Consider the following statement for a moment:
“I would not vote for a man who was Black.”
Aside from a handful of teabaggers, I suspect that most people would recognize this statement as bigotry. Why? The statement implies that all people who belong to the specified category (i.e., Black) are unfit to hold office simply because of their membership in this category. Since the category is irrelevant to this judgment, we have both a falsehood and an unwarranted generalization. This is bigotry, and most people correctly identify it as such.
Now let’s examine the actual quote from the Rev. Billy Graham’s daughter, Anne Graham Lotz:
“I would not vote for a man who was atheist.”
Always Question Authority
One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority. ~ Hitchens
Always Question Authority 
I have already left a reply on the original blog, but since I saw this here first, what the heck:
There are two flaws with this argument.
The first is that racism and bigotry are two different things. A bigot is merely someone who believes in the superiority of their opinions. A bigot may even be right — if you believe that everyone should be equal, and nobody can sway you from this point of view, then you are a bigot, even though you are definitely not racist. So the argument as stated just falls apart through terminology.
But on a deeper, less formal level, there is a very important distinction to be drawn. Prejudice is wrong when it is based on factors beyond the control of the victim, as it is with racism or sexism. Nobody can choose their ethnicity or their gender, after all, and so it is wrong to judge people on those factors. Religion, on the other hand, is something people choose — otherwise there would be no apostates or conversions. I think Anne Lotz is an idiot and either a dupe or a scam artist, but there is nothing whatsoever wrong with wishing to keep people with a given mindset out of elected office; the only problem is that Anne Lotz has it exactly backwards — it’s people with strong religious belief who should be kept out of office, because they will adopt arbitrary and inflexible policies and refuse to make changes in the face of evidence that these policies do not work.
The Vicar,
Thank you for your response.
Speaking of flaws, it may behoove you to re-read the article, for race was never mentioned. I believe this particular logical fallacy is of the non sequitur type.
However, I could not have agreed with you more when you stated, “it’s people with strong religious belief who should be kept out of office, because they will adopt arbitrary and inflexible policies and refuse to make changes in the face of evidence that these policies do not work.”
In Reason,
Madison
Race was never mentioned? What do you call “I would never vote for a man who was Black”, then? It’s the whole second paragraph of the section you quoted, and in fact the focus of the article is the comparison between racism and anti-atheist prejudice. Is there some other meaning of “Black” which is common enough that it can be understood without further clarification, but which I have somehow missed? The only other ones I know of are really obscure — there’s a political party in, if I recall, Liechtenstein, and there was a faction in Renaissance Italy, but I don’t think either one works here.
The Vicar,
My mistake, I meant to state, as you initially stated, that racism, was never mentioned.
The author chose–maybe a bad choice to make his point–“black” as an example of a “specified category.” You needlessly brought racism into the subject.
“[T]he focus of the article is [NOT] the comparison between racism and anti-atheist prejudice.” The focus of the article is recognizing bigotry given the comparison between two “specified categories” of persons; one being Black, and the other being Atheist.
In Reason,
Madison
(Okay, weird that the comments section apparently doesn’t have threaded “Reply” beyond the 3rd depth; even if the design can’t accommodate continuing to indent the margins, keeping track of threading is extremely helpful in order to keep the discussion displayed in order. Tut tut! This is in response to your comment that ends with “the other being Atheist”.)
My point is that racism is an entirely different thing than being against a religious standpoint, something which the original article’s author (and, given most of the comments on that page) does not understand.
You and the author of the article are saying “it’s okay for Atheists to refuse to vote for religious people, but it’s not okay for religious people to refuse to vote for Atheists”. (And before you argue: the first half of that statement is something with which you have just agreed explicitly, from me, while the second half of the statement IS the article in question. And the author of that article has agreed with the first half of the statement in other articles.) The article starts this off by saying, in addition, “when religious people vote based on their religion, it is like racism”.
I am contradicting this: it is okay for anyone to base their votes on their religious preferences. This is precisely why all religions, even the apparently “decent”, are dangerous and wrong.
Furthermore, refusing to vote for someone based on their religion is not at all like refusing to vote for someone based on their race, or any of the other categories of discrimination which are usually lumped in with “racism”, such as gender. The religion of an adult is a choice. It is a part of how they behave, and what they consider important — these are perfectly valid points on which to judge someone. Race (and other such categories) are not, precisely because they are not part of someone’s behavior. To confuse the two is extremely muddy thinking.