Obama turns out to be a uniter after all.

Bringing Mormons and Catholics together since 2011.
Romney declares:

Religious liberty — our first freedom of those enumerated in the Bill of Rights. And the president and his administration said they are going to usurp your religious freedom by demanding that you provide products to your employees, if you’re the Catholic Church, that violates your own conscience.

And so whether it’s a Catholic businessperson or the Catholic Church itself they’re being told what they have to do that violates their religious conscience. That attack on religious freedom I think is a dangerous and unfortunate precedent.

And I know we’re not all Catholic in this room. Many presumably are. But I feel that we’re all Catholic today. In our battle to preserve religious freedom and tolerance and freedom in this country, it is essential for us to push back against that.

Video here.

Liberal Fizbin - Asking Obama about the effect of 20 years of exposure to an anti-American, anti-Semitic church - Wrong, Bad and Racist...

...Linking Romney to a Mormon massacre that happened in the 19th Century - Totally Kosher.

WaPo attacks Romney for Mountain Meadows Massacre:

Reporting from Carrollton, Arkansas, the Washington Post finds some locals still upset with actions of a "Mormon militia" over 150 years ago. The Post reports:

On Sept. 11, 1857, a wagon train from this part of Arkansas met with a gruesome fate in Utah, where most of the travelers were slaughtered by a Mormon militia in an episode known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Hundreds of the victims’ descendants still populate these hills and commemorate the killings, which they have come to call “the first 9/11.”

Many of the locals grew up hearing denunciations of Mormonism from the pulpit on Sundays, and tales of the massacre from older relatives who considered Mormons “evil.”

But the main concern of the paper is ... will this hurt Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney?

The article, headlined "Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith tangles with a quirk of Arkansas history," attacks Romney for being a Mormon, because, according to the paper, his coreligionists and ancestors were responsible for "the first 9/11."

Several questions:

1. How obviously lame and stupid.

2. Is this the year that the mainstream media finally loses all credibility?

3. "...which they have come to call 'the first 9/11.'"???????

I call utter bullshit on that. Who are "they"?

Seriously, who are these Arkansans who huddle around their lodges and re-live an event that happened 150 years ago and hundreds of miles away?

4. I repeat, is this the year that the mainstream media finally loses all credibility?

It's another day, so it's time for another round of ....

...liberal fizbin!



As you recall, back in 2008, the Rule was that it was unfair to ask a presidential candidate whether spending twenty years in a church that catered to Anti-Semitic and Anti-American preaching might affect his worldview.

But this is 2012, and one of the candidates is a Mormon, so the Rule is now that questions about the intricacies of Mormon doctrinal developments are perfectly hunk-dory.

For example:

1) LDS teaching about gender: "All human beings -- male and female -- are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose."

Has this teaching informed Gov. Romney's thinking about homosexual rights generally or gay marriage specifically?

Hey! Here's a novel idea; what about just asking him about his views on homosexual rights without dressing it up as an explanation about theology? I mean we are not electing a Mormon-Exegete-in-Chief, and I don't care about his consistency on Mormon doctrine. I'm interested in the bottom line.

We have had Mormons in elected office for over a hundred years. One Mormon - Harry Reid - is third in line for the Presidency. Thus far we have not seen one instance where a Mormon elected official has rendered their service suspect on account of their being Mormon.

This is just anti-Mormon bigotry being underwritten by political opportunism.

If Romney keeps this up, I'll become enthusiastic about voting for him.

Romney tells college student: "If you want free stuff, vote for the other guy."

Prejudice in America...

...can a Mormon be elected President?

In this day and age, I would like to think that religious prejudice is a long-dead issue, but there has been a lurking concern in my mind about the depth of anti-Mormon prejudice in America. Put aside the Evangelicals, there is a deep animosity against Mormons among secularists and liberals, and, perhaps, moderates. As evidence of that, keep in mind the infamous commercial during the Proposition 8 of a pair of Mormon missionaries busting into a lesbian household to rummage through their things. It was a reprehensible bit of prejudice.

Now, Roger Simon writes this about Romney's loss in South Carolina:

Believe it or not (and I didn’t think it possible), Mormonism was one reason Romney lost South Carolina. Exit polls show that most South Carolina voters wanted a candidate that shared similar religious views. Romney lost big among those voters. Note, I am not describing what ought to be, but rather what the data show is happening.

This does not bode well for Romney’s electability in the fall. Evangelicals are the base of the GOP. If they stay home, Republicans lose, like they did when they nominated the moderate John McCain. But more importantly, Catholics may decide this election in places like Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania. And the Catholic Church makes no secret of its view of Mormonism. An unexcited evangelical base combined with skeptical moderate Catholic voters undermines Romney’s chief campaign message of the last month — “most likely to beat Obama.” It could be a prescription for a November defeat.

Romney will spin that Florida is his firewall because he has an organization there. But he also had one in South Carolina. Tonight was a game changer.

