After winning South Carolina’s primary, Newt Gingrich is amping up his operation in Florida, reaching out to evangelical ministries in particular, the AP reports.

Gingrich did quite well with evangelicals and people who said candidates’ religion matters very much to them (presumably there’s some overlap there).

Saturday’s exit polls seem to fly in the face of a Lifeway Research survey that determined “most Americans will be more concerned with a candidate’s policies than his Prophet.”

After his poor showing in S.C. – particularly among evangelicals – Mitt Romney said he’d release his tax returns. But Mike Huckabee says the problem lies elsewhere and suggested that the devout Mormon “ought to address” his faith in a speech and “sort of dismiss it, make it less important.”

Jeopardy star Ken Jennings says Romney’s rise makes he and fellow Mormons uncomfortable. “Why would we want someone as divisive as a politician to be our public face? Weren’t Donny Osmond and Jimmer Fredette doing just fine?” (In a rhetorical twitch left over from his Jeopardy days, Jennings often phrases sentences in the form of a question.)

Rick Santorum, who finished third in South Carolina, is now stumping in Florida with his pal, the Rev. O’Neal Dozier, who says gays “make God want to vomit” and calls the Tea Party “a godly ordained party.”

On Sunday, Dozier said Americans, particularly blacks, will not vote for a Mormon president. “Blacks are not going to vote for anyone of the Mormon faith,” he said. “The book of Mormon says the Negro skin is cursed.”

A growing number of African American pastors in the nation’s capital have embraced the Occupy movement, according to WaPo.

We’ve come to expect big news from the Obama administration on Fridays, so it came as little surprise that HHS announced last week it would not allow a religious exemption to the new rule that employers must provide birth control through their insurance. Catholic officials vowed to fight the rule.

Yesterday was the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Catholics and others are holding their annual vigils and protests in D.C.

Already this year, six anti-evolution bills have been introduced in state legislatures.

The publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times apologized for suggesting that Israel should consider assassinating President Obama.

More than 100 people have been killed in a series of attacks in northern Nigeria, according to the NYT, the deadliest strike yet by the radical Islamist group Boko Haram.

Yr hmbl aggregator,

Daniel Burke