Andrew “I mean no disrespect” Sullivan has declared it “Mormon week on the Dish!” To help his audience understand the tenets of the Mormon faith, Andrew has linked to a video done by the highly respected and highly respectful auteurs behind South Park.

I’ve gotten a couple of letters saying I should lay off Sullivan, that he’s an inherently uninteresting topic and that addressing his writings is a) shooting fish in a barrel; and b) boring. Frankly I’m much more concerned about the second charge.

So trust me, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t consider it important. When Romney ran in ’94, one of the reasons he lost was because of the effective anti-Mormom bigotry that the Kennedy campaign and the Boston Globe tirelessly peddled. Now, I firmly believe that when confronted with bigotry, Americans will hold the bigotry’s author in disdain while having sympathy for the bigotry’s target. But if no one puts a label to what’s going on, the bigot can get away with it. That’s what happened in ’94.

So, just in the interest of connecting the dots, Andrew Sullivan doesn’t like Mitt Romney because of their differing positions on gay marriage. Because of the paramount importance of this issue in Sullivan’s mind, no attack is beyond the pale.

I don’t truly believe that Sullivan is very much concerned with Romney’s faith or Mormonism in general. After all, an entire election season went by where Sullivan argued that the Democrats should take over the House and Senate. Apparently, the horror that the Senate Democrats would be led by a Mormon never concerned Sullivan enough to delve into what kind of undergarments members of the LDS Church wear or to run a South Park video explaining Reid’s beliefs to his audience. Yet now that Romney has emerged as a prominent presidential candidate, Sullivan feels the need to investigate the faith and ridicule it.

For what it’s worth, the Boston Globe as an institution is now embarrassed by its role in Romney’s 1994 Senate run. I have no such concerns for Sullivan, who apparently slipped the reach of personal embarrassment quite some time ago.

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