The decision of the House leadership to allow a vote on Rep. Bart Stupak's robust pro-life amendment is, of course, bad news for pro-choicers, and a big win for the Catholic bishops, who played hardball and are now on top. But it confronts House Republicans with an interesting dilemma. They can vote en masse for the amendment, get it in the bill they hate, and thereby improve the bill's chances of passage by depriving themselves of a critical talking point and bringing on board the USCCB and some staunch pro-life Blue Dogs.

Under the circumstances, you wonder whether the GOP leadership will contrive some way of preventing passage--such as by arranging for some members not to vote, or sending signals that such pro-choice members as there may be should vote their consciences. Perhaps it's no accident that, as Gilgoff notes, the Family Research Council has not used abortion as the basis for its opposition to health care reform. Maybe they know something.

I'm going to Montreal tomorrow morning for a few days among the religionists at the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting. No computer (don't ask), so posts will be few if any. Back Tuesday. A good weekend to all.

They have 20 parishes in the UK, and claim 400,000 members worldwide. Maybe this is all there is to it. Much ado about precious little.

Taglit-Birthright is the operation the sends young Jews on free trips to Israel in order to firm up their Jewish identity and assure the "continuity" of the tribe. To that end, it mounts programs for alumni of the trips--via Birthright NEXT. And next up on a Birthright NEXT-sponsored program in New York is Gordon Robertson, son of Pat Robertson and current CEO of the family biz, CBN. And, as the Jewish Week Forward [sorry, Week] reports, someone who promotes the idea that Jews can believe in Jesus as the Messiah and still be Jews.

OK, so Robertson is scheduled to talk not on the theology of Jewish identity but on whether evangelicals are "more fervent Zionists than American Jews." Nanny-nanny-boo-boo. But like, I'd be real surprised if the Birthright people, or the Jewish organizations that have clasped it to their bosoms, would include Jesus-believing Jews within the Pale of Continuity.

Keeping young Jews away from evangelicals is not the point. Whatever one says about John Hagee, for example--take John Hagee, please--he's earned the enmity of some of his co-religionists by effectively embracing the doctrine that Jews possess a still valid covenant with God and therefore should not be the object of evangelism. But giving a platform to a promoter of Messianic Judaism? Please.

As you can see, the new issue of Religion in the News leads with the notorious C Street house, which figures in both the editor's column on The Family and Marie Griffith's examination of L'Affaire Sanford. Andrew Walsh reviews the Tiller murder blame game, not without tough words for the (who us?) pro-life community. On the Middle Eastern front, Molly Fitzgerald assesses the warm reception for Obama's Cairo speech; Babak Rahimi reports from Tehran on the Iranian protests; and Ron Kiener and Sarina Roffé offer outsider and insider looks at the Syrian-Jewish graft-and-money-laundering scandal.

Next, Christine McMorris takes on the horror story of child abuse by religious orders in Ireland. Andrew Manis does a number on the shrinking Southern Baptists. Frank Kirkpatrick makes sense of the latest Episcopalian resolutions. And Andrew Walsh (again) tells you what nobody else has about religion in the Michael Jackson send-off. Knock yourselves out.

Over on the Religion Dispatches blog, where religious progressives go to shake hands with each other, there's a little excitement about some research purporting to show that all that fuss about the God Gap was overdone. As Candace Chellew-Hodge enthuses:

A new study from the University of Florida may just be the amplification of our voice that we need. It confirms that there is a growing religious left in this country and dispels the "God gap" theory "that white religious Christians are conservative and more likely to vote Republican, said UF researcher Kenneth Wald."

Then along comes Pastor Dan Schultz, also enthusiastic:

It wasn't until I read about this study that this made sense, but it's precisely the communal faith of mainline Protestant denominations that makes me caution political observers about writing them off as irrelevant. It's true that mainliners are a relatively small chunk of the population--about 12-15%, compared to roughly 25% each for Catholics and Evangelicals--but as the study points out, the communal ideal cuts across denominational lines to some extent.

Unfortunately, however, Chellew-Hodge and Schultz are relying  on last week's press release from UF. Had they looked at the actual paper by Wald, Stephen Mockabee of the U. of Cincinnati and David Leege of Notre Dame (given last September at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, and available here under the title "Is There a Religious Left?"), they would have realized that there's a lot less to its God Gap critique than the release suggests.

