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?

Will Harry Reid give the O'Donnell insult a pass?

In light of the tendency of Leftists to put party allegiance above anything else - such as "feminists" supporting serial harasser Bill Clinton or ignoring the chauvinist attacks on conservative women - I'm inclined to think the answer is obvious.

Here is Moe Lane's Diary:

It’s a valid question, I think, given the way that Lawrence O’Donnell viciously and insultingly went after Mormonism last night on that network. Goodness knows that I have my problems with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. And I have no intention of converting to the LDS faith any time soon, or indeed at all. But to say “Mormonism was created by a guy in upstate New York in 1830 when he got caught having sex with the maid and explained to his wife that God told him to do it” in the pursuit of crude partisan purposes is an insult that splatters far beyond its designated target (in this case, Mitt Romney).

I understand that Harry Reid was a boxer, when younger. If the Senator takes this punch without hitting back, then those days are long gone for him, indeed.

And:

PPS: Sorry, but there is a certain point beyond which you cannot and should not accept taking one for your political team. You would not ask a Jew to tamely accept that someone on national TV repeated the blood libel; a Catholic is not expected to remain silent at a network anchor’s suggestion that the Pope is actually the Antichrist; and going on the air and telling a Muslim that – God, take your pick, but the point is that even members of that particularly prickly religion have a legitimate right to be offended when someone says something that’s legitimately offensive. If Reid is a better Lefty than Mormon… well, we’re about to see whether that’s true.

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.

Decanonization in the Mormon Scriptures.

From the Doug Gibson at the Salt Lake City Standard-Examiner:

(To see Cal Grondahl’s cartoon that goes with this post, click here) Remember the Lectures on Faith sections in the Mormon scripture, “Doctrine and Covenants?” No? But they were there for 86 years? I’m reading an 1918 “Doctrine and Covenants” and sure enough, there’s Lectures on Faith.” What about “Section 101″ in early D&C editions, the “Article on Marriage” that says men and women should only have one spouse? No, haven’t heard of that one either? It was eventually deleted by church leaders and replaced by Section 132, which details celestial marriage and having multiple wives. Decanonization of scripture is not talked about much in the LDS church, and it’s certainly far less frequent than examples of added scripture in Mormon canon, but it does happen.

In the fall 1987 issue of “Dialogue,” historians Richard S. Van Wagoner, Steven C. Walker and Allen D. Roberts explore “The ‘Lectures on Faith’: A Case Study in Decanonization.” (Read) The lectures, comprised of seven chapters and totaling 70-plus pages, were part of the “School of the Elders” that Joseph Smith had in Kirtland, Ohio. Most scholars believe church leader Sidney Rigdon wrote most of them, with Smith and another leader, W.W. Phelps, writing one each.

According to the Dialogue article, Smith “accepted responsibility for ‘every principle advanced.’” However, in 1921, via a committee of church leaders, the Lectures on Faith were deleted from the D&C. The explanation given, the Dialogue authors explain, underscores the LDS Church’s muddled explanations for why canon is deleted. The committee wrote, “… Those lessons were prepared for use in the School of Elders … but they were never presented nor accepted by the Church as being otherwise than theological lectures or lessons.“

Related to this issue is confusion from LDS authorities over what constitutes revelations. In testimony before a court and later before Congress, church presidents Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith stated that church members have the right to reject revelation and that true revelation needs to be accepted by the church. It’s likely those statements were part of efforts to avoid secular pressure on the LDS faith, which was dealing with the unpopularity of polygamy.

Most other church leaders, including George Q. Cannon and Bruce R. McConkie, strongly reject the idea that a prophet’s revelations from God need to be approved by members. Even the D&C has conflicting advice on revelations. As the Dialogue article points out, Section 68:4 seems to indicate that once a prophet declares revelation, it is revelation. However, Section: 28:13 says that common consent is needed for church doctrine. (On a personal note, I’ve always been taught that when the LDS prophet claims revelation, debate ends.)

One reason the Lectures on Faith may have been decanonized, the Dialogue authors posit, is that its teaching as to the character of Heavenly Father — as taught by Smith in the 1830s — differ from later teachings. As the Dialogue authors explain, the Lectures on Faith read, “There are two personages who constitute the great matchless, governing and supreme power over all things, by whom all things were created, and made. … They are the Father and the Son — the Father being a personage of spirit, glory, and power … the son … a personage of tabernacle, made or fashioned like unto man.”

What the Lectures on Faith and its subsequent decanonization teach observers is that Mormon doctrine was in a constant evolution in the 1830s. It was not until 1841, more than a score of years after the First Vision, that Smith taught that God had a body of flesh and bone. This doctrine would later be expanded in Smith’s 1844 King Follett sermon, where, the authors point out, Smith taught: “God, who sits enthroned in yonder heavens is a man like unto one of yourselves,” and “You have got to learn how to be Gods yourself.”

