Mitt Romney and the emergence of anti-Mormon rhetoric

I consider myself pretty lefty. Not just L.A. lefty, but Austin lefty. Granola-chugging, salamander-hugging lefty. But something’s been bothering me for awhile – actually, since this article appeared on the AP wire on February 24th. Entitled “Romney Family Tree Has Polygamy Branch” goes through Mitt Romney’s past to illustrate how his great-grandfather was a polygamist and how – scandal – as a family of long-time Mormons, there are a number of other polygamists in his family tree.

That’s the Associated Press. The blogosphere – notably a place called Down With Tyranny! takes it a step further (as the blogosphere was born to do) calling it “the Shadowy Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormon cult). The author refers to Mormonism as “more like a fraternal self-help organization than a Christian religion” and that there are “many extremely highly placed members of the Mormon cult in very high places – with a lot of money to throw around.” The greatest is that at the end of the article, he adds, “don’t get me wrong; there are also normal people who are Mormons, from Arthur Kane of the New York Dolls and Brenaden Steineckert of Rancid to Gladys Knight, Butch Cassidy and Bowie’s legendary guitar player Mick Ronson.”

See, this is why liberals can’t get ahead. In an attempt to seem hip, they can allow themselves to sound like utter fucking morons. Seriously, have you seen New York Doll? You want to call Arthur Kane fucking normal?!

I was a Mormon for a number of months back in high school. The church was huge where I went to school – Spring, Texas – so big, that there’s now a temple there so members no longer have to drive up to Dallas for ceremonies that aren’t just done in the church (like weddings). I have been several religions. Hell, I went through a conversion to the Zion Christian Church in South Africa two months ago. I’ve taken Catholicism classes, been baptized as a Lutheran, got married in a Jewish ceremony (my wife is Jewish) and attended mosque back in Houston. I find religion fascinating, though I am an atheist.

Mormons are just one more fucking branch of Protestantism. That’s fucking it. Yes, a lot of people have problems believing the veracity of Joseph Smith’s claims regarding how the Book of Mormon came into being. But hey, churches have been born on crazier shit and will continue to be (seriously, lets talk flying spaghetti monsters and a monarch’s desire for divorce). The Mormon church has its share of problems – not allowing blacks to hold the priesthood until the mid-seventies, the secondary role of women in traditionally male roles – but so have many faiths. Read John Howard Griffin’s great civil rights essay Racist Sins of Christians. He’s the guy who did the much-reviled Black Like Me experiment, but was actually a kind of odd, searching Christian who – frankly – wasn’t trying to do some sort of exploitation bit that Black Like Me is seen as now. He was a good friend to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, one of the most fascinating Christian minds of the twentieth century. Both men made a career writing about the problems they saw in their churches, but both men shared a strong and true faith.

Which brings me back to Mitt Romney. Presidential campaigns are muddy, murky ugly things and always have been – from last-minute reveals about out-of-wedlock children (oh, you cad, Grover Cleveland!) to Willie Horton and the LBJ-produced anti-Goldwater nuke ad – but in a land of religious freedom, it bothers me when someone’s religion is used against them. It’s like the idea that Kennedy should never have been allowed to be elected president because he would have to follow the Pope in Rome over the American people. That myth, perpetuated throughout his campaign by the Republicans, made a boogeyman out of someone else’s religion – suddenly making it seem more strange, more “shadowy” to borrow DownWithTyranny’s phrase. In an era where we’re at FUCKING WAR with anti-religious overtones coloring so much of the rhetoric (quick – say “Islamofascist” three times fast), the fact that Romney’s religiosity is being hammered at here is just one more indication of how far into fear this country has slid. Anything that even hints at being of “the other” is used to drive the herd forward.

And I’m not stupid (well…). Having a sitting president who is all about God in a way that makes me see him as a psychopath is going to make any electorate gun shy. But these articles aren’t attacking Romney himself, they’re attacking Mormonism in general. I just don’t like it.

I would disagree with the more run-of-the-mill of your suggestions (meaning "amputation by saw" not "nuclear annihilation"). Polygamy is generally cheered by modern men (who have never been around it - generally westerners) who see it simply as a way of being married and having children, but also having multiple sexual partners.

For the most part, however, it would be considered slavery by women. In cultures where polygamy was practiced beyond merely amongst the Mormons, polygamy is/was as much an identity-stripping form of degradation that turned "wives" into little more than beasts of burden. In effect, slaves to the house and slaves to their husband.

For the Mormons, polygamy was - in fact - a process by which A: more Mormons would be produced and B: would allow for more children to be birthed more rapidly in order to help with the difficulties of frontier life as the members of the LDS church were chased three-fourths of the way across a nation built on the idea of religious freedom. It is no less a degradation, but the reasons there were typically born out of a believed utilitarianism, not sexual appetite (necessarily).

Yes, women have spent millenia in positions secondary to men, but polygamy is even a worse step further. As, for me, slavery is one of the single most inhuman things that can happen to a man or woman, I would say that - yes - polygamy is right up there with the most awful things in the world.