An Act of Mormon Courage

The Mormon Church has always made a big deal of getting their true believers to buy into their shit. In every regular meeting, let alone things like the General Conference, they demand that everyone display their fealty to the cult leaders but "voting" en masse to support and sustain "The Prophet, Seer and Revelator" and the so-called First Presidency (which consists of the Prophet and two of his minions). Not only that, they are expected to vote to support and sustain the Twelve Apostles, and pretty much everyone down a lengthy hierarchy, including their own "ward" or "branch" leaders. To which they "signify" by a showing of hands.

But at the last General Conference of the church, all was not well in Zion.

Seven people actually went against the massive flow of "supporting and sustaining" and shouted, in answer to the regular pro-forma question of supporting the Prophet, "Opposed!"

In the tight-knit conservative, über-conformist cult that is modern Mormonism, that was an act of astounding courage. My hat is off to those seven people who were willing to stand up and call "bullshit" on what they clearly saw, and what clearly was and clearly remains, "bullshit".

Oh, and any of you Mormons who are reading this and who are questioning your faith, you don't have to suffer your spiritual crisis all by yourself. Drop by PostMormon.org and they will help you. You are not alone.

Without a Trace of Irony -- or Embarrassment

I note that one "L. Tom" (who calls themselves that?) Perry, of The Twelve -- the twelve Mormon apostles, that is -- made an interesting comment at the One True Church^TM annual conference last weekend:

Speaker after Mormon speaker warned Saturday about the need to defend "traditional families" — a legally married mother and father, who rear their children together — and about the dangers of "counterfeit and alternative lifestyles."
. . .
Perry, who at age 92 is the oldest Mormon apostle, lamented the media's glorification of "immorality and amorality," suggesting that it makes it harder to keep marriages and families intact.
"Despite what much of media and entertainment outlets may suggest, however, and despite the very real decline in the marriage and family orientation of some," he said, "the solid majority of mankind still believes that marriage should be between one man and one woman." [emphasis added]

Are you fucking kidding me? One man and one woman? Counterfeit and alternative lifestyles? This coming from the prime purveyor and practitioner of polygamy in this country for most of the 19th Century?

Yes, I mean the Mormon Church!!!

Jesus wept...

Polygamy: It's God's Plan

Okay, let's talk about that whole "one man one woman" thing. Despite the history-denying hypocritical Mormons and their support of California Prop 8 with that very slogan, the entire Right Wing is up in arms over the "destruction of marriage" by Teh Gay.

Usually I consider it beneath me to comment on this (yeah, right), but I read something today, AFA Hopes To Save Marriage From The 'Forces Of Evil' on RightWing Watch, that kind of peckered up my interest, so to speak:

The American Family Association placed a full-page advertisement in today’s edition of the Washington Post, in which the group warns the Supreme Court not to “bend what God designed merely to suit the desires of man, knowing that you do so at the expense of children, perhaps even civilization itself.”
The AFA’s Fred Jackson, who was guest-hosting “Sandy Rios In The Morning,” hailed the ad’s “forceful message” to the court and claimed that gay marriage undermines what God established in the Garden of Eden about 6,000 years ago.
“So for at least 6,000 years, people have understood marriage as between a man and a woman and it is only fairly recent history and certainly in this country have the forces of evil attempted to change all of that,” Jackson said. “It is absolutely amazing — one of the saddest facts is how many denominations, church denominations in this country, have succumbed to this pressure.”

Yeah, I know, "Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve". I get that. But what I don't get is this: "for at least 6,000 years, people have understood marriage as between a man and a woman". [emphasis added]

There's obviously a typo in there, since it should read "a man and women". Even a casual reading of the so-called Word of God, the "Holy Bible", shows that polygamy was not only tolerated by God but accepted as no big deal, if not actively encouraged. See What the Bible says about Polygamy for a few of the references to multiple wives and "concubines" in The Book.

One of the main arguing points that the wingnuttery pops up with regularly is that legalizing so-called Gay Marriage (or, as we over here in the Reality-Based Community call it, "marriage") is that it will lead to any number of "icky" things -- like polygamy. For some reason polygamy is generally number one on their list, followed closely by Rick Santorum's celebrated "man-on-dog sex" and so on down the increasingly-disgusting line.

But we need to take a step back here and look at this. Despite it being given a bad rap by child-raping assholes like Warren Jeffs and others in Fundo-Mormon and other cults, is there really anything fundamentally wrong with it? I'm open to all the usual arguments -- it demeans women, it removes too many fecund pubescent girl-children from the breeding pool, etc. etc., but if three (or more, in any combination of genders) people want to set up a household together and have the legal and contractual advantages of "marriage", why shouldn't they?

Interestingly enough, ironically enough, if the agenda for so-called "religious freedom" gets through the state legislatures and through congress, the unintended-consequence backlash may be more than the Religious Right has bargained for. For example: "My particular religion demands that I must strictly follow the practices outlined in the Old Testament. I can't eat shellfish, I can't plant my field with different crops, I can't wear two kinds of cloth, but I can and do have multiple wives. You say I can't do that? Sorry, Charlie, but The Law says I can..."

As I said the other day, be careful what you ask for -- you just might get it.

Late Score: Mormons 1, Teh Gays 0

Splashing all over the news last week was the story that the Mormon Church was making a 180-degree turn in its policies on Teh Gay.

The One True Church^TM appeared to come out in support of gay rights. But did it really? Well, as they say, "the devil is in the details".

The Prophet, Seer and Revelator of The Church, along with his sidekicks in the so-called "First Presidency" and their Corporate Board of Directors Quorum of the Twelve Apostles decided that it probably wasn't cool any more to discriminate against gay people.

That is, of course, unless the person doing that discriminating could play the Religion Card by having some deeply-felt "religious objection" to providing goods or services to one of them damn "homosessual" people, i.e., everyone in the LGBT community.

So this is another question-that-asks-itself: Who besides "religious" people are the ones doing all that homo-hating?

Answer: No one.

This means that the One True Church^© scores one point in the stupid-media-will-fall-for-anything game, but no one really has to make that Lesbian Wedding Cake or take those Two-Dicks-No-Chicks Adam & Steve wedding photographs.

"Sorry, faggots, you're encroaching on my religious liberty. Fuck off."

You know, the same way that "religious objection" kept the races separate by passing anti-miscegnation laws. How that same objection kept innkeepers from renting rooms to "Negroes". How that same objection allowed Southern lunchcounter owners to refuse to serve "anyone" they didn't want to (aka Black people). How that same objection kept Jews out of those "exclusive" clubs.

The list is pretty much endless, all of them examples of how "religious people" could play that Race-Card-in-Reverse to keep those offensive-looking Others from enjoying the vast opportunities that this nation could provide -- provide to the "right kind of folks", to be sure, but still. Isn't it better that the Select enjoy that bounty than no one enjoy it?

Do Mormons Still Believe in Polygamy?

A casual scan of the public face of Mormonism, as shown on their websites and through their many apologists, would indicate that they do not still believe in polygamy. Any more, they are very careful to try to cover up and hide the history of their polygamous past. That's understandable. It was polygamy that prevented Utah from becoming a state in the late 1880s, and the Federal Government had worked hard to disband the church by taking its assets and arresting many polygamous church leaders.

The issue of polygamy, understandably, was a Very Big Deal to the other Christians in the country -- it was seen as immoral, base, evil, irreligious, and generally just a nasty business all around. They said this even as they exhibited a morbid fascination with it. Because, you know, human nature...

Finally it came down to this: The church was going to have to stop the practice or face extinction and have its leaders spend years in prison. Plus Utah was not going to become a state -- and therefore it would miss out on the many monetary opportunities that statehood would provide.

So in 1890,  the "Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Church", Wilford Woodruff, issued a manifesto that advised church members not to enter into any marriage "prohibited by the law of the land". That essentially ended all polygamous marriages -- but only the ones that had been planned. Existing church polygamists could still keep their wives intact, and most of them did. Several families stole away in the night to settle in Alberta, Canada, and across the Mexican border where they set up many Mormon colonies, including something called "Colonia Juárez" in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, in the totally mistaken belief that neither Mexico nor Canada had laws against polygamy. Mitt Romney's grandparents were in the group that went to Juarez, where his father, George, was born. In 1968 the question came up as to whether he was a Constitutionally-required "natural-born" citizen of the United States when he was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

The Mormon Fundamentalist movement said that Woodruff got no such revelation and was therefore a "false prophet" -- anathema to Mormons -- and they split off from the One True Church, and eventually splintered into several offshoots, the most noteworthy of them being the one headed by the notorious Warren Jeffs.

Later on, though, the pre-manifesto marriages to multiple wives had to stop as well. The church members, who always choose to follow the "Prophet", had divested themselves of the supernumerary wives, mostly by attrition, by the end of the first decade of the 20th Century, and the church joined the rest of society on the "one woman one man" bandwagon. To the point that it became Holy Writ  by the time they were campaigning for the passage of Proposition 8 outlawing gay marriage in Califormia -- "It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!"

