Today’s Reading List – February 22, 2007
Romney — Religion — "It Just Doesn't Matter" seemed to be a meme, especially amongst editorialists, especially for smaller papers, all over the place yesterday. Examples:
- Baxter Arkansas This is actually a syndicated piece picked up by a lot of smaller papers yesterday.
- Pueblo Colorado.
- Philadelphia (although this is from a lefty who is kind of ugly in her rhetoric, she has a point).
- Christian Post This is a guest piece by Martin Marty – that's a big name amongst smart Evangelicals.
I think in the end people who attack Romney even vaguely openly on religion will be marginalized. Here's why - it's from a Pakistani newspaper:
Since presidential candidates began announcing their White House bids about two weeks ago, America's core values have been stuck between a rock and a hard place, or should I say, between a Muslim and a Mormon. Thanks to Illinois Senator Barack Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, conversations about American hypocrisy have shifted from the realm of foreign policy to faith, and the guarantees of the First Amendment have been appropriately pummeled out of public discourse by some righteously thumping fists.
It goes on to be very ugly. Needless to say, it is highly biased and generally anti-American, but I think that's the point. There is something un-American about much of the religious questioning that is going on in this Presidential election cycle. It's one thing to say a candidate is "religious" and what church they go to, that's as old as the nation. It's another thing altogether to be reading MSM pieces about specific theological stances.
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney once sounded like a Mormon liberal. [...] These days, Romney talks like a Southern Baptist.
The piece goes on to examine in detail Romney and official LDS stances on any number of things. It just seems unseemly. And as I think about, I am struck about what opened the door to this and I think it may have been Jimmy Carter and that Playboy interview. You know, the one with the "lust in my heart" bite. I fell for that line of nonsense in the first vote I ever cast. Shame on me.
Lowell: One searches one's memory in vain for any MSM commentary on whether John Kerry's political positions were consistent with Catholic doctrine. Ironically, the MSM is looking very provincial concerning Romney.
Meanwhile, McCain seems to have a religious problem any way you cut it. Religion really is a no-win election issue.
Romney impresses another leading Evangelical.
A libertarian view on church and state. There is much in this piece to disagree with, but there is also much to think about.
K-Lo reports on Romney making a funny at his own expense.
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CarlH on 22 Feb 2007 at 11:04 am #
So Romney’s move to the right is causing hand-wringing and disappointment among “Mormon liberals” according to the Religious News Service article posted today? That this comes from Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune, with quotes from many of the “usual suspects,” is hardly surprising for the reasons Lowell has noted earlier. The article is so full of hyperbolic stretches that it would be cruel to itemize them all.
However, what is surprising–but hardly unique among Mormon liberals–is a rather bizarre attempt, at least to my mind, to suggest that Mormons’ overwhelmingly Republican voting preference is correlated correlated to an equally overwhelming failure on the part of Mormons to “line up exactly with the nuanced views of the LDS Church” on abortion. Unfortunately, some of the “nuanced views” cited seem to be more those concocted by Mormon liberals, than anything actually preached from more “orthodox” Mormon pulpits.
For example, I’m aware of no CJCLDS authority who has suggested that “quickening” (and Brigham Young’s statement about its theological significance in an unrelated context) is relevant to the Church’s stance on abortion, but this seems to be favorite trope of Mormon liberals attempting to justify their pro-choice political position. By contrast, in the rather official, public context of a devotional address at Brigham Young University in 1999 later published in the Church’s official magazine, The Ensign,, a current CJCLDS Apostle, Dallin H. Oaks, who happens to be a former law professor at the University of Chicago no less, roundly denounced the craftiness of the “pro-choice” label as seductively misleading, and articulated a theological basis for the LDS Church’s stand on abortion, and even LDS members’ obligation to stand for correct principles about it, that has nothing to do with the arguments cobbled together by Ms. Stack. From the point of view of the Mormon liberals, of course, such pronouncements–if even acknowledged at all–are just evidence of the lack of “openness” among CJCLDS leaders, and more particularly the less open-minded Mormons who don’t agree with them.