A local zoning debate on an Islamic center two blocks north of Ground Zero in NYC has become a political slugfest, with American Muslims caught in the middle, as GOP candidates on Monday intensified their efforts to turn support for the mosque into an election-year wedge issue.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich compared Cordoba House backers to Nazis. The Politico takes a look at the GOP’s increasingly harsh stance towards Islam and finds that “the shift plays to a hostility toward Islam among many Republican voters.” Jon Stewart has come up with a new slogan for President Obama. “YES WE CAN … BUT SHOULD WE?” See Stewart’s take on the Mosque-rade here.

In non-mosque news, call off the weddings, the Ninth Circuit has stayed Judge Vaughn Walker’s Prop 8 ruling. The case will be heard in early December, but the court warned that it’s considering dismissing the appeal over the Prop 8 supporter’s lack of standing. A federal judge ruled that Missouri laws restricting protests near funerals (Westboro Baptist Church, we’re looking at you) are unconstitutional.

A host of evangelical leaders have thrown their weight behind immigration reform, but rallying people in the pews is a different matter, the AP finds, as it follows one man’s quest to turn the tide, one church at a time.

The anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List and Catholics United are going head-to-head on the campaign trail, fighting over whether Catholic Dems should have voted for the health care bill. Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council tweeted that the FRC “is more of a Catholic group than Catholics United.”

A Catholic scholar parsed Obamas Bible references and found that he frequently turns to the Old Testament, particularly the Exodus story, a biblical theme that runs through African American spirituality. Also popular with the prez: the motifs of being “our brother’s keeper,” and the Joshua generation that crosses into the promised land.

Roman Catholic parishioners and a priest from a closed parish are defying their local bishop by meeting anyway independent of the diocese. The NYT profiles another parish priest, this one in St. Louis, who has long defied the archdiocese.

As the new North American Lutheran Church prepares to meet later this month, three Central Illinois congregations have voted to leave the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America over its support for gay clergy.

An Episcopal bishop returned to his Philadelphia diocese amid calls for his resignation because he failed to report, several decades ago, that his brother was sexually abusing a parishioner. A church court found that the statute of limitations on the crime had run out.

The Archdiocese of Boston has married less than half the couples it wed in 2000, as more Catholics hold destination weddings, live together without getting married, or just leave the Catholic Church.

Archaeologists in Afghanistan found 5th-century Buddhist relics. The Taliban ordered their first public stonings since the 2001 American invasion on Sunday, killing a couple who had eloped. Iran said it won’t send a woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery to Brazil, which had offered her asylum. American Atheists want the “right” to blaspheme.

A Wiccan witch is selling a “booty enhancement” spell on eBay for $8.95. Keith Olbermann caught up with the Aqua Buddha.