After a hiatus of I don't know how many weeks, the comments function has been restored to this blog. So feel free to comment away.

The recipe for GOP success is a return to the Gingrich days of the 1980s and early 1990s, with Reaganesque candidates like Virginia's Bob McDonnell hiding their social conservatism under a bushel as social conservatives mobilize quietly behind the scenes. My guess is that the much touted "war within the GOP" will be smaller than advertised. In these times, the hard-eyed guys in the party will succeed in persuading their candidates that the economy and big government are the issues to run on. In New York 23, Deirdre Scozzafava may have been center-right in the New York Assembly, but on the hot-button issues of abortion, same-sex marriage, and the stimulus package, she was beyond the national Republican pale. In the GOP, her kind is almost non-existent as it is.

Mainers' rejection of same-sex marriage--combined with the success of Washington State's expanded domestic partnership law--takes some of the heat off the Obama administration and its congressional allies on gay rights. With voters "not yet ready" to go all the way, there's reason to continue the slow-walk on DADT and  DOMA.

Overall, the God Gaps--the preference of the most religious for Republicans and the least religious for Democrats--are alive and well.

Vito Lopez, the capo di tutti capi of the Democratic Party in Brooklyn, is currently the beneficiary of robo-calls by Nicholas DiMarzio, the capo di tutti capi of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, urging every registered voter in City Council District 34 to support Lopez.

 Why City Council District 34, when Lopez, who's not exactly in political trouble (and not even running this year), represents the 53rd state assembly district?

Well, City Council District 34 is represented by someone Lopez wants to get rid of; namely, council member Diana Reyna, in favor of a new protégée, Maritza Davila. The reason, as NYT's Michael Powell lays it out, is that Reyna, along with Rep. Nydia Velasquez and local nonprofit housing groups, has been opposing Lopez over rezoning a little 31-acre parcel of land known as the  Broadway Triangle. (It's a bitter dispute, pitting Latinos against Hasidic Jews--Lopez is mostly Italian.) The opponents have been suggesting that Lopez earned DiMarzio's love by switching positions and killing a bill that would have extended the statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse lawsuits. And that, in return, the bishop got rid of a priest as head of a local housing group who had annoyed Lopez by opposing the rezoning.

The dispute prompted Msgr. Kieran Harrington, DiMarzio's consigliere (see  Hagen, Tom), to opine in a column in the diocesan newspaper that Mss. Reyna and Velazquez had disrespected his boss. He explained to Powell that the robo-calls were just to "thank Vito who has taken the greatest grief for helping us." The story ends with a late-breaking Harrington quote that unfortunately didn't make it into the online version:

In a measure of how heated this election has become, Monsignor Harrington called a reporter back late on Sunday and accused two of the diocese's priests in Bushwick of supporting Ms. Reyna and fomenting criticism of the diocese.

"Canonically, a priest is not supposed to be involved in partisan politics and it creates a problem for us," he said. "Some of these priests are really renegades."

And we know what happens to renegades in the Diocese of Brooklyn. Canonically, of course, a bishop can do as he damn pleases. Hey, Times! Save that kicker!

Follow: Over on dotCommonweal, Paul Moses, who used to ply the religion beat for Newsday, notes that Bishop DiMarzio has rather enthusiastically--in a full-page, color ad in the diocesan newspaper--endorsed Mayor Michael Bloomberg for reelection. (Along with a picture of the two standing together in Yankee Stadium, the ad reads, "MIKE BLOOMBERG: PROTECTING NYC'S CATHOLIC SCHOOLS. FIGHTING FOR US.") Moses points out that while Bloomberg is famously pro-choice, DeMarzio, chair of the committee that drafted  the bishops' statement on Catholic voting, wrote a letter to the NYT denyingthe paper's claim that  the statement "explicitly allow[s] Catholics to vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights if they do so for other reasons."

Speaking of which, you wonder how this story is playing across the East River, where the rosy-cheeked new archbishop recently took it upon himself to go after the Times for anti-Catholic bias. Another item for the catalog, Excellency? Welcome to Big Apple media, Tim.