David Mazel emailed me a link to this column by Robert Novak, which discusses Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and the fact that a lot of evangelical Christians won't vote for him because he's a Mormon. Novak writes:
Romney is well aware that an unconstitutional religious test is being applied to him, but he may be seriously minimizing the problem's scope as limited to relatively few fanatics.
This is nonsense. The constitution forbids religious tests for public office, which means no official eligibility requirement. For example, many states at the time had laws requiring that legislators had to be Christians, or trinitarians, or members of a particular church. The constitution forbids that. But it absolutely does not forbid - for crying out loud, how could it? - an individual voter from taking into account a person's religion when deciding who to vote for.
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So was Novak concerned when Bush pimped his religious beliefs to try to court the evangelical vote? I'm sure there were people who based their vote on his beliefs.
Wow. There are people Bob Novak considers to be religious fanatics. I thought he was a member of Opus Dei?
That's a mild misunderstanding of Article VI compared to this one.
What could he have possibly been thinking? He thinks there are (unenforcable) rules that tell people how they can vote?
Like the whole "war on Christianity" thing this boils down to people's inflated egos, surely? They assume that a law which is created to control the government is aimed at them personally.
Novak couldn't care less about the Constitution, or the rights it enshrines. Every article by him that I've ever read has the same single concern: how best to bash non-right-wingers under the circumstances of the day. That's all he cares about, all he's paid for, and the only reason he's taken seriously as a commentator.
Raging Bee, that's the reason a lot of people don't take him seriously as a columnist.
Novak has never been confused with a constitutional scholar, but this is beyond stupid. Perhaps Bob should advise Romney to take these "prominent, respectable Evangelical Christians" to court! I smell constitutional crisis.
I don't think Novak is writing so literally. I think the blogger is being very picky, and not analyzing the article carefully enough. Novak is criticizing the internal political apparatus of the Republican party, which has evolved historically peculiar religious barriers to candidancy. This criticism by Novak falls in line with similar criticisms being made lately by other republicans about the influence on protestant evangelical religion in the party's affairs (for example, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec06/faith_10-05.html )
He may be using unconstitutional as a metaphor for unamerican, or anti-constitutional, saying that people within the republican party who are making an issue of the candidate's religion are not heeding the ideas behind the constitution. I don't think he is trying to make a legal argument that the candidate's constitutional rights are being violated, or that people, or political parties, can't (as opposed to shouldn't) consider a candidate's religion affiliation in casting their vote for him.
Novak really isn't stupid. It's fair to argue about the words he's using being equivocal, but I wouldn't try to go further in that. He's only a columnist. He doesn't have an infinite amount of space to convey his meaning, so maybe he relies on too much metaphor. But I get a completely different meaning from his words than this blogger.