Posted on 12/15/2007 4:44:26 AM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
For many sophisticated conservatives, Mitt Romney is an appealing presidential candidate. Before he served a respectable term as governor of Massachusetts, he rescued the scandal-plagued Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. He has also been very successful in business, making millions as the co-founder of a private equity investment firm. Though his hyperpandering to the narrow-minded in this campaign has cost him some honor, he's still smart, accomplished and photogenic.
He's also a Mormon, a biographical note that has caused considerable consternation among the ultraconservative Christians who make up a sizable portion of the GOP's core constituency. Many of them reject Mormonism as a "cult" and would be hard-pressed to vote for Romney because of it. That's the reason he is now under white-hot pressure from Mike Huckabee in Iowa, where hard-core believers have pumped up the Baptist preacher's poll numbers.
It's quite a quandary for those among the Republican establishment who see Romney as not only the most electable among the GOP nominees — he has more intellectual heft than Huckabee and none of Rudy Giuliani's considerable baggage — but also as a genuinely well-qualified candidate.
And they're beginning to fret over those right-wing Christians who have painted Mormons as the children of Satan, a faction that wasn't placated by Romney's recent speech in which he declared his belief that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the savior of mankind."
This curious fracture among the GOP faithful conjures up another bit of biblical wisdom: "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." (Hosea 8:7) For more than two decades, the Republican Party has employed a deliberate strategy of injecting "moral values" and religious beliefs into political and civic life — a strategy that found its apex in the election of George W. Bush, who, during a presidential debate, named "Jesus Christ" as his favorite philosopher.
Though the GOP was historically known for fiscal conservatism and government restraint, party strategists decided back in the 1980s to link arms with Christian zealots to secure the votes of their flocks.
Thus began a long association with such figures as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, dogmatic, dictatorial and intolerant. Their Christianity brooks no dissent from a rigid and warped reading of the Bible that denounces homosexuality and decries abortion but has little compassion for the poor.
To win Republican primaries, GOP candidates are expected to kowtow to those Christianists, and they have, all the while dismissing as immoral "secular humanists" those Americans who want to protect the wall separating church and state. In recent years, there have been few establishment conservatives willing to stand up to the zealots — and those who did have paid a price. (John McCain, who rightly labeled Falwell and Robertson "agents of intolerance" in his 2000 presidential campaign, comes to mind.)
But with ultraconservative Christians balking at the prospect of a Mormon president, many top conservatives are suddenly annoyed. Earlier this month, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, accusing Huckabee of "exploiting" religion, wrote, "Mormonism should be a total irrelevancy in any political campaign." Trained as a psychiatrist, Krauthammer has never aligned himself with the right-wing religionists, but he has been much more circumspect about Bush's exploitation of religion.
A far stranger spectacle has been the sight of Ralph Reed, former Christian Coalition executive, on the airwaves denouncing voters who would use religious beliefs as a test for political office. "We've really gone over the line in this election," Reed said recently, complaining that presidential candidates are being subjected to "a doctrinal frisk." Wow. You may recall Reed and his former mentor, Robertson, as among those who established the procedure, requiring candidates to assume the doctrinal position they laid out.
Time for these folks to stop invoking Christ's name and start listening to Christ's message. Mitt Romney's candidacy should depend on how he leads, not on how he prays.
We’re a plague now, huh.
If we don’t vote for precious willard, we will be sacrificed on the altar of the libral wing of the GOP. I see how it is.
I'm always amazed at the number of people who aren't Christians and have a cursory or childs sunday school understanding of the bible and the faith.... yet they are completely comfortable telling christians how they are suppose to act and believe if they want to be christians. Non christians who want to define what christianity is. I guess they probably spend their lives talking about other things that they don't understand too.
The way I figure it, peoiple who are looking for a saviour to elect often end up with the opposite. German history is a good lesson for that.
People who won’t vote for someone who doesn’t share their specific religious dogma are intolerant, closed-minded bigots. Plain and simple. These people are also not true Americans.
Their highjacking of the Republican party brought us to incompetence and catastrophe that is the Bush administration. Most of W.’s decisions may have been right, but the execution seems to be mostly faith-based. That doesn’t work in the real world.
One’s religious beliefs do not qualify one for anything other than to be a member of that religion.
Odd the things liberals fear ...
Liberalsim is a disease, it effects the brain first, then takes over the whole body.
Last I checked evangelicals are voters, same as trial lawyers, union bosses, minorities, homosexuals, Hollywood actors, environmentalist, anti war activist, and every other click that the Democrat party cowtows to. But some how it is perfectly fine for them to suck up to them.
I’m looking forward to the “Multi-Colored Bigots plague Dems” column.
That ought to tell you everything you need to know about this article and Mitt Romney. Liberal MSM code words for "if conservatives were more intelligent they would be liberals and would, of course, be backing Mitt Romney."
Are you not a German living in Germany?
Or, are you an American living in Germany?
Either way, you have a lot of gall suggesting who is a "true American" and who is not.
Blaming Christians for the Bush administrations ills is pretty ridiculous, would you care to elaborate on that. What have Christians done for example to keep him from securing the borders or cutting spending or pardoning border patrol agents not increasing the size of government.
Huckabee: The GOP’s ticket to ride...over a cliff.
This is the MSM template; ignorant and stupid, but wholly revealing about how the other side thinks.
What actually happened, of course, was an accelerating modernist assault from the 1960's forward on traditional values and practices. This occured on many fronts, which for simplicity's sake we tend to combine into the generic "culture war." The leftist transposition is to assert that Christian conservatives are the aggressors in this, but it is of course the other way around.
Christian conservatives, many of them historically democrats or politically uninvolved, gravitated naturally to the Republican Party because the GOP wasn't excusing the drug culture, turning a blind eye to the crime epidemic, and pushing abortion, condoms in third grade, public profanity, etc. Pretty simple.
Your post strikes me as being from someone who receives little information about America that hasn’t come through the Democrat media’s filter.
The idea of electing a Mormon president would bother people of mroe categories than Christians or “right-wing Christians(TM)”. The LDS conception of theology is vanishingly close to what most people call science fiction. The good news for Mormons is that most people simply do not give a rat’s *** over theology; the LDS church serves mainly as a support group for middle class people trying to raise families, and as a counterbalance to the power of the federal govt. in parts of the country in which most of the land is owned by BLAM. Personally I could vote for somebody like Romney who was born into the Mormon faith, but I could not vote for anybody who converted to it after they were 12.
I like your tagline, but Pissant is a little too liberal for me. ;-)
Are we talking about the same Christian conservatives that brought us Jimmy Carter?
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." President John Adams --October 11, 1798
On the contrary, Christianity shows true compassion for the poor. Charity should be a self sacrificing thing not a governmental seizure of assets and redistribution to those deemed worthy. The Christian view on homosexuality is that we should love the sinner but hate the sin. Hatred of homosexuals is not a Christian tenet. The people who engage in it may claim that it is but it is not and we cannot be held responsible for the idiots of the world.
Calling the MSM filth really is much too kind.
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