But, since the Prophet did not issue this as a "divine revelation" but rather as a "manifesto", the question remains as to whether The Lord commanded it, or did he just make it as a suggestion. None of the passages in the Doctrine and Covenants, LDS scripture authored by Joseph Smith himself, were altered to remove the whole "plural marriage" revelations by The Prophet in the 1830s. But True Believers naturally think that their Prophet is more infallible than the Pope, and many took the manifesto as though it were a new commandment.

But polygamy still exists in the church in a weird kind of way. In order to get into the top tier of Heaven (the "Celestial Kingdom") a person has to be married. And not just married -- they have to be "sealed" together in a Mormon Temple so that they will be husband and wife not only here on earth but also for "time and all eternity". Those who do not receive this "sealing" will not get to go. Sorry.

But there is a loophole. A man who is already on his way there (i.e., a good Mormon who obeys the commandments, upholds The Prophet and the General Authorities, exalts Joseph Smith, and has already been sealed to one wife) can, out of the goodness of his heart (or for a monetary consideration), take on many more women to be sealed to him. By the time he gets to the Celestial Kingdom, he can have a virtual harem of women who are his "wives". Of course those women also have to be good Mormons -- not just any Jane Doe/Street Ho will do. Usually these are women who didn't manage to snag a husband while they were trying to get their MRS degree at BYU, or women who married shiftless "Gentile" (i.e., not Mormon) louts outside the church, etc. Weirdly, woman can also get themselves "sealed" to a man who is already dead (well, the Mormons baptize for the dead anyway; why not get them married off as well? It's not like they are going to complain about it...).

And that still sounds a lot like polygamy to me. It just happens on a different plane.

I am not making this up. And I wonder if I am on that Mormon blacklist yet.

BTW, if you are a Mormon who is questioning your continued belief in the church, you don't have to suffer your spiritual crisis alone. There are people over at PostMormon.org who can help you.  Drop by and see what they have to offer.

"A White and Delightsome People"

It used to be that the Mormons believed and taught that all Native Americans were descended from a group of emigrants from the Middle East to the West Coast of the Americas about 600 BCE(!) who were eventually called "Lamanites", followers of a guy named Laman in the big civil war that happened circa 400 AD, wherein all of the Lamanites slaughtered to the last man their rival tribe, the Nephites. This was a Very Big Deal, with mounted cavalry, chariots pulled by horses, steel swords, the whole works. Never mind the total absence of historical/sociological/biological/archeological evidence of all this, seeing as how, for example, the remains of horses, chariots, steel swords, etc., have not been found anywhere in the Pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere and there is absolutely zero Middle Eastern DNA in the genetics of the "Indians".

However, long before this big battle, as punishment for their apparently innate rebelliousness, God cursed those Lamanites with a "skin of blackness" so that they would "not be enticing" to the Nephites. Who remained "white", of course.

Despite that curse, the Lamanites embarked on some serious ass-kicking, stomped the Nephites literally out of existence, and wasted no time in populating the North and South American continents with up to 50 million people or more by the time Columbus showed up late to the party. And that population explosion all happened in just a little over 1000 years. I'll leave it to you to do the math on that, but me, I don't think it really adds up.

The Mormon Church had for years an "Indian Placement Program", wherein it identified the best and the brightest among the children of the various tribes that inhabited Mormon Country and yanked them off the rez to be raised the homes of middle-class white Mormon foster parents, all in the interest of the betterment of the race by erasing their Native culture and grinding "civilization" into them. Not to mention the salvation of their very souls by infecting them at an early age with the basic tenets of Mormonism.

This all started in 1947, and, coincidentally I'm sure, the Navajo Nation, primary recipient of this cultural hijacking and ideological brainwashing, had become suddenly wealthy in strategic minerals, specifically uranium, which was needed to fuel the nuclear armaments industry. Many of the Indian Placement Program alumni went on to positions of power and authority in theor tribes and have become individually quite successful economically. It was initially limited just to the Navajo Nation but later it expanded out to include the Hopi and other "strategically-important" tribes. Hardscrabble poverty-ridden tribes like the Paiute had to "suck hind tit" -- they apparently had no place in "God's Plan" for the betterment of the Savages.

Sadly, I have to report that none of these "Lamanite Brethren" have turned into a "white and delightsome people" yet, despite the promise of God that if they kept the commandments, served the faith, exalted Joseph Smith, stayed away from the booze, etc., then He would lift that horrible curse and turn them into that white and delightsome people. Now of course, the newer versions of the Book of Mormon (the so-called-by-Mormons "the world's most perfect book" -- which has undergone several thousand editorial revisions over the 170+ years it's been in print...) calls it a "pure and delightsome people".

Jeez, though. It's not like the Mormons didn't try really really hard, and wish-oh-wish with all their might.

Here's no less an authority than Mormon "Apostle" and later Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Church, (aka the "head honcho") Spencer W. Kimball, speaking at a Mormon General Conference in 1960:

I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today... The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter we represent, the little member girl—sixteen—sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents—on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather... These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.

This was just 13 years after the program had started. Jeez, you'd think that the whole Navajo Nation would have achieved that elusive "white and delightsome" status by now.

But now that I think of it, isn't one of the symptoms of radiation poisoning through lengthy exposure to uranium a bleaching out of the skin to a deathly pallor?

Or maybe that's just death itself. It's called a "deathly pallor" for a reason, I guess...

Romney and the Mormon Vote

Okay, I know that it isn't cool to kick a man when he's down, but fuck, you just gotta love it that Mittens got fewer votes from his fellow Morons Mormons than, of all people, George W. aka "Shrubby" aka "Baby Doc" aka '"War Criminal" Bush did in 2004.

I mean, what's up with that? Maybe that the rank and file members of the Moron Mormon church have gotten a little more liberal than those 13 Old Men (12 "apostles" plus one "prophet, seer and revelator") who are at the top of the church hierarchy? Or could it be that the True Believers in the church saw what they feared as the beginnings of the Apocalypse and the rise of the White Horse and they just weren't ready for it yet?

After all, if you are a Moron Mormon, and the End of Times comes before you've had a chance to amass all of the worldly wealth that you can scrape together, you might end up in one of the lesser levels of heaven, for example, the "Telestial" instead of the "Celestial". (Once again, no I am not making this up.)

At its core, the Mormon church is as Calvinist as any of them, with its belief that Success equals Piety. Evidentially, the more success you achieve, the more pious you have to be (because god has smiled on you in the "preexistence" or whatever...), so the higher you will go in the afterlife. Shit, you can even become a god yourself!

So, for whatever the reason, Romney lost a bunch of LDS votes. But maybe it's just because they know him, and one thing we've heard over and over in this campaign is that once you get to know Romney, the more you dislike him.

Mormonism and Islam

A few days ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek reference to the similarities between Mormonism and Islam.

Turns out I'm not the only one to come up with this. Wikipedia even has a full page entry on the topic, including the following coincidences:

• A founding prophet who received visits from an angel, leading to revelation of a book of scripture;
• An emphasis upon family, and the family unit as the foundation for religious life and the transmission of values;
• Insistence that their religion is a complete way of life, meant to directly influence every facet of existence;
• A belief that theirs constitutes the one and only completely true religion on the earth today;
• Belief that good deeds are required for salvation just as much as faith;
• Assertions that modern Christianity does not conform to the original religion taught by Jesus Christ;
• Belief that the text of the Bible, as presently constituted, has been adulterated from its original form;
• Rejection of the Christian doctrines of Original Sin and the Trinity;
• Strong emphasis upon education, both in the secular and religious arenas;
• Belief in fasting during specified periods of time;
• Incorporation of a sacred ritual of ablution, though each religion's rite differs in form, frequency and purpose;
• Belief that their faith represents the genuine, original religion of Adam, and of all true prophets thereafter;
• Prohibition of alcoholic beverages, gambling, and homosexual and bisexual practices;
• Belief that one's marriage can potentially continue into the next life, if one is faithful to the religion;
• Belief in varying degrees of reward and punishment in the hereafter, depending upon one's performance in this life;
• Special reverence for, though not worship of, their founding prophet;
• Emphasis upon charitable giving, and helping the downtrodden;
• An active interest in proselytizing nonbelievers;
• Strong emphasis upon chastity, including modesty in dress; and
• A clergy drawn from the laity, without necessarily requiring collegiate or seminary training.
• A division of the religion into a minimum of two parties after the death of the founding prophet, with one party claiming that leadership should continue through the prophet's descendents, and the other party rejecting this idea.

Wow, there are some things in this list that even I never thought of. But I also note that they don't include the concept of clannish desert-dwellers in their list.

To be fair, the page also lists a number of signal differences between the two religions, but we are not concerned with them today...

Billy Graham and the Cult Backlash

You gotta laugh at this one. After The Rev Billy Graham cast aside decades of theological purity and reclassified Mormonism as NOT a cult, the down-ticket evangelists are beside themselves.

Here's the full story from HuffPost: Billy Graham Faces Backlash Over Mormon 'Cult' Removal.

Seems Old Billy, in his zeal to elect a Republican and get that "uppity Negro" out of the White House, has chosen to ignore for political expediency what he previously identified as "cult" beliefs in the Mormon church, and many of his fellow-travelers in the evangelical community are up in arms over it.

