In keeping with the right's proud tradition of cynically exploiting tragedy, Tony Perkins blames the media for Sunday's church shootings in Colorado. From yesterday's FRC Action alert:

It is hard not to draw a line between the hostility that is being fomented in our culture from some in the secular media toward Christians and evangelicals in particular and the acts of violence that took place in Colorado yesterday. But I will say no more for now other than that our friends at New Life Church and YWAM are in our thoughts and prayers.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, religious conservatives blamed Katrina on everything from abortion to lack of terrorism preparation, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed 9/11 on abortionists, lesbians, et al., Tom Delay blamed Columbine on depravities ranging from evolution to "working mothers who take birth control pills," and Newt Gingrich says liberalism is responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre, Columbine and Susan Smith drowning her children.

But is it too much to ask Perkins to let a tragedy settle for a few minutes before he cheapens it?

And frankly, these stunts smack of bigotry. At the Values Voters Summit I heard speaker after speaker blame black poverty and violence on individual choice and single parents, but when middle class white people flip out and gun people down, all of a sudden it's the fault of some indirect, nebulous, cultural cause.