[wagglebee]

I'm willing to vote for a conservative pro-life, pro-family, anti-abortion, anti-homosexual-marriage Mormon under certain circumstances, but there's no way I'm going to act as if Mormons are part of traditional Christianity.

I would also vote for a Mormon under these circumstances, although it would be with a great deal of hesitation. Nevertheless, this is a moot point as Romney IS NOT a conservative pro-life, pro-family, anti-abortion, anti-homosexual-marriage Mormon and to pretend otherwise would be an insult to the Mormons who actually are.

[darrellmaurina]

@AnTiw1: Yep, Free Republic is a great source of news. Jim Robinson deserves **MASSIVE** credit for coming up with the idea, way back in the earliest days of the internet gaining traction to become a mass communication medium rather than the province of a small group of techies — i.e., guys like me who go back to CompuServe days on TRS-80s and before that to punchcards fed into card readers connected to mainframes.

In many ways, Free Republic is a news aggregator like GoogleNews performing the sort of work once done by the Associated Press. However, instead of article selections being driven by a mindless computer algorithm or a small number of editors who see themselves as elite gatekeepers determining what constitutes newsworthiness, the articles are hand-selected via crowdsourcing by tens of thousands of conservative individuals who pick out things they think are important for the rest of us to know about.

Who said technological innovation is limited to the leftists? They just get more credit for their ideas since they run the traditional mainstream media. Jim Robinson came up with Free Republic and was changing politics while Howard Dean was a minor New England governor of a small state whose “netroots” and “netizen” concepts hadn't yet been promoted on the national stage.

@RFEngineer: We agree on the realities of being pragmatic in politics. Under the American system, as opposed to European-style proportional representation, if we can't get to 50 percent, we don't even get a seat at the table. I frankly haven't decided yet what I will do this fall — my concern is not so much about people supporting Romney here on Free Republic, but rather people going far beyond that position to say that religious “bigots” shouldn't be allowed. That leads to a French-style secular republic, not the Judeo-Christian foundations of the United States.

1,180 posted on Tue May 08 2012 08:08:00 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by metmom: “Hey! What are you doing on this thread making sense? ... And thanks for the coherent, well thought out and expressed evaluation of the situation.”

Thanks! It is, after all, what I'm supposed to do as a reporter — listen to lots of people, analyze what they've said, and write an article that makes some sense out of what happened at the meeting I attended.

@CharacterCounts and ohioWfan: Yep, the thread has been hijacked.

Now back on track, in a hope to unhijack things and get back to the root issue:

1,175 posted on Tue May 08 2012 07:21:52 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by wagglebee: “I would also vote for a Mormon under these circumstances, although it would be with a great deal of hesitation. Nevertheless, this is a moot point as Romney IS NOT a conservative pro-life, pro-family, anti-abortion, anti-homosexual-marriage Mormon and to pretend otherwise would be an insult to the Mormons who actually are.”

We agree.

I understand the desire of Mormons to support “one of their own.” The perils of Roman Catholics backing John F. Kennedy despite his liberal views could be instructive to Mormons.

On the other hand, if Romney loses, maybe after this election the LDS will do some housecleaning. If Reid, Romney and Huntsman become the new face of Mormonism, it won't help their church any more than the Kennedys and Archbishop Weakland helped the Roman Catholic Church.

I do not believe Mitt Romney can win this fall. But whether he wins or loses, those of us in the conservative movement have a major problem either way.