No, I want you to think, not about those mistakes, but about how easily he lies about them, how glibly he obfuscates the moral clarity surrounding them.

Not Like Clinton, or Just Like Him?  You Decide

First, the former Speaker of the House was asked in detail about whether he was hypocrital to pursue Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal when Gingrich himself was engaged in a long-term adulterous affair (with the woman who is now his wife).  Gingrich has an interesting way of distinguishing between his own sleazy infidelity and Bill Clinton’s lies about the same kind of behavior:

Gingrich, when pressed that it was hypocrisy, responded that “people listen to your question but don’t listen to the facts.”

When pressed about having an affair himself, he responded many people approached him at the time and explained lots of people had affairs. But he always responded that it was lying under oath that made it an issue.

“I’ve been through two divorces,” Gingrich said. “I’ve been deposed both times under oath. Both times I told the truth in the deposition because I know that it is, I’m not a lawyer and I know it’s a felony, Bill Clinton is a lawyer. He’s a Yale Law School graduate. He knew it was perjury. He knew it was a felony.”

In other words, “I may have been a sleazeball and a hypocrite, but I didn’t lie about it — at least not under oath!” There.  Do you feel better about this man now?

Like so much of what Gingrich says, this response is — how to put this delicately? — an insult to the public’s intelligence. As one of the commenters to the post says, “Gingrich wasn’t the same as Bubba because nobody knew publicly he was having ANOTHER affair, cheating on ANOTHER sick wife…if they had, none of [the Clinton impeachment drama] would’ve proceeded, perjury or no perjury.”

Yet another Politico commenter raises an ominous point: “Well, there’s an opening: Let’s see Newt’s depositions in the 2 divorces to check out whether he told the truth.” As long as he is a candidate, Newt’s past will be the gift that keeps on giving, as closet after closet is opened to reveal yet another skeleton.

And Another Example

Remember the great signature moment of the second South Carolina presidential debate, when Newt Gingrich rose up in righteous indignation and thundered at the elite news media, which had no interest in the truth but simply wanted to to get him, and any other Republican candidate they could?  Remember how he stated, with fiery certainty and crystalline clarity, that his campaign had offered several witnesses to ABC news who would counter his ex-wife Marianne’s story, but ABC was not interested in speaking to those people?

As Rick Perry might say, Oops.  No such thing happened.  Here’s the video:

Well, so much for fiery certainty and crystalline clarity. I must admit, I am impressed, in a morbid way, by the ease with which Newt Gingrich lies so convincingly.  Watching him do that is like observing the behavior of a rare and exotic species of animal. It is astonishing, frightening, and disturbing all at once.  Is this the kind of man we want as President of the United States?  R. Emmett Tyrell doesn’t think so, and reminds us that we have been down this road before.

Conservatives should not be surprised by the scandals that lie ahead, if they stick with him. Those of us, who raised the question of character in 1992, were confronted by an indignant Bill Clinton, treating the topic as a low blow. To listen to him, character was the “c” word of American politics. It was reprehensible to mention it. By now we know. Character matters. Paul, Santorum, and Romney have it. Newt has Clinton’s character.

It sure looks that way. Please, please, voters of Florida — and voters everywhere who care about electing decent men and women to positions of trust and authority — keep that in mind.
 

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The Mormon Lay Ministry

The story York relates makes perfect sense to Mormons, who are steeped in the Church’s organizational makeup.   The key to understanding this story is to understand that Mormonism has a lay ministry.  Romney was a stake president in 1994.  A stake is roughly the Mormon equivalent of a Catholic diocese and usually consists of around 2500 members of the Church in seven or eight wards, which are congregations like parishes.  Each ward is presided over by a bishop, who is like a pastor and does all the things pastors do – care for the poor, provide marriage and life counseling, hear confessions, work with the youth.  (Romney was a bishop before he was a stake president.)  The stake president and the bishops, as well as their counselors and all of the many other members who assist them, are unpaid laity.  In other words, they have a day job, and devote 20-40 hours a week or more to their callings and are deeply loved and respected by the members they serve.

