After the Tucson memorial service, many right wing bloggers attacked President Obama’s speech on civility in politics and falsely claimed that organizers encouraged the applause throughout the President’s address. One Power Line blogger, Paul Mirengoff, had another target: Dr. Carlos Gonzales, a Native American professor at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine who gave a Pascua Yaqui prayer at the service. Mirengoff believed that, despite a number of readings from the Bible from other speakers, Dr. Gonzales’s prayer wasn’t “Christian” or “American” enough, and did a disservice to the memorial:

As for the “ugly,” I’m afraid I must cite the opening “prayer” by Native American Carlos Gonzales. It was apparently was some sort of Yaqui Indian tribal thing, with lots of references to “the creator” but no mention of God. Several of the victims were, as I understand it, quite religious in that quaint Christian kind of way (none, to my knowledge, was a Yaqui). They (and their families) likely would have appreciated a prayer more closely aligned with their religious beliefs. But it wasn’t just Gonzales’s prayer that was “ugly” under the circumstances. Before he ever got to the prayer, Gonzales provided us with a mini-auto biography and made several references to Mexico, the country from which (he informed us) his family came to Arizona in the mid 19th century. I’m not sure why Gonzales felt that Mexico needed to intrude into this service, but I have an idea. In any event, the invocation could have used more God, less Mexico, and less Carlos Gonzales.

It turns out though that Mirengoff is a partner at a law firm, Akin Gump, which has an active practice in Native American communities, who may not take kindly to Mirengoff’s dismissive and denigrating post about Gonzales’s prayer. The Careerist reports on the reaction to Mirengoff’s post: