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Firedoglake deploys mockery of Mormons to criticize the Mormon Harry Reid for opposing the the mosque near Ground Zero.

Making the cliché move of anti-Mormon bigots everywhere, Attaturk homes in on the undewear, titling his post "That?s no Sacred Undergarment, it?s 'Depends.'"

It's a very short post. Other than the reference to Reid's interest in reelection ?  that's something we all thought of, right ? there's a question that I take as rhetorical question meant to accuse Reid of inconsistency:

By the way Harry, I imagine you were up front in making sure the Mormon Church didn?t build some sort of Memorial at the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, because that would be, y?know, offensive to the memories of the victims for the same reasons?

You may need to do a little research to feel the bite that criticism. In the implicit analogy, 1. Mormans are to Muslims as the Mountain Meadow Massacre is to the WTC attack and 2. the memorial at the Mountain Meadows Massacre site is to the Mountain Meadows Massacre as the mosque near the WTC site is to the WTC attack.

I don't really see how the analogy holds up. As I understand it ? and please correct me if I'm wrong ? the Mountain Meadows memorial is a monument to the victims of the massacre (which occured in 1857). It was put up by Mormons in recent years, and, though today's Mormons were born long after the event and could not possibly had causal role in the massacre, they nevertheless take it upon themselves to express regret for what happened. Indeed, there is debate among Mormons about whether the apologies have gone deep enough.

An accurate analogy would be if today's Mormons put their efforts into making public statements informing us that they are not the ones who committed the massacre and that the vast majority of Mormons don't advocate doing that sort of thing, and then they wanted to build a place of worship for themselves near the site of the massacre which they want us to honor because of the way they would be making a show of the moderation of their form of Mormonism.

Come on, Attaturk! You can't even picture Mormons doing that, and certainly if they did, there would be screams of horror and disgust!

Full post as published by Althouse on August 17, 2010 (boomark / email).