Dallas Paper's Religion Blog Snickers at Alabama-Iran Parallel

Update (13 Feb. | Ken Shepherd): Tomaso responds here, dismissing the notion that he exhibited any liberal bias. Commenters to his blog post are divided.

Condescending secular elitism isn’t just for the coasts anymore. It can even come from red state Texas.

On The Dallas Morning News’s Religion blog Feb. 12, Bruce Tomaso wrote a post called “Alabama and Iran Have Something in Common.” It stemmed from a recent Gallup poll that asked people around the world, “How important is religion in your daily life?” The poll found, among many other things, that nearly the same percentage of the population of Iran (83 percent) and Alabama (82 percent) said that religion was important to them.

Tomaso thought this was a riot: “Since I've never been to Iran and haven't spent enough time in Alabama to have a well-formed opinion, I refrain from cleverly drawing further comparisons,” he wrote. “But that doesn't mean you wiseakers can't!”

In case readers didn’t get the parallel between the murderous, bigoted, dark-age theocracy and The Yellowhammer State, Tomaso’s post sported photos of Ayatollah Khomeini and George Wallace. It didn’t make clear whether it was comparing the segregationist Wallace or the later, born-again Christian Wallace to Khomeini.

In fairness to Tomaso, Gallup’s own article was titled “What Alabamians and Iranians Have in Common.” In fairness to Gallup, it left the elitist yuks to religion bloggers.

Matt Philbin is managing editor of the Culture & Media Institute.