I understand the, uh, over-sensitiveness of Christians when they believe they are being forced to take their Christianity out of “the public square,” as my good friend Scott Richert avers, but the Huckster’s “floating cross” ad is a vulgar display of I’m-more-Christian-than-you-guys electioneering that is even beyond the pale for Catholic League president Bill Donahue, who is surely no militant secular humanist (or a pagan like me):

“‘The whole idea is to give the appearance of a cross,’ he said, ‘and this is just injecting religion into politics even too far for guys like me.’ Asked if the ad was ‘too much,’ Donahue said it was. ‘Because there’s a pattern here,’ he added. ‘Every other word out of [Huckabee’s] mouth is that “€˜I”€™m Christian.”€™ He’s calling into question Romney’s Mormonism…let people talk about there faith, but don”€™t sell it on your sleeve.’ Added Donahue, ‘Yeah, I believe in freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but don”€™t become a salesman. Don”€™t hawk it like that on the street.’ Donahue concluded, ‘Sell yourself on your issues, not on what your religion is.’”€

The real clincher, however, is that the Huckster doesn’t even cop to utilizing a religious symbol, when the viewer is practically hit over the head with this floating cross: for him to claim that none of his people saw this in preproduction is just an outright lie, as anyone who looks at the ad can clearly see. First he attacks Romney’s Mormonism with some cheap comment about “Don’t Mormons believe that Christ and the Devil are brothers,” and now this: the man is a sanctimonious liar who would be a real danger if he ever manages to get into the White House—not because he’s religious, but because he doesn’t hesitate to use religion in the most vulgar manner possible to achieve his political goals.