While Democrat Hillary Clinton was in New Hampshire talking about the economy and Republican John McCain was in Portsmouth at our Seacoast Media Group home for a forum on energy security and global climate change, Mitt Romney was in Texas trying to accomplish the impossible — convince religious conservatives he was a man of faith and their values and not part of a wacko religious cult while avoiding the real elephant in the room of whether Mormons are Christians or not.
According to the Associated Press: “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,” Romney said at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum. “Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.”
To what extent he managed to stop the bleeding his campaign perceives from Republican rival Mike Huckabee (who just happens to be an ordained Baptist minister) remains to be seen. In my daily link, Andrew O’Heir writes fluently about why Romney’s speech has little to do with that of John F. Kennedy’s separation of church and state speech in Houston in 1960. Namely, Romney was dealing the modern religious and political dynamics of the Republican party.
But the speeches do have one thing in common on a cultural level -- dealing with intolerance, ignorance and bigotry. Frankly, the ignorance of the American people about Mormonism and who the Mormons are is an unfair burden for Romney to have to bear. I speak somewhat personally because I grew up in Southern Nevada amidst a large Mormon population and heard plenty of tales about the exotic nature of Mormonism. There were, as they say, good and bad Mormons, friends and neighbors. They were in their own way no different from Pentecostals, Latin mass adoring Catholics or dour Lutherans. They were with all their flaws and eccentricities, quintessentially American — and for the many I met, their religion wasn’t their defining feature.
There are good reasons for Republicans to disown Romney — his policy evolutions, his amazing lack of sophistication in foreign affairs and the fact that he was essentially a part-time governor most of his tenure in Massachusetts. But for so-called ‘values voters’ establishment to treat Romney as a religious (and political) heretic is a level of hypocrisy that would no doubt make Jesus blush.
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