The Fundos have been strutting around with their "my god is better than your god" arguments for years. The identification of Mormonism as a cult was a big part of that. Add to this the fact that the Mormons seem to have more in common with Islam than mainstream Christianity (a charismatic founder who made up out of whole cloth new holy scripture, subjugation of women, polygamy, abstemious from alcohol, desert dwellers, clannish distrust of outsiders as infidels, etc. etc.), and you have a recipe for disaster.

One of the pastors interviewed for this story says, "The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association probably cost Mitt Romney my November ballot when it stopped calling Mormonism a cult explicitly because of this election."

Let's hope so. And let's hope a lot of his co-religionists feel the same way.

Sidebar: I know a guy who is now in his 70s who grew up in the same area of North Carolina where Billy Graham lived, and he states, unequivocally, that Billy Graham is a dick. Like we didn't already have that one figured out...

Religion, Race and the Old Double Standard

Andrew Sullivan, although I think he can be a bit of a dick at times, usually has some interesting stuff to say about politics. And this week at The Daily Beast, he's hit one out of the park:

Imagine for a moment that Barack Obama had never attended Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago and had decided to attend services, and proselytize for, a black separatist, nationalist church that refused to allow whites to participate in crucial religious services because white people had been condemned by God for their iniquity in the ancient past and had been for ever marked white so black Americans would know instantly to keep their distance. In fact, the definition of white in this black supremacist church was just one drop of white blood in a black person. It was Nazi-like in its racist precision and exclusion. Whites were denied the rites that made a person a full member of the church. Even blacks with a tiny strain of white DNA were kept from full participation.
Imagine further that backing this racist church was not a youthful folly on Obama's part, but a profound commitment - that he went on a mission abroad to convert Christians to a new religion based on black racial supremacy, and has often said that the most important thing in his entire life to this day is a church whose sacred scripture declares white people to be cursed by God for their past sins - and the sign of this curse is their white skin.
A simple question: Do you think this issue would not come up in a general election or a primary? If Obama was subjected to news cycle after news cycle of clips of Obama's actual former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, can you imagine the outrage if Obama had actually been a part of a black supremacist church - that denied whites equal access to the sacraments - for over a decade in his adult life?

Well, a little role reversal, a little whitewashing of images, and voilá, may I present Mitt Romney, lifetime member of the long-time white-supremacist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints -- Mormon, for short.

Go ahead and finish the whole story for a complete look at Bishop Romney and his church. We can't afford to have this guy as president.

Mormon Mitt in Bed With Big Tobacco

Mormon scruples? Mitt Romney? It is to laugh. Here's an exposé from Truthout that shows Mittens' rank hypocrisy when it comes to the tenets of his church: Mormon Mitt in Bed With Big Tobacco shows Bain Capital's intimate involvement with Big Tobacco. Tobacco, you might recall, is one of the major no-no's in the Mormon church, right up there with alcohol and coffee as substances that the faithful are not to indulge in under penalty of ... of something or other...

Okay, it turns out that this isn't such a big revelation of Mormon hypocrisy after all. In the mid-1800s Mormon trading posts along the Oregon Trail made huge profits from selling whiskey to emigrants bound for the Oregon Country. As long as they weren't "saints" and kept on heading west.

It seems that in Mormon World, the only time that tobacco and alcohol and caffeine are sins is if Mormons use them. They are more than happy to sell that shit to what they refer to as "Gentiles" -- which means anyone not of the Mormon faith.

And that means that Benjamin "Bibi" Netanhyahu, in Mormon Land, is a Gentile... WTF???

And no, I am totally not making this up!

Traveling Atheist Billboard Attacks Mormons

Over at CNN there's a story entitled Atheist billboard attacks Romney's faith, but Mormons say it's misleading.

The billboard says, simply, "No blacks allowed (until 1978); No gays allowed (current); Shame on Mormonism".

Naturally The One True Church is all in a lather about it:

"People are surely free to disagree with us on the facts," Dale Jones, a church spokesman, wrote in an e-mail to CNN. "This group seems not to know that there have been black members of the Church since our earliest history, and there are many faithful gay members of the Church today."

But that really doesn't tell the whole story, either. Black people were certainly not denied membership in the church. They were "only" denied the priesthood. Doesn't sound like it's such a big deal, except for the fact that the entire church is built on the patriarchal structure of the priesthood. Without having it conferred on you -- which is standard for every male member of the church -- you can't hold a church office, you can't be become a scout leader (and the Mormons are into scouting big time), you can't officiate at any church-related function, you can't bless the sacrament, you can't even bless your own children. All of these things are extremely important to the Mormons, and withholding the priesthood from the "unworthy" is, in fact, a Very Big Deal in the church.

