BYRON YORK: MSNBC host condemns Romney to Hell.

Bashir’s sermon wasn’t the only Mormon-related message coming from Democrats and their allies in the press. That same day, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer said Romney’s family “came from a polygamy commune in Mexico.” “I am not alleging by any stretch that Romney is a polygamist and approves of [the] polygamy lifestyle,” Schweitzer told the Daily Beast, “but his father was born into [a] polygamy commune in Mexico.”

It is true that Romney’s more distant Mormon ancestors did move to Mexico to escape a U.S. crackdown on polygamy, but it is also true that Romney himself (married 43 years) does not practice polygamy, his father did not practice polygamy, and his grandfather did not practice polygamy. Romney’s great-grandfather Miles Romney was the last polygamist in the line. And, just to point out one of the more unique features of this election, President Obama also has polygamy in his background.

In any event, the general election campaign is only a few days old, and voices on the Democratic side have already made hard-edged statements about Mormonism. Does anyone expect that to change as the campaign goes on?

Nope. Hate and bigotry is all they’ve got left.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

You say that “Hate and bigotry is all they’ve got left”

The problem for them as a strategy is that they are preaching to the choir.

They already have the base; the people who hate, the racists , the religious bigots, are already solidly on Obama’s side.

I have rarely seen such a divide where virtually all the racism and religious bigotry is found on the Left. The Right is made up of people you find at a typical Tea Party rally: well behaved, middle-American, working people who go to church and only want to live their lives in peace and raise their families.

Team Obama will lose, and they lose badly, both in the manner and the magnitude of their loss.

Let’s hope. You get more of what you reward, and America doesn’t need more racism and bigotry.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Andrew Piederer writes:

There is an aspect to this story that hasn’t been covered and has implications for future attempts to use Romney’s Mormonism as an attack vector.

I’m not sure what Martin Bashir was trying to accomplish by citing ‘Mormon’ scripture, but he succeeded in making himself look foolish by getting the citation wrong in the second instance (There is no Nephi 2:34–the verse he is looking for is 2 Nephi 9:34), and completely misunderstanding the context of both citations, which don’t refer to lying as an unforgivable sin worthy of ‘hell-fire’ , but a particularly egregious form of apostasy (becoming anti-Christ).

We see Democrats quoting scripture on a regular basis, and I’ve never quite understood why they do it. It clearly has no authority with the irreligious (mostly Democrat) and for those who are religious, the awkward and–let’s be charitable–‘unconventional’ ways in which scripture is uses, marks them as ignorant and self-serving. Obama’s claims to Christian faith have suffered specifically from his use of scripture, which bear no resemblance to standard exegesis.

The bottom line is, ‘successful’ attacks on Romney’s Mormonism require being actually conversant with Mormon doctrines. Failing that, it’s better to stick with the Seamus the dog stories…

Not that those have worked out so well.