The office of stake president is one of the most responsible in the church.  Stake presidents are selected by the Church’s highest leaders.  They thus are representatives of the Church, both internally and externally.  What they say and do in their personal lives matters a great deal to the Church and its members.

So Why Brief the Church’s Leaders?

In 1994 Romney was about to enter a national political race against Ted Kennedy, one of the most famous political figures in the USA, and was a stake president.  He learned from his pollsters that he could never win in Massachusetts if he took a pro-life position.  York:

How Romney handled that dilemma is described in a new book, “Mitt Romney: An Inside Look at the Man and His Politics,” by Boston journalist Ronald Scott. A Mormon who admires Romney but has had his share of disagreements with him, Scott knew Romney from local church matters in the late 1980s.

Scott had worked for Time Inc., and in the fall of 1993, he says, Romney asked him for advice on how to handle various issues the media might pursue in a Senate campaign. Scott gave his advice in a couple of phone conversations and a memo. In the course of the conversations, Scott says, Romney outlined his views on the abortion problem….

In light of the polling data, Romney decided to run as a pro-choice candidate, pledging to support Roe v. Wade, while remaining personally pro-life….

In November 1993 … Romney … traveled to Salt Lake City to meet with church elders. Gathering in the Church Administration Building, Romney, in Scott’s words, “laid out for church leaders … what his public position would be on abortion — personally opposed but willing to let others decide for themselves.”

By Scott’s account, Romney wasn’t seeking approval or permission; he was telling the officials what he was going to do. Scott quotes a “senior church leader” saying Romney “didn’t ask what his position should be, nor did he ask the brethren to endorse his position. He came to explain, and his explanation was consistent with church teachings and policies.”

According to Scott, some of the leaders were unhappy with Romney’s plan and let him know it. “I may not have burned bridges, but a few of them were singed and smoking,” Romney told Scott in a phone conversation.

This story tells us something about what Romney’s true feelings on life are. It also tells us something about his independence from the Church when it comes to political matters.

And So….

John and I have both met Ron Scott, when we were fellow speakers with Scott on a panel about Romney and religion. I’ve also corresponded with Scott. He is no Romney shill and disagrees with him politically.

The time seems right for this kind of information to come out.  In my opinion, it’s helpful to the overall discussion of the role of faith in the candidate’s life.  York notes:

By all accounts, Romney did a lot of good in his time as a Mormon official, and that work was a significant part of his life. In the coming campaign, voters will want to know more about it.

From what I’ve seen it seems to me that Romney’s supporters have been hoping he’d do that very thing.  Watch this space!

Finally….

It’s New Year’s Eve and so it seems fitting to close with this from Stewart Schwartz of The American Thinker:

Yes but “he’s a Mormon — he’s in a cult,” another spat, echoing at least one Baptist leader who urged evangelical Christians not to vote for Romney “because he’s a Mormon[.]”  Ah, but doing and being make for worship in a way that words and song only begin to express, which makes Mitt Romney as evangelical in walk as Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann.  Which means this: Evangelicals have three dogs in this hunt.  And Mitt, because of his experience and integrity and faith, his potential to lift a nation economically and emotionally reeling from a Democrat-led descent into the leftist swamps — well, that dog’ll hunt!

Mitt Romney, like Perry and Bachmann, lives and breathes faith in a life so authentic that it automatically makes him a political outsider, the real deal in a political world where love and loyalty are measured in nanoseconds.  Who is Mitt Romney?  New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie answered that simply, telling Iowa primary voters of an enduring and intimate love for his family, a love so un-Beltway that it shines in “a guy who is a father and a husband and loves his wife and his kids.”

Mitt Romney not part of the faith-based conservative traditions that power a culture built by American exceptionalism?  In the words popularized by that great Catholic theologian, Bing Crosby, “‘Tain’t so, honey, ’tain’t so…”  Mitt Romney, in public and private, demonstrates biblical values in walk and talk, in battling an entrenched Beltway class that includes Obama and Newt Gingrich and, he says, is “gutting” a great nation with  ”[s]low growth, out-of-control regulation, and chronic uncertainty.”

And so it doesn’t really matter whether Mitt is Christian, Mormon, atheist, or Pescatarian.  What does matter is that he is not Barack Obama, that he is not a Beltway insider, and that he does not answer every question with the words “more government.”

Happy New Year!

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I really mean what I say about that being an insult on the deepest possible level – that is something I know because I have had it thrown at me.  We Christians tend to debate about who is and who in not inside the club all the time.  Such debate does not generally have the import it carries with it at the moment, but it is fairly common.  The exclusion of Catholicism from the fold is reasonably common amongst the more hardcore of we Protestants, but somehow, not withstanding the rants of Jeffress, we have found a way to co-exist amiably.  Never been a problem for me personally.

However, within Protestantism there is a branch called “Pentecostalism.”  In the broadest of terms, Pentecostals have an overt, and many would say overwhelming, focus on the miraculous – most commonly “glossolalia,” or the speaking in tongues.  The strict definition of a Pentecostal is someone that believes that the conversion experience comes in two parts.  The first would be the salvation experience, or the “acceptance of Christ as your Lord and Savior,” that we are all so familiar with.  The second part would be a separate experience known as “baptism of the Holy Spirit” and this experience is universally accompanied by glossolalia.  There are volumes and volumes written about this stuff and I could go on for days, but that is all you need to know for the story at hand.

When I was in high school, a Pentecostal revival movement swept through my community.  People not normally prone to such things were claiming ecstatic experiences and “miracles galore” were happening throughout the community.  For a whole bunch of reasons, this was a tide I resisted.  But it resulted in a deep hurt.  It took some years, but the movement eventually died a violent and tragic death.  But long before it turned so ugly, one of my closest friends, a spiritual peer if you will, that was caught up in it accused me point blank of “not being a Christian because I had not spoken in tongues.”  Fortunately I am still friends with this individual today – some 40 years later – and that, I believe, is the real miracle to come out of the whole thing.

Boy, it hurt at the time though, obviously because I remember it so vividly today.  The scar from the wound that was created by that accusation serves as a constant reminder to me that some theological opinions are best kept to oneself.  Needless to say, a wound that deep resulted in a number of counter-accusations, some substantive and some designed to wound as deeply as I was wounded.  One of the arguments that I made that sticks with me even to this day was that my friend could not possibly expect me to come to his point of view, nor even be much of a friend if he was going to so casually toss about such insult.  He was free to believe I was wrong and he was free to pray for my correction, as I did his, but such an accusation served no purpose but to construct a wall where a bridge should be.

In the end, that is the bottom line here.  The theological chasm between Mormonism and traditional creedal Christianity is indeed wide.  I am fascinated by how it has narrowed over the years, but it remains quite large at the moment.  But at a time when our nation desperately needs to change course we need bridges, not walls.  Yes, I want Mitt Romney to be the next President of the United States.  But I am also smart enough to know that he might not even be the Republican nominee – that’s politics.  But you can bet your bottom dollar that I am going to support the Republican nominee because the nation so needs a new direction.  That is unless there has been such a wall constructed between myself and such a hypothetical not-Romney nominee that I cannot overcome it to pull the lever.

That is something Camp Perry and others with religion issues about Romney need to think about.

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Think about it for a minute.  Most acknowledge that it will end up like the Canadian or British systems which are on de facto rationing.  On what basis will the rationing decisions be made?  I can think of some.  How about smoking?  You smoke, you forgo treatment for lung disease.  Or how about beef consumption?  You eat more than 8 ounces of beef a week and you will be denied access to the cholesterol lowering statins.  Of course, unprotected sex will not be on the list of forbidden behaviors.

Yep – that’s social engineering.  But I failed to realize just how awful it could get until I came upon this article in the BBC:

Doctors are demanding that NHS staff be given a right to discuss spiritual issues with patients as well as being allowed to offer to pray for them.

Medics will tell the British Medical Association conference this week that staff should not be disciplined as long as they handle the issue sensitively.

The doctors said recent cases where health workers had got into trouble were making people fearful.

But atheists said it was wrong to mix religion and health care.

There it is, in black and white.   The nationalized health care system in Britain is being used to prevent the discussion of religious matter in a medical setting.  Look at that last sentence – ponder it – “But atheists said it was wrong to mix religion and health care.”  Can you conceive of a time when religion is more important than end of life?  I bet all of us of faith have a story somewhere in our lives where faith restored health when medicine could not.  Or where it brought comfort to those in pain or even terminal.  No place do our lives intersect more with religion than when it comes to our health.  I wonder how many of those atheists have prayed, “just in case” when they received their cancer diagnosis?

To say that religion and health care “do not mix,” is not an attempt to keep religion a “private matter,” it is an effort to wipe religion out.   And yet, the argument has some merit if the government provides health care.  Imagine a Catholic individual denied the Last Rights because priests cannot be allowed in government owned and operated hospitals because “religion and health care, since the areligious government provides it, do not mix.”

Proponents of nationalized health care can call my assertions here preposterous if they want, but are they?  But there it is in the British system.  Yes, if you read the entire BBC article, you can see there is a chaplaincy system – its just doctors that are not allowed to discuss religion with patients – but how sterile is that?  I know many Christian doctors, many of whom pray for each patient, even if quietly and privately, as they see them, and it is effective.   Imagine health care robbed of the simple power of prayer.

Obamacare is not nearly as benign as it appears on the surface.  Monday morning update:  Here’s a piece on the same thing from the conservative leaning London Telegraph.

And while we are looking at Britain…

Here is something to think about.   This article appeared in the London Telegraph by the Anglican assistant Bishop of Newcastle.

Britain is no longer a Christian nation

If recent trends are any guide, many Church of England parishes will have been cheered by higher attendances at Easter services. The last published statistics for 2006/7 show rises of 7 and 5 per cent in church going at Christmas and Easter.

But these figures are just about the only signs of hope for the church and certainly not the first green shoots of a revival. Other statistics make for gloomy reading.

Annual decline in Sunday attendance is running at around 1 per cent. At this rate it is hard to see the church surviving for more than 30 years though few of its leaders are prepared to face that possibility.

[...]

The figure rises by a small amount if adult baptism and thanksgiving services are included but it is hard to see the Church of England being able to justify its position as the established church on the basis of these numbers.

Yet, if one looks at the religious identification figures from the UK in 2001 (newest I could find)  one sees that over 70% of the population still identifies as “Christian.”  So how does the assistant bishop justify his conclusion that it is no longer a “Christian” nation?  Well,of course, all his stats are about the official, established church.  Will the UK cease to be Christian if the Anglican church indeed becomes so weak that it can no longer justify its status as the established church?

Of course not, it will just become more like America which is the most religious nation on the planet.  So why the woe?  Well, establishment is a big deal, government money, perks, etc.  I wonder how many leaders in the value voters crowd in our nation seek those perks and how many of them are really about the issues they claim to represent?  Further, I wonder how their stance on voting for someone of a different religion, even if having the same values, correlates?

Sadly, we’ll never know.  Such data could never be reliably gathered.  But it is interesting to think about.

A final British note…

This Thursday, July 2, the lovely wife and I are off to cruise around the island of Britain with blogfather Hugh and friends.  We will be gone for a couple of weeks   If there is news between now and then, I will post, but while gone, unless something super major happens, I will leave you in Lowell’s way too busy hands.  Maybe you want to check he and his wife out at True North.  I’ll be “going travelogue” at Blogotional if you want to see pics and hear about adventures.

Brief Monday postscript:  Gee, this sounds awfully “Christian” to me.

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

But scanning the news this morning has come close to breaking my spirit.  The daily headlines I get from the Washington Times, a purposefully conservative newspaper, were lead by this:

Social conservatives fall from moral high ground

Republicans retreat from values claims

That, dear friends hurts a lot coming from that source.  Two thoughts cross my mind.  The first is that social conservatives, in a sense, deserve this.  We do attempt to stand on high moral ground.  And while we hold a religious belief that relies on grace, the world does not share that belief.  In such a circumstance, when we stand on that high ground, we are obligated to live up to it.

I have said in the church for years that the scandals that plague TV preachers do the cause of Christianity real harm.   The same applies in this situation. As morally based political activists, our cause is hurt tremendously by scandals like this.  We are now in the unfortunate and unappealing situation of having to throw Sanford under the bus.  At a time when he and his family have much need, and all our instincts as people of God is to give it, we have no choice but to denounce him as a part of our movement.

This is why, much as he has worked to regain our trust and redeem himself, there are limits to how high Newt Gingrich can be allowed to climb again.  This is also why, as appealing as she appears. there are limits to Sarah Palin too. While the issue of her daughter is just her daughter and not her, and her daighter made heroic choices in the face of the circumstance, it taints, and we cannot at this juncture afford even a taint.

This is why we have to exercise much care, much more than we historically have, in who we choose to lead and represent us.

The second point that comes to mind is that this headline may be the result of Republican infighting.   With Huckabee’s antics and Palin’s divisiveness, social conservatives have been under much fire inside the party since the last cycle.  It would not surprise me if fiscal and defense conservatives were using this scandal to shore up their positions in the party.

Such is unseemly and simply cannot be tolerated.  We cannot win anything unless all three legs of the movement can restore the coalition.  Any Republican using this scandal sides with the liberal Democrats.

Prayers for the Sanford family and prayers for the party.

Postscript:  Jonathon Martin has a more sober analysis of the damage this causes Republicans.   Although, his lack of mention of Romney as one of the new generation of leaders is puzzling.  And Dan Gilgoff piles on.

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I happen to favor traditional marriage and suspect in the long run we’ll go back to traditional marriage. I don’t believe we’re going to follow Europe down the road of a secularized, nonreligious society. If anything, I suspect that in the next 30 years Europe will become dramatically more religious because what it will find is that a secular society is stunningly sterile and has no natural base on which to organize civilization.

Please go join the discussion there.  It would be bad form for us to co-opt it here, but I will make my comments in this forum.

First of all, it is a near certainty that Europe will become “dramatically more religious” in the next 30 years.  The real question is “what religion?” and “why?”  The answers I see are, “Islamic” and “demographic.”  See here.   Europe’s native birth rate is so low that they are importing Islamic workforces in droves.  They will soon overwhelm the native population.  This is one of the reasons that our efforts in the Middle East and the GWOT in general are so important.  It probably is not a war we can ever win in the sense of defeating the enemy.  But if we can apply enough pressure that Islam will reform in a sense similar to what happened to Christianity a few centuries ago, we can avoid global religious conflict.

Even if Europe were to return to Christianity in the Gingrich predicted fashion, it would be a bit of an ugly thing.  That is not serious religious conversion – its societally-imposed and for reasons other than religious ones.  It would be a pretty sterile religion too.  Which means I am not at all certain how helpful it would be.  Religion changes people, who become; therefore, better people – who in turn make a better society. Using religion as a tool to enforce social mores is the root of the rebellion that created our nation.  People need to choose religion for personal reasons, or it turns ugly fast.  Hence the state of Islam today, or Christianity a few centuries ago.  (Oh, by the way, this paragraph is a clarion call to missionaries of all sorts.)

Finally, the nation can return to traditional marriage without returning to religion.  That will probably happen.  Same sex marriage is a recipe for societal decay with or without a religious component.  Hence the reason every society in history regardless of religion or lack thereof rejected it.  Even the devotedly secular communist regimes of recent times have rejected same sex marriage.