And you have to wonder about the self-hating African-Americans who were willing to put up with this nonsense prior to 1978. Yeah, there may have been black Mormons prior to that time, but I'll bet they were few and far between.

I saw a group of black Mormons on The Daily Show last week, and one of them said, in defense of the church, that many churches exhibited overt racism in their history. Yeah, true enough, but does that really excuse the racism in the Mormon church that existed officially up until 1978?

1978. Think about it. That's so recent that it's barely history.

Even Your "Hometown" Newspaper? Really?

For Mormons, wherever they might physically live, Utah is the Holy Land, the Mormon Homeland.

And that is why it is even more interesting when your "hometown newspaper", in this case the Salt Lake City Tribune, comes right out and endorses your opponent.

Tribune Endorsement: Too Many Mitts is the news out of SLC today. And boy does it ever push the slams against Mittens:

...it is not the only Romney, as his campaign for the White House has made abundantly clear, first in his servile courtship of the tea party in order to win the nomination, and now as the party’s shape-shifting nominee. From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: "Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?"

The evidence suggests no clear answer, or at least one that would survive Romney’s next speech or sound bite. Politicians routinely tailor their words to suit an audience. Romney, though, is shameless, lavishing vastly diverse audiences with words, any words, they would trade their votes to hear.

Yeah, eat that, Mittens! If you can't even gain the endorsement of the newspaper of record for the Mormon Homeland, then why should we vote for you?

Governor, You're No Jack Kennedy

In a now-famous speech he gave in the 1960 presidential campaign, JFK said he believed in the absolute separation of church and state. Watch it.

Mittens Romney has tried mightily to cover himself with that JFK cloak, but it really hasn't worked. Vanity Fair has a terrific article entitled When Mormons Go to Washington, giving a history lesson on what happens when members of the Mormon church go to Washington. It isn't a pretty sight.

For not yielding to the wishes of the L.D.S. Church, in 1965, Mormon Congressman Kenneth W. Dyal said he received “abuse, threats, blackmail and vicious attacks on my integrity from corporations, church members and their leaders.” It was perhaps for this reason that resisting the Church was not common.
. . .
From 1851 to 1869, more than 99 percent of Mormon voters supported Church-approved candidates in all but one election. In that year, nearly 96 percent voted for the candidates selected by the L.D.S. president. From 1851 to 1877, there were only three non-unanimous votes in Utah’s House of Representatives, occurring once in 1851, once in 1855, and once in 1861. During the same 26 years, the Utah Legislature’s upper chamber voted unanimously on every motion and bill except for three dissenting votes on different days in 1852.
... the First Presidency consistently favored the Republican Party after 1890 and tried to restrain devout Mormons who were Democrats. The Mormon rank and file obediently fell in line, and today 70 percent of Mormons identify themselves as Republican or Republican-leaning, while only 19 percent say they are Democrats.

There's plenty more and it's all interesting reading. Can we really believe that the so-called General Authorities of the church will take a totally hands-off approach to a president who also a member of their church? I don't think so.

A Mormon Woman Speaks Out Against Romney

Jesus, when a Mormon "patriarch" can't even keep his own women in check, what makes us think he's going to be able to run a nation?

Check out A Mormon Woman's Manifesto by Judy Dushku, wherein she eviscerates Mitt Romney for being the number one Mormon asshole in her life, at a time when she and her granddaughter needed some spiritual counseling but instead got Mormon bluster and threats of excommunication (excommunication being one of the worst things that a Mormon can face--you are cut off from everyone in the church, all of your friends and family, fellow workers, the whole ball of wax; it can be daunting to face for someone raised in the church and encouraged to have only Mormon friends, etc.)

As an aside, Judy Dushku is the mother of ultra-hot actress Eliza Dushku. No word yet on what she thinks of Mitt Romney, but since the fruit never falls far from the tree, I would guess that she doesn't like him either. The Wikipedia article says she is no longer practicing the faith. Good for her!

Is Romney the "White Horse" of Mormon Prophecy?

This one has a long pedigree. Way back in 1843 Joseph Smith, the original "Prophet, Seer and Revelator" of the Mormon Church, may have given a prophecy that someday the Mormons "will go to the Rocky Mountains and will be a great and mighty people established there, which I will call the White Horse of peace and safety." Adding that "I shall never go there" and predicting continued persecution by enemies of the church, Smith reportedly said that "You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed. It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber.... I love the Constitution; it was made by the inspiration of God; and it will be preserved and saved by the efforts of the White Horse, and by the Red Horse who will combine in its defense." BTW, the identity of that Red Horse is not stated in the prophecy, but it's a small stretch to see it as a reference to the "Lamanites" -- Native Americans who are left over remnants of a great Jewish(!) civilization in North America whose skin was cursed to darkness at some point.