One other thing. Romney annoyed people in South Carolina. His robo calls, from the vaunted “organization,” annoyed voters to no end. I watched someone get 5 calls in one night, many from Chris Christie. Another person is getting them in Germany in the middle of the night on her cell phone. Sometimes organization and money backfires.

Exit polls are exist polls, and if that's what they show, that's what they show.

As for Simon's point about "And the Catholic Church makes no secret of its view of Mormonism," I have to say "huh?"

Is he insinuating that there is some deep well-spring of prejudice against Mormons among Catholics. That seems to be an incredible statement. Among Catholics, there is the sense that Mormons are a kind of Protestant sect, more extreme than most, but no more extreme than many Protestant sects, including the Quakers, Christian Scientists, or any of the other strange little sects that make up Protestantism.

Certainly, the Catholic Church makes no secret of its totally accurate view that Mormon baptism doesn't qualify as baptism in the biblical sense in light of the different meaning that Mormonism attaches to the idea of the Trinity, but that level of theological nuance is sadly lost on most Catholics and other Christians.

Also, where does Simon get the data to extract this insight? Only 10% of South Carolinians are Catholic. Do we have any idea of how this scant minority of Catholics among South Carolina's Republican voters felt about Romney?

Perhaps the accurate point that we can take from Simon is that it may not take much to "poison the well" against
Romney.

Mitt Romney...

....community organizer.

It's terrific how the mainstream media has discovered a new-found respect for Mormonism.

I think it's ironic that Pastor Jeffres is calling Mormonism a cult, in part, because it was founded 1800 years after Christ.


So, apparently, 1500 years is alright, but 1800 years not so much?

The problem with turning these kinds of discussions into public free-for-alls is the problem of rocks and glass houses.

On which point, "MSM: John Lewis, I’ve heard that name somewhere…LOOK, A MORMON!"

"Let's you and him fight."

Francis Beckwith responds to an essay in a January 2007 edition of the New Republic that tries to split orthodox Christians from Mormons over the issue of Natural Law.

Linker’s argument is flawed in several ways. It is, first, an uncharitable reading of Mormon thought. For it isolates the office of prophet and the exaltation and authority of God from the essential components of LDS metaphysics. Although the LDS prophet may offer new revelation, his authority is neither boundless nor under his absolute control. His pronouncements are limited by certain eternal principles – such as those articulated by Smith and other Mormon prophets – as well as the moral and religious requirements of the LDS canon of Scripture and the numerous teachings of the church’s General Authorities.


For, as we have seen, the LDS universe is shot through with teleology, moral and otherwise. The Mormon God is bound by an unchanging moral law outside himself that is part of the infrastructure of an eternally existing cosmos. This, of course, does not mean that one may not raise philosophical questions about the coherence of having a moral law without a moral lawgiver that is identical to the Good. Rather, it means that Linker locates the dispute between Mormons and traditional Christians in the wrong place. It is not a question of whether one can know a natural moral law that exists. It is over whether or not that natural moral law is merely part of the furniture of the universe or ultimately in the Being of God.

Mormons and traditional Christians differ in many ways; but the attempt to pick a fight between them over belief in a natural law is not one of them.

Here is the New Republic article that Beckwith is responding to.

It's adorable how liberals get interested in scholastic theology every four years.

Stoking the fires of sectarianism.

Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin weighs in and argues that Catholics should not vote for a polytheist who claims to be a Christian.

In various races, we might be asked to vote for candidates who are Mormon.


While they may be very nice people and may even share many values with Christians, Mormons are not Christians. They do not have valid baptism because they are polytheists. That is, they believe in multiple gods. This so affects their understanding of the baptismal formula that it renders their administration of baptism invalid and prevents them from becoming Christians when they attempt to administer the sacrament.

Unlike other polytheists (e.g., Hindus, Shintoists), Mormons claim to be Christian.

Casting a vote for a Mormon candidate thus means casting one’s vote for a polytheist who present himself to the world as a Christian.

I can see situations in which that might be a morally legitimate option. For example, if one lived in Utah, where the only viable candidates in many races are Mormon, it could be morally legitimate to vote for a pro-life Mormon over a pro-abortion Mormon.

But matters seem different when we are talking about national races, such as the presidency.

To elect a Mormon to the American presidency would, to my mind, be a disaster.

It would not only spur Mormon recruitment efforts in numerous ways, it would mainstreamize the religion in a way that would deeply confuse the American public about the central doctrine of the Christian faith. It would give the public the idea that Mormons are Christian (an all-too-frequent misunderstanding as it is) and that polytheism is somehow compatible with Christianity.

In other words, it would deal a huge blow to the American public’s already shaky understanding of what Christianity is.

That means it would massively compromise a fundamental value on the scale of the abortion issue.

Faced with the choice of voting for a pro-life polytheist-claiming-to-be-Christian or a pro-abortion whatever, I might well choose to simply sit out that race and refrain from voting for either candidate, because voting either way would mean doing massive damage to America.

Note that I’m not in principle opposed to voting for polytheists. I could see, for example, voting for a pro-life Hindu over a pro-abortion monotheist. But a Hindu does not claim to be a Christian and thus does not risk confusing people about the core doctrine of Christianity the way Mormonism does.

