Huckabee's Religious Beliefs Are Just as Wacky as Romney's, So Why Should We Care?

I truly cannot begin to express how profoundly exhausted I am with election stories about religion, in no small part because they are getting sillier and sillier--and this is surely the silliest yet:

Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, asks in an upcoming article, ''Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?''

Are you fucking kidding me?

It's bad enough that presidential candidates are debating the finer points of theology in the first place, but that the debate is supposed to prove who would make a better President of the United States is manifestly preposterous. We have lost the plot, people.

Listen, I don't give a shit if a politician is a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Pagan, a Zoroastrian, a Scientologist, a Pastafarian, or a worshipper of the Great Pumpernickel Loaf from the Eighth Dimension of the Planet Zorgon. All I ask from the people who want my vote is that they not attempt to legislate their personal spiritual beliefs or pen asinine resolutions proclaiming their belief system to be Teh Greatest in Teh Universe!!11!!!--or even "one of the great religions of the world," because you'll never convince me in a million years that a government overtly sanctioning such feelings of supremacy has nothing to do with despicable shit like "Happy Hanukkah" eliciting a beating.

I'm an atheist; I'm married to an atheist; I've got friends who are atheists; atheists contribute to this blog; I also have family members who are Christian; I've got friends who are Christian and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and Pagan; religious people contribute to this blog--and the one thing on which all of us agree is that religion doesn't belong in politics, because all of us are smart enough to have long ago discerned the basic freakin' concept that religion, no less one very precise manifestation of one specific religion, is not the singular genesis of morality. No one's got the market cornered on morals.What someone believes has only the capacity to convey about them that they believe that thing. Saying "I'm a Christian" or "I'm agnostic" or "I'm a Sikh" says nothing about a person's intrinsic character, despite what plenty of people who wear each of those labels (and others) would have us believe. Whether one believes that Jesus and Satan were respectively God's son and a fallen angel, brothers, gay lovers, or characters in a fairy tale shouldn't serve as a substitute for the collective quality of a person established by actions; what one believes does not equal who one is.

So it doesn't really matter a fig to me whether Romney believes Jesus and Satan are brothers; I still know he's a disingenuous, opportunistic, integrity-challenged dodo. That Huckabee is trying to make it an issue only confirms that he is a brainless, ethically-impaired gobshite, hiding behind his religion because he's got nothing else to offer.

Their respective religious beliefs didn't figure at all in those calculations.

UPDATE: For more on the Huckabee/Romney religion feud, click here.