As the ugly slush money of the John Roberts America continues to pour into commercial campaigns meant to bring out the worst racist impulses of this country, perhaps now is a good time to remind everyone of this simple truism:
Mitt Romney has been a church leader in a "religion" built on extreme secrecy. I use the word "religion in quotes because I'm not sure it really is a religion. Much like Scientology, Mormonism requires strict adherence behind closed doors in ceremonies it repeatedly lies to the public about.
I measure a religion by its openness to its practices.
Mormonism, just like cults such as Scientology, the Landmark Forum, and the Rajneesh Cult of the 1980s, vigorously trains its adherents in how to speak about the "religion" in public.
This requires deft propaganda.
Follow me over the squiggle for more...
The Cult of Mormon involves the singular belief that becoming Mormon is the only path to an after-life. This, of course is nothing new. Many religions (well, mostly just Christianity) believe their path is the only path to Salvation.
The difference is between practice and the spoken word.
This is where Mormonism deviates from other religions, which are quite open about their beliefs and about their texts.
Mormonism, like Scientology, is built upon the belief of talking in code. This requires church "elders" to talk in a language that has dual meaning. On the one hand, it speaks to the larger population in reassuring and universal tones. On the other hand, it communicates to other Mormons that what is taking place is simply the necessary tools of a Mormon in a non-Mormon world.
We see this in Romney's claims that Mormonism is just a variation of Christianity, no different, than, say, Catholics or Lutherans.
As anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of Mormonism knows, it is absolutely not a religion consistent with any branch of Christianity. Any claim that Mormonism is "Christianity" is ludicrous. It is the same as claiming Christianity is simply a version of Judaism.
Romney is not just a Mormon, he was a church leader for decades. He avoided Vietnam on a religious exemption, and spent his time in a Mormon mansion in France preaching and converting people.
This is before the Mormon church allowed black people into the religion. This was also when one of the central goal of Mormonism was the retroactive baptism of every dead Jewish person in the Holocaust.
You see the Mormons believe all Jews are barred from Heaven, no matter how pious or worthy their lives were.
To the Mormons, the project of "saving" Jews, whose spirits are stuck in the afterlife, requires a ritual Baptism of each and every Jewish name with a stand-in. This is a living person who performs the role of the body of the dead Jew in a ceremony in which the living person is dunked into water in their place.
Where do these rituals take place?
In Mormon temples in Utah. Behind closed doors. Without one word being mentioned outside of the templte.
In other words, the Mormon Church, of which Mitt Romney has been an active leader since the 1960s, performs daily baptism rituals in which people stand-in for dead Jews, are dunked into water, and baptized in the names of Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith.
Mormons have retroactive baptized Anne Frank and members of Ellie Wiesel's family, among millions of others.
The Mormon Church runs the website Ancestry.com. Why? To compile the list of the name of every person who has ever lived. Why? To Baptize them. Ancestry.com is not some gentile family tree building fun website. It is part of the project of Mormonism to baptize every living soul to "save" them.
Has Mitt Romney ever performed one of this retroactive baptisms?
Has Mitt Romney stood over a baptism pool in a Mormon temple in Utah and read aloud the names of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust for the express purpose of "saving" them for the sins of being born Jewish and being killed by the Nazis?
Does Mitt Romney feel this is appropriate behavior by the church, even as Jewish groups have loudly and vocally protested this practice since it came to light in the mid 1990s?
If you still don't understand why this is a big deal, understand that everything from the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition has involved Jews being threatened with death for not converting to Christianity. Many Jews resisted, and were killed. They willingly died rather than be forced to convert. Other Jews converted to save their own lives.
Centuries of persecution. And now, in 2012, we have a major Presidential candidate who is part of a religion that plans to retroactively "save" all those Jews who didn't convert when they were alive.
This practice is shameful.
Mitt Romney, a leader in the Mormon Church MUST answer as to his beliefs about this abhorrent and offensive practice taking place behind closed doors in Utah.
You might think it doesn't matter. Why should the survivors of Holocaust victims care if their names are read in a temple behind closed doors? If you have to ask that, then you simply do not understand how damaging this belief system has been for centuries of European history.
Does Mitt Romney believe that all Jews, no matter how virtuous, are going to hell unless they are converted to Mormonism, whether they choose to be or not?
Has Mitt Romney participated in secret rituals meant to retroactively baptize deceased Jews?
If Barack Obama was forced to repudiate the more controversial statements of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, in 2008 (which Obama did), then how the FUCK is the same not asked of Mitt Romney???