Article VI Blog

No, really:

At the same time, Obama campaign senior advisor David Axelrod said Sunday that Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion was off-limits in Democratic strategies for the campaign.

And yet, the story continued for five more paragraphs (not to mention there were three preceding paragraphs about Republicans and Wright.)  Let’s see, false equivalency and an excuse to pound the Mormon drum a few more times.  Don’t educate, just say the word a few dozen times and let the existing prejudice do its job.  Well it is the LATimes.

It is amazing how much is being written about an “off limits” topic.  Bill Maher keeps talking about it, what is amazing is that anyone is listening.  He does not matter.  He is a bitter, ugly little man who has gotten more and more outrageous over time.  Listening to him – AT ALL – grants him credibility he does not deserve.  We routinely ignore him around these parts, but every now and then we need to remind you to ignore him – COMPLETELY.

Daniel Halper at The Weekly Standard tried to match JMR’s marvelous sarcasm from yesterday, but really no contest.

And speaking of yesterday, Jodi Kantor took to MSNBC to try and justify her really poor NYTimes piece.  This woman is a hack with an agenda:

Kantor reports some of his fellow worshipers, “who are close to Romney,” say Romney is contradicting what he talks about at church and when he is out on the campaign trail. Kantor says Romney professes being “sensitive and respectful” as well as “being generous and giving” during church, yet some of his fellow worshipers say he is “carrying out political attacks, some of which are very harsh and they see a conflict.”

That is the oldest shot at religious people in anti-religion history, it is pure cliche’.  But then never let actual reporting get in the way of an agenda.

And speaking of agenda’s, there were a couple of pieces out attempting to resurrect Evangelical credibility after the last two primaries.  One by Marvin Olasky at World Magazine is of they “lesser of two heretics” – get over it and vote” variety.  That is moderation by World standards, but still, I’m not sure the whole lesson of American religious plurality has gotten through there.

The other was at The American Spectator and was by Jeremy Lott.  The piece is long and to any student of this issue uninformative.  It recounts the major problems from the right and simply says, without much evidence, that these are minority issues.  He is correct to an extent, but there are a couple of important points he misses.  One is the impact of the vociferousness of the minority on a majority ignorant and suspicious of Mormonism.  This is why Huckabee’s attack question of 2007 was so important – despite Lott’s conviction to the contrary.  Secondly, in his efforts to portray the left’s anti-Mormon bias as far more virulent than the right’s (which it is) he leaves out the entire and terribly important Prop 8 spectacle.  In his description of Mormon belief and history, he is less than objective, and the effect is disparaging.

Despite these problems Lott’s conclusion is right on:

All of this religiosity is going to be used against him in the coming months by people who would like to knock religion down a peg—especially his own form of wonderbread, patriarchal, particularly American religion. The politically expedient course would have been for Romney to practice his Mormonism sparingly. Yet he wouldn’t have made it this far without it, and he has in the past been honest enough to admit this.

In his Bush Library speech four years ago, Romney acknowledged that his faith could “sink my candidacy,” and if that were to happen, well, “so be it.” But he believed on the whole “Americans do not respect believers of convenience. Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.”

Note in that conclusion that Romney’s religiosity will be used against all religion.  That’s the real key to all this and why this Bloomberg piece is so ugly:

Romney Is Mormons’ Path to the Christian Mainstream

The Christian mainstream is not defined by politics, but Bloomberg wants to make it appear that way in an effort to drive a wedge.  Which is why the tepid pieces by Olasky and Lott are insufficient.  They work too hard to maintain a boundary when unity is called for.  Mormon theological differences are not in dispute, by either side of that issue.  They do not need to be discussed.

Obama simply needs to be beaten.

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For a short period of time many of us were comfortable supporting Mitt Romney until the Washington Post pointed out that one hundred years before he was born Mitt Romney killed Arkansans through his Mormon proxies.

This is genuinely terrifying.

First, there is the realization that some Mormons in some places at some times have done bad things. Many Americans believing Mormons to be without sin merely as a result of being Mormons had supported Governor Romney. Now we must question our assumption, because once our eyes were opened by the Post, we saw that many Mormons had done bad things.

We should realize that guilt is by association. Romney is guilty of all crimes Mormons have committed. We eventually must ask the Post about liberals association with Stalin in the past and whether Americans will be able to listen to them, since some American liberals went light on Stalin who killed tens of millions of people. However, they have rightly seen the priority of past Mormon historical sins, especially ones hard to document, because some Mormons are not American liberals and thus have a higher burden of proof.

We all, of course, accept that liberal Mormons like Harry Reid have paid for their Mormon guilt by washing in the water of mainstream liberalism.

And the knowledge that Romney can control the Mormon past makes this fallibility genuinely frightening.

What kind of man would reach through the space-time continuum in the order to kill non-Mormon Arkansans?

We must investigate Governor Romney further.

Over the last hundred-fifty years scores of Mormons have committed crimes while claiming to be Mormons. Will Governor Romney tell us criminal by criminal why he allowed these crimes or if he was not using his time travel powers why he did not? How could a good Romney allow pain and suffering caused by his Mormon minions?

Second, there exists the possibility that Governor Romney, already frighteningly perfect in appearance, is actually a Time Lord. The new house in California, with its “elevator,” becomes a plausible home for a TARDIS. Is America ready for a time lord as President? What is his relationship with Doctor Who? Is he in league with the  some unknown group? Will he be making a BBC series while President?

Finally, we have the actions described by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in “A Study in Scarlet.” In this fictional account, Doyle describes Mormons as very, very bad historically. Of course, he also describes the entire Mid-West as uninhabitable. However, many Americans first experience of Mormons in literature has been this story. Why hasn’t Governor Romney done something abut this? Why hasn’t he commented on it? How does he plan to deal with the voting bloc of Baker Street Irregulars in the American public? Shouldn’t he respond to every conceivable prejudice against Mormons Americans hold?

I will admit that my first exposure to Mormons in literature was this book and Governor Romney, alive at the time, did nothing about it. What is he hiding?

All of us most appreciate the courage of the Post in broaching the issues related to accountability, time travel, and community.

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Late Friday, Dylan Byers @ Politico asked, “When will we talk about Mormonism?“  (Like it hasn’t been talked about incessantly since about 2006!)  Apparently the NYTimes decided the answer to the question was yesterday, Sunday.  They ran a very long piece by Jodi Kantor that recycles old stories and interview the usual suspects.  It’s all hearsay, and almost no Mormons were interviewed, certainly none of standing or import.  I am tempted to simply dismiss it as another bad bit of journalism about a subject that doesn’t really matter except that Michael Shear of the same newspaper write on Friday about race and religion.  Shear quite dishonestly tries to wrap Romney and the SuperPac that threatened a Wrightstrike into the same package.  Shear’s piece sounds very much like a “don’t go there” warning, and yet the paper does not just wander, but strides at rapid pace into the space with the Kantor piece – which was widely syndicated, by the way.

It is clear that Obama and his willing thralls in the media want to make this campaign about anything but the actual issues.  They are betting on the notion that America views people of color as oppressed and people of faith as at least one of the oppressors.

This brings me to a debate between WaPo opinion guys Michael Gerson and Colbert King on Romney’s Liberty University speech.  Here’s a link to Gerson’s latest entry in the discussion.  Says Gerson:

But King’s objection is not primarily literary but ideological.  Romney’s offense is addressing a message to a “narrow” audience of evangelicals, who need to be informed that they are no longer a cultural majority.

They have known this, of course, since the 1920s, when Clarence Darrow, H.L. Mencken and others made it pretty clear.  But evangelicals retain their rights as citizens and voters, which makes it understandable (and democratically appropriate) that Romney should appeal to them.  Evangelicals, by the way, are not predominantly upper class. They are more likely to view themselves as besieged group than as part of a ruling elite. And they have a famously uneasy relationship with Mormonism.  Which makes it a stretch to say that an upper class, Mormon member of the ruling elite was pandering to an evangelical audience that looks “pretty much like him.” I imagine the crowd was conscious of a few differences.

All that said, I agree with King that Romney needs to craft a general election message that extends beyond traditional conservative constituencies.

Two things to point out here.  First Gerson is right that Evangelicals, “are more likely to view themselves as besieged group than as part of a ruling elite.”  Evangelicals are lining up behind Romney rapidly and with good reason – they feel oppressed by an administration that has pretty consistently trampled on their rights and certainly discounted their viewpoint.   Evangelicals certainly view themselves as increasingly oppressed.  They do not, as of yet view people of color as oppressors, but if Obama wants to play racial identity games, they just might develop that view.

The second point from Gerson is that Romney’s speech did precisely what Gerson and King agree on, but seem to think he did not do.  Yes, he spoke to Evangelicals in the speech, but what he did was invite them into the bigger tent of people of faith generally – a tent that is much larger than just “traditional conservative constituencies.“  This also points out one of the places Team Obama has miscalculated.  Most people are “of faith,” even if they are not in total agreement with their particular chosen, or unchosen, religion.   If Obama really wants to make this about race and religion, he is playing with fire and he will lose.

Concerns about Mormonism are not, except within small subsets on the left and the right, based in opposition to it – they are based more on the kind of curiosity about the unknown and the perceived to be strange.  Once they find out that Mormons put their pants on one leg at a time and do not have tails of any sort, the curiosity usually dies away pretty rapidly, and they revert to the common American understanding that race and religion are not matters for the political battlefield.  If Obama wants to stand on this ground, he will be rejected.

Which brings me back to the issue of precisely who is oppressed right now.  At Powerline, Scott Johnson write about HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ Georgetown commencement address. He points out that she raises the JFK speech in defense of the Obamacare mandates with regards to contraception, et. al. As I read the post, I grew increasingly angry.

There was a time in this nation when churches ran extensive healthcare networks.  Until Medicare and Medicaid, the government had little or nothing to do with the healthcare industry.  However, since the inception of those programs, government intrusion into healthcare has grown at a frightening pace, leading to Obamacare which is probably the largest single power-grab by our government in history.   In the process of this encroachment, churches have been pushed out of the healthcare business either by conscience conflicting mandates like this most recent one, or through lack of funding since the government was sucking up all the healthcare dollars.

And yet, Sebelius has the unmitigated gall to claim the church should sit on the sidelines because of church/state separation?!  Who crossed that line to begin with?

Look, if the nation really wants the government running healthcare – that’s America.  It marks the church’s failure to retain its cultural influence.  However, the question of what the nation really wants is seriously in doubt given the circumstances of the adoption of Oabamacare.  Given this background, “chutzpah” is the word that comes to mind to describe Sebelius’ claim, and yet it seems inadequate – Sebelius’ claim may just cross the line into “oppressive.”

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Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright is back in the news in a big way.  Apparently a SuperPAC backing Romney was going to do an ad blitz aimed in that direction, but has now backed away, with some public Romney encouragement.  A far out few want to make the case that Mormonism is now on the table, and others point out that after all the Mormon talk to be shocked at the Wright talk is disingenuous.

This one is a tough call.  For one thing, Rev. Wright is an individual, not a religion.  Not only that, he is an individual that Obama claims in his “autobiography” (given the admitted use of composite characters and other literary devices the quotes are mandatory; the line between fiction and non-fiction seems to be getting finer by the moment) had enormous influence in his life.  There is also Rev. Wright’s penchant for saying distinctly political things in the context of religious discussion.

Certainly, things like this are completely out of line.  Jim Geraghty said something this morning that I find really troubling:

But one of the big reasons President Obama finds himself within a few points of Mitt Romney is the gap between what he promised and what he delivered.  As Obama addressed when he spoke to a disappointed donor, “I’m running against the Barack Obama of 2008.” So why is there that gap? (Besides the fact that immanentizing the Eschaton has always proven tougher in practice than in theory.) Why is what Obama delivered so different from what he promised? Isn’t it fair, considering the poor job the press did in examining much of his life, to ask if Obama is just a fundamentally different man than the image that was presented to the country in 2008?

Anybody besides me remember the “Mormons lie” meme?  That’s the line that bounced around a lot in the ’08 primary and surfaced in the far right corners again this time that since Mormon theology is so “changable,” Mormons must have a looser view of truth than the rest of us and therefore cannot be trusted.  In his newsletter this morning Geraghty examines Obama’s record, his governance, his campaign claims and the literary devices in his autobiography and concludes:

So what that tells us is not only that Obama will lie — just about every politician will — but he’ll offer a truly implausible lie and weather the consequences. “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

That is all we really need to know.  Fascinating as a trip through the mind of Obama and the minds and faith that made it might be, they are not relevant.  We know Obama is a liar of stupendous magnitude.  In the immortal words of Stan Lee, “‘Nuff Said!”

Anything else casts aspersions on others of similar belief and faith that are less spiteful and vituperous that Rev. Wright.  Wrong as I think Liberation Theology is, many good and well meaning people hold it, and do good things.  For the last two days here we have discussed character.   Rev. Wright in his hatred, Pres. Obama in his lying and both in their lack of humility are men of poor character.  Religion should make people of good character, but often those of poor character gain influence within it.  To judge faith on that basis is simply to note that we are all sinners – that’s not news.

Closing Links

Thomas Sowell on racial prejudice.

Talk about majoring in the minors.

And this caught my eye as a reminder of just how ugly humanity can be.  “There but by the grace of God…,” comes to mind.

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So, Brookings releases a study that shows that Romney’s Mormon faith could help him in the general.  The press analyzes endlessley (just two examples – here and here), but in reality there is little to analyze, it’s a no-brainer.  Guess what, religious people are going to vote for someone, anyone really, that stands with them on the issues over somebody, like Barack Obama, that does not.  The fact that Mormons and traditional Christians agree on these matters just cements that rather unremarkable fact.

Fortunately, there are people out there that look at things a little deeper.  Consider Daniel Henninger:

For Barack Obama, life is politics. For Mitt Romney, life includes politics; politics, he said, does not define us.

And then consider Ross Douthat, guest writing at WaPo:

For decades, the cultural tug-of-war between the Christian right and the secular left has encouraged people to envision the American religious future in binary terms –as either godless or orthodox, either straightforwardly secular or traditionally Christian. But these examples and trends suggest a more complicated reality, in which religious institutions have declined but religion itself has not, and Americans increasingly redefine Christianity as they see fit rather than than abandoning it entirely.

