If you drink, smoke, dance or date, you may not have a lot in common with Mike Huckabee. The Southern Baptist evangelist follows an ascetic path to God that is more prohibitive than Jesus' own, if we are to believe accounts of the Last Supper and the Wedding at Cana, where wine, for instance, was plentiful and celebration the norm. The astringent end of Southern Baptist culture first touched me when my Dad and brother and me went to the Marietta, Ga., YMCA so Dad could sign us up for activities that might keep us out of trouble. You can only imagine our shock when we were told that the Y - this was 1962 - did not accept Catholics. While I know the Y has moved past that level, I wonder how well-planted in the modern world the general scope of Southern Baptist dogma is, and I think Americans deserve to know. Will a Huckabee candidacy work against the alcoholic beverage industry, against the arts, against other cultural norms that they do not accept? How influential will his religion be when it comes to his treatment of them as President? For my money, the Southern Baptists are even more racially discriminatory (as with the Mormons, from a historical standpoint. not currently) as the Mormon brethren of Mitt Romney. Does the Huckster have Catholic advisors, or will he in the White House? Has he met the Pope, or would he? Will alcohol be banned at the White House? Will dancing? Will the Inaugural Ball be of the popular variety, or the Baptist variety? Do Southern Baptists have any peculiar end-of-life practices? These are questions whose answerws will let us know how his religion would help shape his presidency, if he gets one, and I think he ought to step up and answer them as forthrightly as Mitt Romney did.