policies as president? Is he a believer in “end times” eschatology, which holds that American foreign policy should be shaped by the coming Armageddon in the Middle East?

Finally, Conason makes the oft-overlooked point that although atheists may vociferously and passionately defend their worldview, they have historically shown more tolerance for religion than the other way around.

Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals — including agnostics and atheists — have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader — which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid’s religion.

In fact, where poll after poll shows that a significant proportion (a majority in some cases) of Americans would refuse to vote for an atheist for any public office solely on the basis of their nonbelief, one would be hard-pressed to find an analogous position among freethinkers. But, then, there have never been enough admittedly atheist candidates to make such a position tenable.

Some day. In the meantime, I will address the issue of tolerance further in an upcoming post.