The Media's Mormon Fixation

But having already exhausted the usual storylines—he’s stiff, he’s changed positions, he’s inauthentic—journalists have returned to the one that generated so many sparks in the last campaign: he’s a Mormon!

This is not quite breaking news, of course, but it does inject a note of dramatic divisiveness into an otherwise tepid candidacy.

Admittedly, news organizations had a legitimate reason to pounce on the question of Romney’s faith over the weekend. At the Values Voter forum, Robert Jeffress, a Baptist leader from Dallas who introduced Rick Perry as a “committed follower of Christ” ripped into Romney’s religion. It is a “cult,” he told reporters, and “Mormonism is not Christianity.” (Perry has largely avoided making any comment.)

Romney sidestepped the attack the following day, calling for tolerance and saying there is no place for “poisonous language” in politics. He did not use the M word.

Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, brushed off the incident. “It doesn’t really change anything,” he told me Monday. “He’s going to talk about jobs, the economy, foreign policy. There’s not a grand strategy here except to talk about stuff we want to talk about.”

Romney is said by those close to him to have laughed off the Jeffress slam as nothing new, and Stevens insists he isn’t worried about the coverage. “It’s only a distraction if you get distracted,” he says.

Still, the floodgates have opened. Politico’s lead story on Sunday was headlined “Mitt Romney’s Mormon Issue Returns.” Other candidates were asked about the Jeffress rhetoric on the talk shows, and as the new week began it was the hot topic on television and online.

Will the press keep pounding away at this anti-Mormon outburst? Why, 50 years after JFK broke the Catholic barrier, is a candidate’s religion again emerging as a major issue?

Journalists have a fig leaf in tackling the topic. Evangelical Christians made up 44 percent of the Republican primary electorate in 2008, according to an ABC News analysis, and many have an antipathy toward Mormons, which is why Romney fared poorly among these voters last time. Thus news outlets can say, with some validity, that they’re merely engaging in horse-race analyses rather than singling out a Mormon candidate for special scrutiny.

We have been down this road before. The clamor over Romney’s religion was such that the candidate felt compelled to deliver a major address in December 2007. “He gave his speech on this four years ago,” Stevens says in a that’s-old-news tone.

Why, 50 years after JFK broke the Catholic barrier, is a candidate’s religion again emerging as a major issue?

At George H.W. Bush’s presidential library, Romney said: “Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin…No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith.”

That speech prompted a wave of reporting on everything from Romney’s days as a Mormon missionary to examinations of what Mormons, who comprise about 2 percent of the U.S. population, believe (the church gave up polygamy more than 100 years ago).

A New York Times editorial said Romney was "trying to persuade Christian fundamentalists … that he is sufficiently Christian for them to support his bid for the Republican nomination. No matter how dignified he looked, and how many times he quoted the founding fathers, he could not disguise that sad fact.”

Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist minister, caused a stir by asking: “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” He later apologized for a mistake he said was rooted in ignorance. Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses, where evangelicals play a particularly strong role, and Romney has since developed an allergy to Iowa, blowing off the summer’s straw poll.

This time around, Romney’s rivals haven’t exactly rushed to the defense of Mormonism. Asked on Fox News Sunday whether Romney could be deemed a “true Christian,” Rick Santorum said: “He says he’s a Christian.” Michele Bachmann, asked on CNN’s State of the Union whether Romney is a Christian, ducked twice by talking about her own “sincerely held faith” and the need for “religious tolerance.” Herman Cain, asked the same question on the same program, said: “I’m not running for theologian in chief. I’m a lifelong Christian.”

(The other Mormon candidate in the race, Jon Huntsman, told voters in New Hampshire: “I have no idea why people are wasting so much political-capital bandwidth on this issue. It’s nonsense.”)

Romney has significant weaknesses as a candidate, starting with his evolution from a Massachusetts moderate who once backed abortion rights through his awkwardness at chatting with regular folks at a diner. But he has focused like a laser beam on the economy, a sensible strategy for a former venture capitalist running against a president who is presiding over a 9.1 percent jobless rate.

