Morning Maddow: Egad, The RNC Still Has A Religious Bigotry Problem? (Video)

Rachel Maddow brings us an update on the Republican National Committee's plans to take a free trip to Israel, paid for by the American Family Association, home of Bryan Fischer, one of the most prominent wackadoodles in rightwing media. This is sort of a perplexing choice by the RNC, given Fischer's insistence that the U.S. Constitution applies only to Christians, and immigrants to this country should be forced to convert. The AFA "solved" that problem by firing Fischer from one of his jobs Wednesday, canning him as its “director of issues analysis” and national spokesman, but keeping him on as the host of its main radio program (and more on that in a later post).

Ah, but David Lane, the AFA guy who's organizing the Israel trip through an AFA subsidiary, the American Renewal Project, is quite a peach himself. Lane organized the great big prayer rallies for Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry, and was one of the AFA's point men in a brief but sleazy attempt to paint the RNC's 2012 candidate, Mitt Romney, as a believer in a "false god" -- as documented by the Daily Beast. So even with Fischer in a reduced role, the RNC is headed to Israel with a guy who specifically refused to vote for Mitt Romney because he was a Mormon and who said just this week that the AFA believes "America was founded by Christians for the glory of God and the Christian faith."

This is Rachel in full astonished-outrage mode, and it's glorious. Watch.