Or is hate speech fine if directed at Mormons?

This comment posted at Chris Cillizza's blog, more than six hours ago:

Chris, Take a vacation! Romney and McCaine are the two LEAST likely guys to become Presidsent I can imagine. You know I detest the "religious" right wingnuts, especially Dobson and his crowd of pseudo-christian nazis, but he came out and said that under no circumstances would he vote for nor support McCaine. ANd you know what a bunch of mindless robots all those Fundimentalists are....so kiss McCaine goodbye. As for Romney, he's a Mormon! Now, I don't know how many Mormon's you know, but every one I have run into is a crook. Nad please don't accuse me of over generalizing. I really mean, all of them are crooks and swindlers, con artists, nutjobs, and lunies. If Mormon's are in the automtive industry you can count on the fact that they roll odometers back (and I have personal experience, having WITNESSED this). If they're in construction, they will swindle anyone, even fellow poorer Mormons, out of their land and homes. These are the scum of the earth sorts. Couple that with the fact that Romney has surrounded himself with the very worst of the Bush and Swiftboat nutjobs and you cannot rationally give Romney a chance in h*ll of winning anything. These two birds are DOA and past their spoilage date. Talk about someone with a chance.

Posted by: MikeB | January 15, 2007 01:18 PM

It may be the policy of the WaPo to allow bigoted comments to remain published on its website, but I suspect that most bigoted comments are quickly deleted.  It seems to me that anti-Mormon bigotry just doesn't register with MSM in the way that, say, anti-black racism does, or anti-Semitic screeds.

In the course of writing the Romney book, I was struck again and again on how many folks in the American public square are not only unfazed by anti-Mormon bigotry, they often don't even notice it.  Jacob Weisberg's bigoted assault on Romney of a few weeks ago was just one example among many I have seen or heard.  Substitute "Catholic" or "Jew" for "Mormon" in either the comment above or Weisberg's piece, and you'll get the picture.