Akin is a serious and subtle thinker.  I agree with his observations but I disagree with his conclusion.

I think that there is a serious value in the American tradition of tolerance.  The American social compact involves "bracketing" a candidate's religious views from his public views.  This has been a very effective way of preventing sectarian squabbling that would divide the religious vote to the benefit of the secularists.  By agreeing to disagree, we do not automatically respond to a candidate's view on tax policies with an appeal to their wrong-headed views on transubstantiation.

Of course, that live and let live view doesn't mean muting religious disagreements.  Insofar as Mormons are not Christian, then the proper response to the erosion of what it means to be "Christian" about which Akin is properly concerned is more speech about the subject.

Something to support every kind of prejudice.

Patheos is hosting a symposium, which this week turns on the question, "Can Christians Vote for a Mormon for President?"

Warren Cole Smith says "no" because of Mormonism's ahistorical and anti-historical beliefs and because it would be a major boost for Mormon missionaries:

What Weyrich understood was that you can't have it "both ways" when it comes to Romney's faith. You can't say that his religious beliefs don't matter, but his "values" do. The Christian worldview teaches that there is a short tether binding beliefs to the values and behaviors that flow from them. If the beliefs are false, then the behavior will eventually—but inevitably—be warped. Mormonism is particularly troubling on this point because Mormons believe in the idea of "continuing revelation." They may believe one thing today, and something else tomorrow. This is why Mormons have changed their views, for example, on marriage and race. Polygamy was once a key distinctive of the religion. Now, of course, it is not. Mormons once forbade blacks from leadership roles. Now they do not. What else will change?

J.E. Dyer says "why not?" because Mormon politicians look remarkably like every other politicians:

Mormons in politics run on party platforms, but while their voters tend to espouse socially conservative positions, the best-known LDS politicians don't always do so. Mitt Romney came late to favoring limits on abortion, for example, and Jon Huntsman is passionate about legalizing narcotics. Senators Bob Bennett, Orrin Hatch, Jake Garn, and Mike Crapo have been largely indistinguishable from centrist Republicans in terms of their voting records and stances on issues. The political "product" of Mormons, while variable, has been the opposite of radical and scary.


LDS politicians work within the limits of constitutional government. They have no history of failing to respect First Amendment protections, nor do they advocate applying religious principles inappropriately to the activities of the state. This, it seems to me, is what we need to know about Mormons when we are contemplating voting for one.

And Jeremy Lott offers his Catholic version of "Two Cheers for Mormonism" and a simple rule to guard against a bigotry that can all to easily be turned against everyone:

The exact question put to the symposium was "Should traditional Christians be comfortable supporting Mormon candidates for office?" Allow me to answer the question with another one: "Why should they not be comfortable supporting Mormon candidates?" So far as I am concerned, the only legitimate answer is not a sectarian one.


There may indeed be good grounds to oppose a Mormon candidate for office. Yet they ought to be the same grounds that you would use to oppose someone from your own religious tradition. Random traditional Christian voter X should not vote for Mormon candidate Y for the same reason that he would not for a Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish candidate—because you disagree with the candidate about political matters of great import.

If you care deeply about limiting abortion, as many traditional Christians do, then you probably ought not support former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, even if you both happen to be Catholic. Instead, you should consider supporting Jeff Flake, Rob Bishop, or Mike Crapo—Mormons legislators with solid pro-life voting records all.

When I put the case to evangelicals like that, they usually concede they can agree with most Mormons on, say, abortion, gay marriage, and the importance of family generally. But then they insist that Mormons believe "weird things" that make them suspect and probably members of a cult.

So: no sale.

Bill Maher manages to get under the skin of a liberal Mormon.

Liberal Mormon blogger Joanna Brooks is really offended about a "joke" by Bill Maher about Mitt Romney's "magic underwear."

This week, on David Letterman, Bill Maher got ugly about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his Mormonism.


“Don’t get me started on Mitt Romney,” Maher sneered to Letterman. ”Because Mitt Romney will teach America what’s really in Mormonism.”

“Mitt likes to gloss over... ‘well, we’re just different types of Christians.’ No. No, I was raised Catholic,” Maher leaned in and raised an eyebrow, setting up for his big punchline: ”And there was no magic underwear.”

Big laughs from the crowd at CBS studios. Right on cue.

Magic underwear?

It’s no secret that highly observant LDS people wear sacred undergarments as an expression of religious commitment.

But magic underwear? Please.

There is a historic Mormon folk belief that garments offer a kind of protection to their wearers. But for the vast majority of Mormons, garments first and foremost represent the daily wearing of a covenant to lives of modesty, chastity, and faith.

The same way an orthodox Jew would wear a kippah (for men) or modest clothing (for women), or a Muslim woman would wear a headscarf, highly observant Mormons wear garments.

Fair point and Mormons are as entitled to respect for their traditions as any other group.
 
It's nice to see that Maher can bring such diverse people together by being such a complete human toothache.