I say "may have given" because the person to whom he spoke it, John Roberts of Utah, didn't bother to write it down until 1902. For those of you who were home schooled, that is a full 59 years after the fact. That's kind of a long time to keep the words of the Prophet to yourself.

Nevertheless, the prophecy itself has clung on stubbornly in Mormon thought, even though various authority figures in the church have never really adopted it as doctrine, never as being fully the word of the Prophet. Whenever a Mormon politician comes onto the national stage, though, the faithful among the Saints -- most of whom still believe in it despite the lack of support by the church -- try to adapt the prophecy to the politician. The George Romney of 1968 had been the White Horse candidate until he crashed and burned, and now  his son Willard Mitt is the one who carries the burden of the White Horse. Now that it's Mitt's, he's shrugging it off as "not church doctrine". But since he and the Mormons want nothing more than to establish a Mormon theocracy in this country, it has to be on his mind. What better way to do it than over some sham "constitutional crisis" wherein the constitution is "hanging by a thread"? After all, Glenn Beck (Mormon) says that it is already.

Well, let's keep Romney and Beck and their co-religionists guessing whether he's the White Horse or not for another four years. Defeat Romney, re-elect Obama, and let the prophecy swim snugly in the stew of Mormonism a little while longer.

(See White Horse Prophecy on Wikipedia for more details.)

Proselytizing at the Point of a Gun

In 1966, at the beginning of the huge buildup of American forces in South Vietnam, a group of Mormon so-called General Authorities (LDS bigwigs, including the recently deceased "Prophet, Seer and Revelator" Gordon Hinckley, then only a member of The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles),  made an official trip to Vietnam for the Dedication of the Land of Vietnam for the Preaching of the Restored Gospel. In Mormon land, this dedication is a Very Big Deal.

I would guess that it was also considered by the average Vietnamese -- those who were even aware of it -- to be just one more step in Yankee imperialism, since the ceremony took place on the rooftop garden of the Caravelle Hotel, then and now one of the most luxurious and exclusive hotels in Saigon. I couldn't drink there, none of my friends could drink there, and no one under the rank of bird colonel could drink there. Totally off limits to all but the top echelon.

I was in Vietnam later than this, in 1968-69, and one of the Group chaplains where I was stationed was a Mormon (despite the fact that there were probably only two or three Mormons in each of the two battalions in the Group -- go figure). I heard with my own ears his incredible statement that, since Vietnam was so dedicated, it took a war to make sure that God's promise was kept to the poor savages who inhabited that benighted land.

I don't know how much of that was official Mormon Doctrine, but I assume that it was pretty much right on, since this particular chaplain was a scion of Mormon Royalty: His father was one of the General Authorities of the church and the official guru of Mormon Doctrine (he even wrote a book on it). The opinions of those General Authorities on various matters have a similar weight and authority to pronouncements from the College of Cardinals in the Catholic Church.

I assume that since the Communist victory in Vietnam and their takeover of the country, the Mormon missionaries haven't been welcomed back in any number. So much for that whole god-wants-the-Vietnamese-saved thing, I guess.

Which brings me to Mitt Romney (you knew it was coming). His Mormon faith is not just a facet of his existence, it is all of it. There's no way to separate it from him as a person. Or him as a President. Which scares the living shit out people who are aware of the violent history of The One True Church. If he buys into the whole proselytizing at the point of gun thing -- and why shouldn't he? -- then what's to stop him from pulling some weak-ass excuse out of his ass (are you listening, George W?) and invading some other poor benighted land that needs to have The Restored Gospel brought to its savage denizens?

Harry Reid is SO Fucked

One of the many secrets of the Mormons is the knowledge, common amongst the "Saints", that everything that is written (or spoken as well, I presume) against the Mormon Church has been taken up to an "enemies list" archive in the Wasatch Mountains outside Salt Lake City where it will be used against the transgressor at some future time when The End Of Times has come, the Mormons are in control of everything, and "just retribution" can be exacted against the guilty. They don't like to talk about this, for obvious reasons, but just get one of them alone, ply him with enough alcohol, and you can pry out it out of him. He'll eventually admit it. And revenge is such a hallmark of Christian charity...

