I'm LDS and I don't feel that way. I don't know any other church members who feel that way. It's bigotry when a person will not vote for a Mormon no matter how qualified that Mormon may be. There are some regular posters here at FR that fall into that category and make no bones about it. I would like to challenge the management to run a poll to see how many members and lurkers felt that Mitt Romney was unfairly vilified on this site. It might bring a little perspective to the ongoing conversation regarding bigotry here on FreeRepublic.
>It might bring a little perspective to the ongoing conversation regarding bigotry here on FreeRepublic.
I would love to see that poll. Because while FreeRepublic claims to prohibit religious bigotry on this forum, it does nothing to stop it. And when challenged with posts bringing bigotry to the attention of the moderators, I get zero response.
Sure you do. Read your post and read your tagline. You and several of the posters to this thread obviously think anyone who publicly criticizes the LDS Church on Free Republic is a religious bigot.
There are some regular posters here at FR that fall into that category and make no bones about it.
Well they are expressing an honest opinion, aren't they? There are a lot of Freepers who would NEVER vote for a Muslim or a Hindu or a Rostafarian or a Jehovah's Witness or a Mennonite or a Unitarian or a Scientologist or for that matter, a "Purpose Driven" Evangelical. I would number myself as one.
I would like to challenge the management to run a poll to see how many members and lurkers felt that Mitt Romney was unfairly vilified on this site.
And how badly were Baptists in General and Huckabee in particular vilified by Mormons for simply asking the rather legitimate question about whether or not the LDS Church teaches that Jesus and Satan were brothers in the pre-existence?
FWIW I voted for Romney. That means I think a lot more positively about Mormonism than I do about Jehovah's Witnesses, or Muslims, or Mennonites or Unitarians or Scientologists or "Purpose Driven" Evangelicals. But a person's religious beliefs, especially if they are outside the mainstream of Historic Christianity are a legitimate source of inquiry into their qualifications to be the president of the United States.
It might bring a little perspective to the ongoing conversation regarding bigotry here on FreeRepublic.
Crying "bigot" is the last refuge of a person who has no legitimate answers to questions about their beliefs and practices. The fact is that Romney never had a chance. Not because he was a Mormon, but because he was just not real. Nobody really knew what he really believed. He talked the talk, but he never walked the walk.
No, it's not.
Many problems with this post:
(1) First of all this assumes that when a voter casts a ballot in a primary that only one candidate is "qualified." Are you seriously calling every voter a "bigot" who saw Romney as "qualified" but held less "qualities" in common with the voter & therefore he/she voted for another candidate? Wow! What a sweeping generalization!
(2) I take issue with the way you just framed the 94%-95% of LDS voters in Utah. I don't think that Romney was the only qualified candidate on the ballot in Utah. Therefore, since they chose Romney in a big way due to his "personal qualities" (exact words by the Salt Lake Trib), these voters therefore voted against the religion of other candidates in favor of Romney's religion. How dare you imply that LDS Utah voters are "bigots!"
(3) According to your logic & many other FReepers, a voter can't assess a polygamous fundamentalist Mormon candidate and vote against him on that basis because that would be discriminating against his implementation of D&C 132. (Are you consistent? Would you not consider the fundamentalist component of such a candidate?)
(4) Another poster one time made a similar claim. That to disqualify a candidate based upon their religion went against the spirit of the Constitution. But the Constitution never addressed how voters are or are not to assess "character" issues.
The liberal knee-jerk reaction we often see in society is to try to protect every perceived minority (example: alternative sexual minorities) with codifications galore & big govt crackdowns to the point where home owners can't even choose one renter over another if they are not wanting to be involved in sanctioning sexual behavior outside of marriage.
I've noticed the "conservative" approach to trying to club folks over the head is to try to use the "Constitution" approach mentioned above for that (Article VI) instead of new speech and sexual orientation types of codes.
The problem with this is that the Constitution or cultural codes could never provide enough information in advance about the character of the candidate. (That's why it leaves that issue up to voter discretion).
No matter how vehement some folks object, they can't get around the simple fact that "vulnerability to deception is a character issue. All or most of the POTUS candidates are usually qualified. But qualifications are what get candidates on the ballot. It's qualities--as the Utah LDS voters who voted primarily on the basis of "personal qualities" showed--that get candidates elected.
Some candidates' vulnerability to deception is in the area of their other-worldly commitments and their inability to define major world religions and their adherents. Other candidates' vulnerability to decption is in their sexual and partner life...for example, perhaps serial marriage or potentially scandalous affairs quite religiously.
Some voters won't care that a candidate has had three wives. Many FReepers have expressed a preference for a single-wife candidate. You can no more tell them that they shouldn't consider that quality of a candidates as to tell other voters to ignore the personal (religious) qualities--like LDS voters did NOT do.