Huckabee's Slip

There's been a lot of dredging of Mike Huckabee's past record and public statements over the past couple weeks, from his belief that AIDS patients should be quarantined, to his signing of a full-page ad stating that women should "graciously submit" to their husbands, to his numerous pardons and ethics complaints. But the one statement that might hurt him the most is this mean-spirited shiv in the back of Mitt Romney.

In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, to be published this Sunday, Huck admitted that he didn't know much about Mormon theology, but did say this: "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

It was innocently phrased, the simple questioning of someone who doesn't know much about Mormonism (despite the fact that Huckabee was a theology student, and has claimed that the experience has given him a leg up on the other candidates in dealing with radical Islam). But there's no doubt that it was designed to scare people about the spooky religious cult of Mitt Romney's. It's completely outside the boundaries of politics, but when you have such a huge subset of the Republican coalition concerned primarily with which candidate can out-Jesus one another, when you have a candidate like Huckabee who touts his support from Tim LaHaye, the author of the Left Behind novels, this is the kind of politics you get.

Romney assailed the comment, saying that attacking someone's religion is going too far, and I agree. Of course, Romney dismissed out of hand having a Muslim in his cabinet, so he's maybe the worst messenger of that message. But I think that this kind of bigotry could actually hurt Huckabee moving forward, maybe not in Iowa but elsewhere.

(By the way, the much scarier revelations in that NYT article were that Huckabee has consulted with bitter-ender neocon Frank Gaffney and thinks Duncan "let's build a plane that can't fly" Hunter would be an excellent Secretary of Defense.)

UPDATE: Huckabee's message for the remainder of the primaries: