Democrats' senior adviser for religious outreach quits amid "under God" controversy
The Catholic League's William Donohue is no fan of the "religion outreach" leaders for the Democratic Party and the Kerry campaign. Weblog earlier noted that he went too far in painting Mara Vanderslice, Kerry's director of religion outreach, as an extremist. But we've got to admit that the Democrats' new senior adviser for religious outreach, Brenda Bartella Peterson, was an odd choice for the position. As Donohue, The Washington Times, and a few other conservative outlets note, she was part of a interfaith group in February that filed a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court, asking it to remove "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance.

"Are they out of their minds?" Donohue asks rhetorically. "Would they hire a gay basher to reach out to homosexuals?" Peterson's appointment, he said, suggests "that either no one bothers to vet candidates for religious outreach or the elites making the choices are anti-religious."

Now wait a second. Again, Donohue is going way too far, and his "gay basher" comparison is ridiculous. Peterson is, after all, an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and was executive director for the Clergy Network for National Leadership Change (a group whose sole purpose is to rally religious leaders against President Bush's re-election). Her credentials are far deeper than Vanderslice's, who was more pulled into the position with the Kerry campaign simply because she knew where phrases like "least of these" come from. She's not anti-religious. Let's get that straight.

What she is, apparently, is against using ...