Posted on 06/21/2011 8:09:13 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Mitt Romney is on track to get the Republican nomination for president the same way his 2008 rival John McCain did. The former Massachusetts governor was the runner-up in the last open primary and is not facing anyone strong enough to knock him out of his place in line. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 30 percent of likely GOP voters would back Romney. Second, at 14 percent, was Sarah Palin, who is: a) not yet running, and b) not yet literate.
This is in spite of party purists' fury over Romney's record of helping people and running a sensible government in Massachusetts. He, most notoriously, implemented a universal health care program, but also signed an assault weapons ban, supported stem cell research and conceded the right to an abortion.
If conservatives walk away from Romney's campaign, it's hard to see him charming over supporters from elsewhere. A born blue-blood with a pre-politics career in the corporate/finance world, the always-chipper Romney acts like an android programmed to seem human enough to be elected to office. He's 90-percent passable, but kinks in his programming keep cropping up. He holds economic stump speeches at places like Staples (where you apply after being laid off from your real job). He jokingly told a group of jobless voters, “I'm also unemployed,” as he runs for president on his $200 million bank account. As a cute, everyday-life incident for a Boston Globe profile, he recounted putting the family dog in a cage, tying it to a car roof and driving 12 hours until it sprayed poop down a window. He's clueless in ways that make you uncomfortable.
But the factor lying in wait to sink Romney is this: He's a Mormon.
Since its founding in the 1820s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has survived persecution by everyone from angry mobs to President James Buchanan. It became mainstream by, firstly, giving up polygamy and, secondly, creating its own mainstream, out in the remote Southwest, where it's a domineering cultural force. Its smiley followers eschew drugs, alcohol, coffee and even tea but are fond of abundant procreating, so the church is now 14 million strong.
Evangelicals, who makeup an unavoidable force in the GOP and are not known for their tolerance for religious plurality, still have a frosty view of Mormons, who have made some interesting add-ons to the tenets of Christianity.
The Obama-is-a-Muslim hoax shows the deep-seated paranoia of Americans, especially Republicans, that the president might have strange and exotic religious beliefs. Romney actually does! His church baptizes famous dead people, mandates long underwear and thinks the Second Coming will happen in Missouri.
Romney will try to deflect any mention of his religion as a personal attack, but you can choose to join or leave a church.
The LDS leadership orchestrated, in violation of the church's tax-exempt status, a massive donation drive for groups supporting Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that overturned same-sex marriage in California. The two main Prop. 8 groups got most of their out-of-state funding from Utah. If the few times Obama was in the same room as Bill Ayers amounts to a scandal, so does Romney's membership — and not-insignificant tithe — to a group with a homophobic agenda.
But the Mormon issue will probably get so mangled by Tea Party yokels in the primaries it will be toxic by the general election. And, of course, Romney will handle it awkwardly. In 2008, he ran into a grizzled old diner patron who declared, “I am one person who will not vote for a Mormon!” Proving he was on autopilot, Romney tried to shake his hand anyway.
A nation with serious religious hang ups, the United States is not ready for a Mormon president, even through Mormonism is different from mainline Christianity only in its impossibly wholesome image and a tally of small, weird things that make you go, “Huh?” Sort of like the difference between Mitt Romney and actual human beings.
Oh, it’s more than that. There is something fishy in this man. He is a high priest in this non-Christian religion, yet he doesn’t follow a narrow conservative path (kind of like Reid). He wants his religious affiliation to be off limits in the ballot box, yet he wants to ban what you as an individual can buy in weaponry while having taxpayers pay for the abortions of your fellow Americans. No, I think Romney’s religion and his seeming connect then disconnect then connect then ... well, you get the picture. Romney is proving himself the more of a duplicitous scoundrel through his religion and his fli flopping on his chosen priestly position.
I like your perspective. :)
Excellent points, thanks.
Preach it, Brother!
Nor do I hate Mormons. In fact, all things considered, I think that is a plus because they vote more conservatively than any other major religious group. It is just that Mitt thinks more like a northeast liberal and less like a Rocky Mountain conservative. IOW, I have a problem with this particular Mormon just as I have a problem with the particular fake black man named Obama.
And, no, the LDS church didn't violate their tax exempt status by opposing the pink mafia's attempt to redefine marriage. It is a moral issue. A lot of us Evangelicals, Catholics and Orthodox Jews feel the same way. If you want to go after churches for engaging in politics, why not start with the more blatant ones who push socialism from the pulpit and tell their parishoners which candidates to vote for rather than limiting their involvement to strictly moral issues.
I don't care that he is a Mormon. I know and like a bunch of Mormons, so that bit of Mitt doesn't bother me a whit.
I don't like him b/c he is a RINO! Got it?? Romneycare!! That's his baby, that's Mitt and that's NOT for me!
Still not clear enough? Just so you understand Independents like me, here's the pattern we gotta stop:
Ford, Bush the Elder, Dole, Bush the younger, McCain...RINO brethren all.
NO MORE RINOS!!! We have a Constitution and a Republic to save!
Sure are desperately seeking when you have to go to a gay newspaper
to knock Mormons!
...it figures any port in a storm
That might be because Romney was (is?) such a high ranking leader and teacher within the religion, and that his family line is so famed within the church.
Remember that Romney is the man that would not stop using the Guatemalan illegal aliens, even when the national story broke, the media went back a year later, and Romney had rehired the same company and it’s Guatemalan illegals, again.
The rest of us know Romney's Biggest Problems are policy and past performance.
Equally, next to no one cares Huntsman is (or was—he can't seem to answer clearly) a Mormon. They care about his service in the Obama regime, his approval of same-sex unions, his prior Cap-and-Trade support, etc.
Remember Bush's half-hearted attempt to introduce some tiny steps toward making social security solvent? The AARP sent some of their plants to disrupt the initial hearings and he packed up the tents and retreated to the tall grass, never to bring up the topic again.
Compare and contrast that to the congressional smack-down he got on amnesty and recall the first words out of Karl Rove after the 2006 mid-term shellacking a wonderful opportunity to reintroduce comprehensive immigration reform. Which, if you recall, they promptly did.
That is the same way I feel about Mormons. I don’t care if that is their choice but I see it as false and them blind or stupid.
Romney does not have a conservative bone in his body, and as is typical for him, he was always uninterested in any form of border control until he had that stroke during the primaries, when he became the opposite of who he was his first 60 years.
Romney was every bit lenient on immigration until the ‘new Mitt’.
Why, how "tolerant" of you.
I do not hate Romney, I don’t even know him personally. I do however, loath his liberalism and I want him to just go away.
Whatever, Dude.
There are a million reasons to reject Willard.
There is no need to resort to religious bigotry.
........................................
Finding a candidate shifty, loopy and untrustworthy because he is in a cult
is not bigotry. Each of us has the right to vote. The Constitution places
no restriction on how we are to evaluate candidates. To suggest the reverse
is Mittgotry... a slippery slope.
In addition, as you said, there are a million reasons to reject Willardo.
Great.
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