Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 6:58pm

Religious Bigotry and the Left

 

One of the tools that some Obama supporters have been utilizing in their quest to give Obama another four years to transform the country in his image is the raw sewage of religious bigotry.  Christopher Johnson, a non-Catholic who has taken up the cudgels so frequently in defense of Mother Church that I have designated him Defender of the Faith, has their number:

 

If the desperation of the left is any indication, the 2012 election of Mitt Romney to the US presidency has the same air of inevitability that Barack Obama’s election had four years ago:

I was on a conference call yesterday regarding intelligence gathered from a highly placed source that liberal Obama surrogates are planning to target Evangelical mega-church parking lots with bigoted anti-Mormon flyers the final weekend before the election in key battleground states like Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin.

Mega-church pastors are being notified to have parking lot attendants be on the lookout for such a lit drop. But please forward this post to all pastors of both Protestant and Catholic churches, particularly in battleground states.

The GOP’s all-important social conservatives may be getting more comfortable with Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith – but liberals are increasingly wary about the candidate’s religion in the run-up to November, according to a new study.

The study found anti-Mormon attitudes have increased since Romney’s 2008 presidential bid and are highest among liberal and non-religious voters….

The study found attitudes about Mormonism among Evangelicals has largely remained unchanged since 2007 – when 37% said they were “less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate for president,” compared with 33% this year.

However, that sentiment among non-religious voters increased from 21% to 41% over roughly the same period.

Among liberal voters, 43% said they were less likely to vote for a Mormon presidential candidate in 2012, compared with 28% in 2007.

Then there’s Andrew Sullivan who takes shrieking hysteria to a whole new level.

I raise this because it is a fact that Mitt Romney belonged to a white supremacist church for 31 years of his life, went on a mission to convert Christians and Jews and others to this church, which retained white supremacy as a doctrine until 1978 – decades after Brown vs Board of Education, and a decade after the end of the anti-miscegenation laws.

Romney’s response to the white supremacism of his church was to point to his mother’s and father’s secular support for civil rights for African-Americans, which ties in with Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s abolitionist convictions. And there is no question that Mitt Romney’s parents were heroic civil rights Republicans in the secular sphere – in a party that had not yet become the South’s racial plaything. And I do not doubt Mitt’s story about weeping upon hearing that the “ongoing revelation” had now changed. But all this evades the key question: what did the Romneys do to confront their own church’s non-secular position on the inherent spiritual inferiority of blacks? Nothing, so far as I can find. If any reader can find some, please send it to me and I’ll post it.

There’s nothing in Romney’s answer that violates the old Mormon doctrine – still there in the Book of Mormon – that for some reason, people with black skin suffer some kind of inherited curse that will only be lifted after everyone else has been saved in the hereafter.

Notice also the lack of any apparent remorse, or criticism of the church’s previous position. This is a church that can take a position rooted in its own Scripture and just one day say it’s over and let’s move on. Even white supremacism! And people still don’t see how Mormonism – its utilitarian use of truth, its studied mainstream all-American appeal, its refusal to be completely transparent to outsiders, and its insistence on never having to account for itself – isn’t integral to Mitt Romney’s personality and beliefs. Romney will no more let outsiders look at his finances than the LDS church will allow non-Mormons inside their Temples after they have been consecrated.

Look: every religion has these stains in its past. My own church committed the Inquisition and, in my view, began the demonization of the Jewish people that killed and terrified and marginalized so many for centuries, leading to the Holocaust. Its continued systematic discrimination against women is a scandal. Its criminal rape of children makes it the most flawed current Christian institution on earth. And if you asked a Catholic candidate whether it was wrong for the Church to have treated Jews as cursed and sub-human for so long, I cannot imagine any Catholic politician not saying yes. Unequivocally. Is there a mite of evidence that Mitt Romney ever challenged the white supremacism in his religion and its active racism while it was in existence and he was still a missionary and member for 31 years of his life?

Do I have problems with Mormonism?  Profound problems and not just spiritual ones; the idea that Joseph Smith was a prophet is too absurd to even remotely entertain.  Do I consider Mormons to be Christians?  Not as I understand both the meaning of that word and Mormon “theology.”

Who am I voting for for United States president in a couple of weeks?  Mitt Romney.

Why?  Because we’re not selecting a presiding bishop in November, we’re selecting this country’s First Magistrate.  Religiously-speaking, Mitt Romney’s Mormonism neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, as Jefferson put it.

You don’t know a single thing about this country, do you, Sully?

Go here to Midwest Conservative Journal to read the brilliant rest.  Appeals to religious bigotry have long been a staple of Leftists in this country.  Most Leftist political sites on the internet are drenched in it, in the comboxes at least if not always in the posts.  Evangelicals, Catholics, anyone with the temerity to disagree with their political goals are routinely slammed, usually in the vilest terms imaginable.  The attempt by some Leftists to arouse bigotry against Mormons in order to defeat Romney is therefore quite understandable and predictable.  For quite a few on the port side of our politics, their Leftism is effectively a substitute religion.  People who disagree with them politically are not fellow Americans to be reasoned with, but heretics to be crushed.  In that endeavor any tactic, no matter how reprehensible, is permissible for them.

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T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, October 24, AD 2012 5:49am

Silver-Lining Department: That display of dishonest, ignorant bigotry is preferable to their tweets calling for assassinating President Romney.

Paul W. Primavera
Wednesday, October 24, AD 2012 6:17am

Thank you, Donald!

PM
PM
Wednesday, October 24, AD 2012 7:34am

Can any one in the ranks of the democrat party call for sanity?

It’s a chance for their leaders, like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius, John Kerry, Caroline Kennedy, et al touting their Catholicism to redeem themselves! Or what about Harry Reid? It would be a proud moment for them and the country to caution these wayward citizens they are being paid to serve.

It’s time now. They melting pot is boiling.

Are they laughing at what is happening after all? They let the travesty at the DNC convention publicly shame themselves about whether or not their Creator should be ‘on the platform’.

philip
philip
Wednesday, October 24, AD 2012 12:15pm

D demonic
N narcissist
C culture

To wide a brush, sorry about that. The clip is pathetic. The only goats are those that belong to Obama and his warlocks.

trackback
Wednesday, October 24, AD 2012 12:25pm

[…] Religious Bigotry and Secularists – Donald R. McClarey, The American Catholic […]

John2
John2
Thursday, October 25, AD 2012 10:01pm

PM,

Good comment. You have listed the crew that is going into retirement. If the Dem Party is to be saved, these worthies will be swept aside while another generation comes in to do the work.

You also pushed my thinking button — it might be good to be a young Dem over the next few years. As the party beheads itself, there will be opportunities to climb the ladder quickly.

Of course, you run the risk of rising in influence while the ladder falls to pieces. Still, there might be opportunity here for a new collection of conservative Dems.

All that is down the road. None of it matters November 6.

Good comment, thanks.

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