Perhaps the most important thing to learn from the Lectures on Faith’s history, as well as the deletion of “Section 101″ of the early D&C, is that Joseph Smith’s understanding of the doctrine of the church he started grew over time. Yet, the majority of Latter-day Saints today, as the Dialogue authors concede, are quite unaware of these evolutionary changes.

In 2012, let's shut the Protestants out of government.

2012 Decoded talks about a Mormon- Catholic ticket:

A Mormon-Catholic Ticket Would be Groundbreaking and Typically American


When Elena Kagan was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 2010, it was an historic event: For the first time in American history, there was no Protestant member of the nation's' highest court.

Could 2012 be a presidential ticket of a major party without a protestant?

Were Mitt Romney to be the Republican presidential nominee and were he to choose a Catholic running mate--say, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie--that would seem to be such an event. Of course, the Obama-Biden ticket was historically WASP-free, an African-American attendee of the United Church of Christ--until the Jeremiah Wright controversy church--and a Roman Catholic.

 Right now, the Supreme Court is 7-2 Catholic/Jewish, the Speaker of the House is Catholic, the Senate Majority leader is Mormon, the Veep is Catholic - a bad Catholic, but nonetheless still in the Catholic column - and the President is...well, who knows what he is.

This saying something deeply significant about Protestant culture, but I'm not sure what exactly it is.

Why Mormons are Christian.

According to Daniel C. Peterson, the reason is that to deny Mormons are Christian is to commit the fallacy of equivocation:

But we don't claim to be mainstream Christians, and these objections conflate or confuse "mainstream Christianity" or "traditional Christianity" or "historical Christian orthodoxy" with "Christianity" as a whole. They mistakenly assume that "Christianity" and "mainstream Christianity" are synonyms.


Obviously, the two are related. But they aren't the same — just as "box" and "cardboard box" aren't synonymous. (There are, after all, wooden, glass, metal, stone, plastic, and other kinds of boxes.) A cardboard box is a type of "box," but a person who doesn't want a cardboard box isn't necessarily rejecting boxes altogether. Likewise, a squirrel is a species within the larger class of mammals, and Catholicism and Methodism are species or types of Christianity. There are many types of mammal besides squirrels, many types of Christian beyond Catholics and Methodists.

After endorsing Rick Perry at the "Values Voter Summit" earlier in October, Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress defended his denunciation of Mormonism with a pretty typical specimen of equivocating language: Mitt Romney, he said, is "not a Christian" because he "doesn't embrace historical Christianity."

His denunciation presumes, falsely, that "Christianity" and "historical Christianity" (the Christianity defined at Nicea and other councils) are synonymous, and that to reject the latter entails rejecting the former, too.
 
However, although they overlap, "historical Christianity" and "Christianity" are distinct concepts, just as palms, firs, flowering plums, and apple trees are both similar and different. Palm trees still share "treeness" with apple trees, and, for that matter, with trees generally. They differ merely in secondary traits.


We Latter-day Saints cheerfully acknowledge — indeed, we proclaim — that our faith isn't part of the traditional Christian mainstream. After all, if it were mainstream there would have been no need for the Restoration or the mission of Joseph Smith.

If Alister McGrath's contentless description of Protestantism is correct, it's not easy to see why Mormonism isn't Protestant.

The problem, though, is the same problem as calling a tail a leg, i.e., calling a tail a leg doesn't mean that a horse has five legs in any way except the most abstract and deracinated sense.

Likewise, if there is an essence of Christianity - a core set of non-negotiable concepts - then the faith that doesn't hold to those concepts isn't Christian in anything except as a kind of an arbitrary attempt at trademark infringement. 

Mitt Romney...

....community organizer.

Pot meet Kettle...

...Rock meet glass house.

Michael Voris deconstructs Pastor Jeffres criticism of Mormonism.

William Lane Craig on "Is Mormonism a Cult"?

Link here.

Craig makes a sound argument and has many sensible point.  I would pick a nit with him about equating "cult" with "non-orthodox Christian."  I would understand that when the word "cult" is not used in its strictly accurate sense of a group of people organized around a particular devotion, it implies people who are under the extreme, excessive and/or unhealthy control of some person or institution. There can be non-orthodox Christian "cults" in that latter sense, such as the "Heaven's Gate" cult, which was, after all, a "UFO cult."  On the other hand, it is not at all clear that Mitt Romney or any given Mormon is a "cultist" in the same sense that a member of "Heaven's Gate" was a cultist.

Perry's "Pastor" also thinks that Christians should avoid a "cult-like pagan religion" whose name rhymes with "Datholic."

I was kind of waiting for this shoe to drop from the moment I heard about this guy.