Why, then, are the media again being diverted by his faith? It is true that Romney would be the first Mormon president, but that hardly seems a farfetched notion in a country that has elected its first African-American president.

The answer is that Romney’s disciplined style doesn’t lend itself to the Trump-style entertainment that many in the media seem to prefer in 2011. A religious controversy, by contrast, touches enough hot buttons to heat up the debate. The question is how long the media can stoke this issue if Romney, the stubbornly steady campaigner with every hair in place, refuses to engage.

If Romney gets the nomination, he will be running against a black man. The Mormons teach that dark skin is a curse from God and that white skin is a blessing from God.

You mean the PRESS would print stuff like THIS???

"You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.

The first man that committed the odious crime of killing one of his brethren will be cursed the longest of any one of the children of Adam. Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings.

This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin. Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race--that they should be the 'servant of servants', and they will be, until that curse is removed."

Brigham Young-President and second 'Prophet' of the Mormon Church, 1844-1877- Extract from Journal of Discourses.

Here are two examples from their 'other testament', the Book of Mormon.

2 Nephi 5: 21 'And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.'

Alma 3: 6 'And the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men.'

August 27, 1954 in an address at Brigham Young University (BYU), Mormon Elder, Mark E Peterson, in speaking to a convention of teachers of religion at the college level, said:

"The discussion on civil rights, especially over the last 20 years, has drawn some very sharp lines. It has blinded the thinking of some of our own people, I believe. They have allowed their political affiliations to color their thinking to some extent.I think I have read enough to give you an idea of what the Negro is after."
"He is not just seeking the opportunity of sitting down in a cafe where white people eat. He isn't just trying to ride on the same streetcar or the same Pullman car with white people. It isn't that he just desires to go to the same theater as the white people. From this, and other interviews I have read, it appears that the Negro seeks absorption with the white race. He will not be satisfied until he achieves it by intermarriage."
"That is his objective and we must face it. We must not allow our feelings to carry us away, nor must we feel so sorry for Negroes that we will open our arms and embrace them with everything we have. Remember the little statement that we used to say about sin, 'First we pity, then endure, then embrace'...."

(Rosa Parks would have probably told Petersen under which wheel of the bus he should go sit.)

1967, (then) Mormon President Ezra Taft Benson said,

"The Communist program for revolution in America has been in progress for many years and is far advanced. First of all, we must not place the blame upon Negroes. They are merely the unfortunate group that has been selected by professional Communist agitators to be used as the primary source of cannon fodder."

We are told that on June 8, 1978, it was 'revealed' to the then president, Spencer Kimball, that people of color could now gain entry into the priesthood.

According to the church, Kimball spent many long hours petitioning God, begging him to give worthy black people the priesthood. God finally relented.

Sometime before the 'revelation' came to chief 'Prophet' Spencer Kimball in June 1978, General Authority, Bruce R McConkie had said:

"The Blacks are denied the Priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty.
The Negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain blessings are concerned, particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow there from, but this inequality is not of man's origin, it is the Lord's doings."
(Mormon Doctrine, pp. 526-527).

When Mormon 'Apostle' Mark E Petersen spoke on 'Race Problems- As they affect the Church' at the BYU campus in 1954, the following was also said:

"...if the negro accepts the gospel with real, sincere faith, and is really converted, to give him the blessings of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost, he can and will enter the celestial kingdom. He will go there as a servant, but he will get celestial glory."

When Mormon 'Prophet' and second President of the Church, Brigham Young, spoke in 1863 the following was also said:

"Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God is death on the spot. This will always be so."
(Journal of Discourses, Vo. 10, p. 110)

Yeah; Native Americans are althroughout the Book of MORMON; too.

“I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today ... they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people.... For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised.... The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.

At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl-sixteen-sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents—on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather.... These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness.

One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.

(Improvement Era, December 1960, pp.922-23). (p. 209)

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