Earlier today, Mitt Romney got a hand-delivered letter from seventy-some local religious leaders. Plenty of bigwigs signed, including Episcopalians Thomas Shaw and Gayle Harris, Harvard Divinity School's Howard Cox, Don Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, and Lawrence Lowenthal of the American Jewish Committee. The subject: the governor's recent call, in a September 14 speech at the Heritage Foundation, to
ratchet up surveillance of mosques and foreign students.
The signators want a retraction. They accuse Romney of "countenanc[ing] guilt by association and discrimination against whole communties of faith, thus creating a climate in which intolerance and hate crimes can proliferate."
Here's some friendly advice to Shaw, et al: If you really want to stick it to Romney,
shut up.We all know the governor wants to be president. Right now, as he paves the way for an '08 campaign, he needs all the publicity he can muster. And he'll
get it for free, if residents of his home state raise a ruckus every time the governor makes a strategic comment or two. By keeping this story in the news for an extra day or two, the aformentioned religious leaders are basically making an in-kind contribution to Romney's presidential campaign.
Also, I'm
happy to criticize the governor when it's warranted. But is it really, in this particular case? Take another look at Romney's comments as reported by AP, and note the added emphasis:
"Romney made the remarks Wednesday during a speech in Washington at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He referred to the state's 120 colleges and universities and speculated about students who are from countries that sponsor terrorism, asking 'Do we know where they are, are we tracking them?'
He also spoke about gathering intelligence at mosques
'that may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror.''Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping?' he asked. 'Are we following what's going on? Are we seeing who's coming in, who's coming out? Are we eavesdropping, carrying out surveillance on those individuals from places that sponsor domestic terror?'"
Suppose, hypothetically, that an imam at a Boston mosque was inciting anti-western violence. (It
happened in England.) Would we want to know everything possible about what he was saying? Of course. Would wiretapping be appropriate? I'd say so. The problem, obviously, is the vagueness of Romney's phrase. Any mosque
might be teaching doctrines of hate and terror. That doesn't mean they should all be preemptively wire-tapped. But in cases where there's serious cause for concern, the governor may have a point.