And don't forget, he's the guy who thinks that one reason that Mormons are cult is because they were founded 1800 years - and not 1500 years - after Christ.

According to K-Lo at NRO:

Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, is calling on Rick Perry to formally distance himself from Robert Jeffress.


Jeffress, of course, is the pastor who introduced Governor Perry at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C. last week, who did Perry no favors, as Bill Bennett put it the next day, when he derided Mitt Romney’s religion.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not only Mormons Pastor Jeffress has problems with. As Donahue points out:

Last year, Rev. Jeffress said the Roman Catholic Church was the outgrowth of a “corruption” called the “Babylonian mystery.” He continued, “Much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn’t come from God’s word. It comes from that cult-like pagan religion. Isn’t that the genius of Satan?”

Donahue asks:

Where did they find this guy? When theological differences are demonized by the faithful of any religion—never mind by a clergyman—it makes a mockery of their own religion. Rev. Jeffress is a poster boy for hatred, not Christianity.

Perry should follow John McCain’s lead here. As Wayne Barrett explains:

A powerful Catholic voice based in the New York Archdiocese, Donohue’s denunciations of another controversial Texas evangelical—Pastor John Hagee—as an anti-Catholic bigot forced 2008 GOP nominee John McCain to reject Hagee’s endorsement. (Hagee had called the church “the great whore” and a “false cult.”) “I think Rick Perry should follow the lead of McCain,” Donohue said in an interview on Wednesday, “and say ‘I don’t want this guy Jeffress’ endorsement.’” Donohue later reconciled with Hagee, who Donohue says came to visit him and apologized for the comments.

But under the "Obama Rule," why are presidential candidates responsible for the noxious views "their pastors" might hold?

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!"

Mormon Feminists says "Dammit! Catholics worship Mary and my crazy, liberal friend is proof."

Feminist Mormon Joanna Brooks is like those Catholics who are eternally loyal to the "spirit of Vatican III," which remains perpetually just around the corner and is perpetually receding from vision as the '60s generation ages and dies.  Because she is dreaming of a Mormonism that embraces Goddess worship and homosexual ministers, she wants people like herself - people who don't believe in what their religion teaches - to be as authoritative as, you know, 2,000 years of tradition, the entire historic magisterium and 99% of the members of the tradition. 

This time, though, she takes her shot at the Mormon canard that Catholics worship Mary:

Mattingly, an Antiochan Orthodox religion journalist whose Get Religion blog “work[s] with the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life and a philanthropist... with the byline Roberta Green,” has made the criticism of minor usage errors a major concern as of late (Roberta Green is Roberta Green Ahmanson, who, along with her husband Howard Jr., is a significant donor to conservative Christian political causes). For their “sins” in using the term “worship” in place of the orthodox term venerate, Mattingly criticized Edmunds and the Guardian’s copy editors, calling them “ridiculous.”


But Mattingly’s piece reminded me of the day I sat in the back pew of a Catholic church on the eastside of Austin, Texas, with my friend Rose, who is Tejana and Catholic. Pointing to a gorgeous mural of a dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe that spanned the cathedral chancel, Rose smiled at me conspiratorially and said, “I bring my kids here to see God as a big, brown-skinned woman.”

Don’t tell Rose that she doesn’t worship Mary, or that she doesn’t “get” Catholicism, as heretical as her feminist Tejana take on it might be.

It’s worth asking the question of what it really means to “get religion.” Religion scholars long ago acknowledged two valid perspectives on religious experience: one that focuses on religious institutions, their policies, their projects, and the “official” story, and another that focuses on the way religion is lived everyday in “unofficial” yet very real ways by common people of faith

Get it?  Because Brooks knows some crazy feminist who wants to make Mary the fourth member of the Trinity, that must, somehow, be a "real Catholic" position.

News flash for Brooks, it doesn't.  Her friend is formally but not materially Catholic.  If she believes what Brooks says she does, she is both formally and materially a heretic and should get educated and go to confession.

Of course, Brooks hit and run effort of smearing Catholicism with the "Catholics worship Mary" canard is really about Brooks' unhappiness with Mormonism:

A few weeks ago, Mattingly criticized RD for running my story on a recently-installed, openly-gay Mormon congregational leader in San Francisco. Get Religion insisted that this story on Mitch Mayne wasn’t really news, and that it was bad journalism to claim that Mayne’s call to serve indicated “evolving” views of homosexuality in Mormonism, because only orthodox institutional statements from high-ranking Church leaders count as evidence.


But as someone who’s been writing about Mormonism and homosexuality for 20 years, since I was an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, I stand by my observation that Mormon views on homosexuality are changing.

I'll leave it for Mormons to define their own religion, but Brooks should but out from telling Catholics what constitutes Catholicism.