Which brings us to a guy named David Twede, who runs a website called (oxymoronically at first glance) MormonThink.com, which is a website, run by Mormons(!), devoted to answering some historical questions about the Mormon Church. Hint: They don't answer them to the betterment of the church; quite the contrary -- check them out.

Twede has evidently run afoul of the Mormon Powers by running a piece that is critical of Mitt Romney. Check it out, both on the news site linked above as well as other sites that are carrying the story.

If they are going to excommunicate (the worst "official" punishment the church can mete out, BTW) Twede for being critical of Romney, then what chance does Harry Reid have? The wheels of Mormon justice must be still grinding away on Harry for his transgressions, but I'm guessing that he's got too high a profile for them to make a Federal case out of it. No, all of Harry's criticisms of Romney are being filed away in that Wasatch Enemies List archive, ready to be hauled out on Judgment Day when Jesus returns to earth (in Jackson County, Missouri, the actual site of the Garden of Eden -- no, I am totally NOT making this up...).

I would guess that my rantings over the years about the Mormons has secured me a place in the archives as well. In fact, I'd be kind of disappointed to learn that I was not there...

Romney and Theocracy

Just so you  know, here's a commentary from a former "saint":

Growing up in a devout Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) family in a suburb of Salt Lake City, I knew my religion as well as my name. My mom played the organ in a Mormon temple, I was a Boy Scout, and there was rarely a Sunday when we would miss church. Praying at least three times daily and studying the Book of Mormon were as essential as brushing our teeth or making dinner.
For the first time in American history a Mormon is the presidential nominee for a major political party. And while the Romney campaign has swiftly dismissed questions about his religion as inappropriate and irrelevant, it may seem that much of the media have tiptoed around this topic and have discussed the LDS church in glossy, broad terms. But here's why Mr. Romney's religion is relevant: For Mormons, there really is no such thing as separation of church and state.

The money shot:  "For Mormons, there really is no such thing as separation of church and state".

And there you have it. Everything you need to know when it comes to casting your vote. Read the whole story to get a "testimony" from an insider about what the Morons Mormons are all about.

No separation of church and state for these folks. No sireee!

Is Mitt Romney an "Anchor Baby"?

I had forgotten until the other day that Romney's father, George, an erstwhile 1968 presidential candidate himself, was not actually born in the United States. Instead he was born in the Mormon Colonies in Northern Mexico where his father had fled from Utah, taking his several wives with him, rather than be subjected to the new law forbidding polygamy in Utah. Seemed Utah wanted to become a state so bad that it was willing to persecute members of its own church who had up to then sincerely been following the Word of God...

It turns out that the church elders and their multiple wives were still legally married in the eyes of the Mormon Church, but were lawbreakers in the United States after the church government kowtowed to the rest of the monogynous country and called off what had been held up to that time as an irreversible tenet -- a central "Doctrine" of their belief system.

Ask any Mormon today and he or she will tell you that the church outlawed polygamy oh so many years ago. Not true. The nation outlawed it and the church went along with that and advised all those in plural marriages had to stop it (wink wink). At that a number of Mormon extended families fled the United States and established a series of agricultural colonies in Mexico, all of them within two hundred miles of the US border, where a pliant Mexican government, glad to have all the industrious and hard working Mormons who came with a penchant for making deserts bloom with food and cash crops, allowed them to stay and to flourish while the government at the time basically looked the other way.

At least up until the Mexican Revolution of 1912, with its antireligious tones and tirades, made it too hot for them there and they had to, for the most part, escape back into the US.

So if Old George Romney was born in Mexico and then came to the United States, where the Mittster was born, doesn't that make him Mitt of those so-called "anchor babies" that the right wing keeps fuming about?

Is anyone going to bring that up? And have we ever seen Mitt's own birth certificate? And how do we know that he wasn't born in Mexico himself?

Hey, fair's fair. If Orly Taitz can work herself into a lacquered lather over Barack Obama's real birth certificate, why can't she give Romney the same treatment.

Oh, and that whole polygamy thing with Mormons in general? They still believe in it but are enjoined by the church from practicing it (this is why so many offshoots of the Mormon Church exist, chief among them the notorious Fundamentalst Latter Day Saints, late of serial child molester Warren Jeffs fame), they still believe that no one gets into the highest level of Heaven (there are three in total) without entering into plural marriages, and single women who can't find a husband here on earth can have herself "sealed" -- in a special temple rite, by proxy of course -- to old dead guys who were Mormon Royalty themselves when they were alive, thereby getting to skip the line and get immediately into the Good One. And only those who get into the Good One have the opportunity to get promoted as it were, and to become gods themselves where they can create and rule over their own planets...

I am not making this up. Check it out for yourself and see if I am right.