(note: religion is a tricky issue in campaigns. I'm trying to distill the ideas below into a 60 second TV ad for Super Tuesday. Any suggestions or criticisms you have are much appreciated--TJ Walker)
American was founded on the principle of religious freedom. No religious test may be established for any public office in our country. Great public servants can come from any proud religious tradition. However, as important as religious tolerance is, it doesn’t work if the most powerful use their power to promote intolerance in the name of their own religion.
Imagine if Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright teamed up and posthumously baptized (I know Muslims don’t baptize, just bear with me) and converted Ronald Reagan from Presbyterian to Islam. Outrageous, right?
What if Barney Frank decided to perform a ceremony on the grave of William F. Buckley, a lifelong Catholic? And Frank “converted” Buckley into a Gay, Jew for the afterlife? Wouldn’t that be…disturbing?
Well the Mitt Romney family performed a baptizing ceremony on Mitt Romney’s wife’s father, Edward Davies, 13 months after he died! (Salt Lake Temple, 19 Nov 1993) Davies was a lifelong opponent of organized religion. He was vehemently opposed to all religions. And yet the Mitt Romney performed a Baptism ceremony on him to Mormonize him after death and for all eternity. Was that tolerant of Davies’ wishes?
On March 22, 1969, Edward Davies daughter Ann was married to Mitt Romney at a religious ceremony at the Salt Lake Temple. Neither of Ann Romney’s parents was allowed into the wedding ceremony. Romney’s religion would not tolerate the presence of Ann Romney’s parents at the ceremony because they had not converted to Romney’s religion.
From 1966 till 1969, Romney became a full-time employee of the Mormon Church. His job was to covert people away from their religious beliefs and to accept his ostensibly superior religious beliefs. Romney decided to take this job at a time when the Mormon Church did not believe that black people had fully developed souls and therefore couldn’t become full-privileged members of the Mormon Church. Romney continued to serve in major leadership positions in his church and has become one of its largest and most influential donors. In 1978, a mere 115 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves, the Mormon Church reluctantly decided to drop their official stance of intolerance toward blacks.
In 2012, no good citizen should display intolerance by voting against a candidate just because of his or her religious beliefs. But no good citizen should ignore a candidate’s long history of promoting intolerance through the guise of religious extremism.
more at www.americanlp.org