Lately there has been some talk about whether or not questioning the religious beliefs of Presidential Candidates is "fair game" in an election. The Romney campaign has been holding up stories in the media about the Mormon faith to what they called the "Jewish Test" wherein they ask if a similar story would be written about Jewish beliefs and history. I will let Romney campaign spokeswoman explain it in her own words.
"Our test to see if a similar story would be written about others' religion is to substitute 'Jew' or 'Jewish,' " Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul wrote in objection to [an] article...about the candidate's role as a church leader in Boston. She pointed out a passage that explained [the Mormon] belief that Christ's true church was restored after centuries of apostasy when the 19th-century prophet Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates that he discovered in Upstate New York. "Would you write this sentence in describing the Jewish faith: 'Jews believe their prophet Moses was delivered tablets on a mountain top directly from G-d after he appeared to him in a burning bush,' " Saul wrote in a November e-mail. "Of course not, yet you reference a similar story in Mormonism."
I have several problems with that block of text passing for a paragraph.
The first of which is the apparent worry over informing people about Mormonism. This seems to be Romney's biggest fear, that if people learn about his church they will be immediately turned off by it and him. I happen to think there is some truth to that. Second, they seem to forget that Mormonism is a very small, very new religion that most people are unfamiliar with, whereas the Jewish faith has been around for a very long time and has a very large population in the United States.
Is it not the media's job to inform the public? Are stories about the history and beliefs of the Mormon church not valuable information for the masses, when one of the two major candidates for President stakes claim on this new religion? There is such a thing as context. You might even call it Collective Context if I may coin a phrase. Nobody of voting age is confused by what a "Jew" (as they're so found of saying) is, or what they believe.
Mormonism on the other hand is by design secretive and Mitt Romney has done nothing to change that fact. On the contrary he is often first to hide his Mormonism, to try and disguise it as regular old, boring Christianity. The email I block quoted above is a prime example of the Romney campaign pretending as though Mormonism is no more exotic or extraordinary than religions that have been around for several thousand of years longer than it.
They are going out of their way to ensure there is no discussion about Mormonism and that Romney is not linked to the crazy rituals and bronze age beliefs regarding the role of woman, the use of birth control or any of the touchier more controversial subjects such as polygamy, racism, child brides, etc. The Romney campaign doesn't want the American people to discover the ridiculous basis for some of Mitt's most devoted beliefs.
The fact that they are apparently scanning news papers all over the nation for such stories only to guilt trip the authors, strikes me as a sign of desperation. But it is in this way that Romney has kept his religion a secret while still holding his religiosity front and center. Both Team Obama and Team Romney have said questions about the candidates religious beliefs are officially off limits.
This seems to be the one area in which these two sides agree, so naturally they are both wrong.
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