Now, go to Dan’s post and discuss.

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

[W]hile we [Mormons] don’t like what Big Love is doing, we’re not doing much about it. We’ve learned by observation that protests and boycotts merely increase the publicity, and therefore the viewership, of such hostile productions as the Big Love temple episode.

So the church’s official advice to its members is: Ignore it. (See this, for more.)

. . .

Most Mormons are seeing the Big Love temple episode in the context of the recent outpouring of hatred and bile from those who most vehemently opposed Proposition 8.

Mormons have been targeted for business boycotts; some have lost their jobs because they contributed to the campaign to defend marriage.

The result is that few of us have any desire to act as the worst of our opponents have acted. After someone has boycotted a friend’s business, it makes it a bit harder for you to want to call for a boycott.

By and large, while we’d prefer that everybody handle differences of opinion peacefully, we’d rather be persecuted than be the persecutors. The few times in our history when we have departed from that principle, the results have shamed us for generations. Tolerance works better.

I agree with Card, by and large, but I think the difficulty lies in knowing when to speak out, and how loudly, in response to attacks.  In politics, for example, a candidate cannot often turn the other cheek when religiously-based whisper campaigns are under way. 

As far as the HBO show goes, my guess is that this latest kerfluffle will pass without much impact on anyone or anything.

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I think it is important to note that “Big Love,” which a high-level HBO executive told me was supposed to be the next “Sopranos” for HBO, is struggling, and this may be the show’s final season unless ratings improve.  The same HBO executive told me personally that HBO would be sensitive to Mormon beliefs and would not confuse the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with the many polygamous sects in the world today, many of which have historical roots in Momonism.

I guess HBO forgot those promises.  HBO’s cynical effort to stir up controversy by televising what purports to be a version of the temple ceremonies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which are deeply sacred to committed Mormons, must be seen as what it is:  a ratings ploy.  By outraging Mormons and goading them to complain publicly, HBO hopes more people will watch their show.

So, in light of the inevitable attention this little flap will generate, here are a few thoughts and related links that may actually be helpful to those unfamiliar with the main issues:

1.   The relationship between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the “Mormons”) and the fundamentalist polygamist sects is like the relationship between Catholics and Lutherans.  They are part of the same faith family, but totally distinct faiths.  The Roman Catholic Church has nothing to do with the modern actions and beliefs of the Lutheran Church, and vice versa.  (By making the analogy, I do not intend to equate Lutherans and polygamous sects; Lutheranism is a major world religion, and a major force in history.  The polygamist sects are very small, reclusive groups.)

2.  As a wise man reminded me yesterday:  ”If you are a Mormon, and you want to be excommunicated from the church quickly,  practice polygamy.  All other sins take longer.”

3.  Daily Variety, of all places, publishes today a fine commentary by a Mormon reader about the entire controversy. It’s really a must-read.

What does all this have to do with politics?  Well, as John and I have argued repeatedly, there is a “for whom the bell tolls” aspect to this episode:  When the mainstream news and entertainment media abuse any religion in this manner, they make it harder for people of faith to be visibly active in the public square.  The best thing any of our readers can do to support the principles underlying Article VI of the Constitution is not to watch “Big Love” this Sunday night, and encourage everyone they know to do the same thing.

Ironically, most Mormons don’t even have HBO – my family doesn’t – because we prefer not to have R-rated programming in our homes.  So if there will be any “boycott” of this Sunday’s “Big Love” episode, it won’t be Mormons who are leading it.

Watch an ennobling movie instead.  I recommend A Man for All Seasons:

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

It’s kind of interesting to note that Rep. Flake is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I don’t think that ever comes up in his re-election campaigns.  But listen to what he has to say.  Does his religion have any bearing on whether or not you want someone in Congress espousing the views Rep. Flake expresses here?

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

It’s a little different from our usual material here, but seems quite appropriate.

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