[...]

But the heretical imperative in America’s religious life has usually existed in a kind of fruitful and creative tension with more conservative, institutional, and historically-rooted forms of faith –first denominational Protestantism and then later the Roman Catholic Church as well. And the post-1960s decline of these churches has taken a significant toll on our common life, in ways that both religious and secular observers should be able to recognize.

For one thing, individualistic and do-it-yourself forms of religion are less likely to bind communities together, encourage stable families, assimilate immigrants, and otherwise Americans to live in healthy fellowship with one another. It is not a coincidence that as the institutional churches have lost their purchase among poor and non-college educated Americans, that population’s social ills have multiplied and its economic prospects have dimmed.

At the same time, self-created forms of faith are also less likely to provide a check against the self’s worst impulses –whether it’s the kind of materialism that Joel Osteen’s sunny promises encourage, or the solipsism that percolates under the surface of popular spiritual memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love.” Many of America’s contemporary crises, from the housing bubble and the financial crash to the collapse of the two-parent family, can be traced to just this tendency — encouraged by too much contemporary religion — to make the self’s ambitions the measure of all things.

Finally, when strong religious impulses coexist with weak religious institutions, people become more likely to channel religious energy into partisan politics instead, and to freight partisan causes with more metaphysical significance than they can bear. The result, visible both in the “hope and change” fantasies of Obama’s 2008 campaign and the right-wing backlash it summoned up, is a politics that gives free rein to both utopian and apocalyptic delusions, and that encourages polarization without end.

So, reading through all that, what is the religious value that matters?  It’s simple really – Character formation.  We discussed yesterday the lack of humility in the Obama White Houses’s assault on the history section of the White House web site.  That’s a lack of character.  We see Henninger naming Obama as a product of precisely the problems that Douthat describes.

Now, I am not necessarily with Douthat that all this falls from the binary view of things.  The binary view is a result of the root problem.  (Note that his argument is a bit circular when the binary view is in fact the third result of the problem the binary view causes)  The root problem is that the church, institutional and otherwise has abandoned character formation, substituting instead any number of things from mere salvation to politics to simple “success.”

Character formation results in people that are humble, that understand the proper role of politics in life, people that can love homosexuals without supporting same sex marriage – the list goes on.  Most importantly, good character can back a candidate of differing faith, but equally good character.  That’s the revelation in the difference between how religion played in the primary and how it will play in the general.

Those that thought and still think Romney’s religion is problematic in his race for the presidency should examine their character, and the efforts of their church’s to develop same.  They and the nation will be better off.

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Some things are simply beyond understanding.  Seth Mandel @ Commentary:

The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography on www.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax reform advocacy with his “Buffett Rule” gimmick. My first thought was, he must be joking. But he wasn’t—it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford).

He goes on to provide numerous examples.  They are breathtakingly self-important. Said Phillip Klein:

Obviously, as president, Obama can use the tools of the White House to advance his goals. But at the same time, all presidents are to some extent guardians of the institution. Sure, a lot of the White House website is naturally going to be used to promote Obama, but there are some areas that should be considered neutral ground — one of them being the history sections. White House presidential biographies are the type of thing that school kids read and they should be able to do so without being bombarded by propaganda for whoever is in power.

That’s very true, but that is putting it mildly.  Jim Geraghty in this morning’s newsletter is quick to point out:

No, what this illuminates is not Obama’s thinking – as much as we might suspect this sort of thing — but the thinking, mood, and atmosphere within the White House. Which may be even more worrisome, really; how likely is it that a staff and cabinet that reveres him as a Munificent Sun-God is likely to dissuade him when he’s on the wrong course?

How true, and the other thing that occurred to me is how incredibly immature the whole thing is.  Of course, the vast majority of adults left the Obama administration very quickly.  (Remember all those resignations?).

This whole episode should be distasteful to virtually anyone that bothers to pay attention.  And it reminds me of the fact that regardless of theological belief, the Bible contains a lot of smart things.  Things like:

1 Cor 14:20 – Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be babes, but in your thinking be mature.

Gal 5:13 – For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

I know that in my household if you had to try and put a finger on the one thing that makes Obama and his administration so unlikable, its not policy as wrong as that is.  Wrong policy is a fact of American life.  No, the one thing is the immaturity, arrogance and self-aggrandizement of this president and his administration.

Service, humility and maturity are indeed religious values, but more they are American values.  Values that have made the nation great.  They run deeper than even values about life and marriage.  These character traits are the things that have, more than anything else, made America a Judeo-Christian nation.  Further, a nation that welcomes any faith that holds those same values dear.  I think we were beginning to take them for granted.  No More.

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