Mormons, and Christians, and Cults, Oh My!

Last weekend at a "family values" conference in Washington D.C., Robert Jeffress, a conservative Baptist minister called Mormonism a cult, and then subsequently attempted to dissuade attendees from voting for Mormon practitioner and presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The bigoted comment sparked a great deal of media attention, but much of the real news, since no one really cares what one fundamentalist Baptist pastor says, turned out to be the reaction to the comment, or lack thereof, from other GOP candidates.

According to politicos like Slate's William Saletan, Herman Cain and Rick Perry, who were so quick to jump on the prior week's "N-----head" controversy, should have been stronger in their repudiation of the "cult" comment. Saletan argues that the reason for the lack of a more vociferous renunciation is that it is still generally acceptable to discriminate against Mormonism - that the idea of being repulsed by anti-Mormon bias has yet to be cemented in our collective conscience in the way that racial discrimination has been. Saletan rightly takes his criticism of Cain and Perry a step further by advising us all on the deeper and more profound ethical lesson of this incident.

"The prejudices you need to work on aren’t the ones you recognize in your grandparents’ generation. They’re the one you don’t recognize in your own generation, and in yourself."