A Mitt Romney fan I am not. But I think the Mormon bashing which has been going on is out of line and un-American, and Romney’s enemies would do well to keep in mind that it could very well trigger a backlash in his favor.
Right now, the anti-Mormon stuff is mainly on the right wing fringes, and this WorldNetDaily piece is typical:
When asked for specific rituals she considers bizarre, Erickson claims Romney and other Mormons take part in clandestine marriage ceremonies involving “outrageous” customs. Explaining her own Mormon wedding, she says she was forced to completely disrobe against her will.
“It was horrific,” she told WND. “There I was standing naked. They brought this bowl of water, and started washing my body down and whispering prayers over my body. They stopped over the right and left breast, the navel and knees and prayed specific prayers.”
To help ensure the general public did not learn details of the rituals, she says believers took a symbolic knife to feign their own murder if members spilled the beans of what really goes on behind closed doors.
“They actually had us slashing our guts open and our guts falling to the ground if we told people of the secret dogma of the ceremonies,” Erickson said.
Wow. Sounds like those evil Mormons are not much different than some of the cannibals and vampires I’ve been reading about lately.
I hasten to add that it’s not just the WND crowd who want to save us from this wicked slasher cult.
While the left has been generally silent (save the gay activists in California during the Proposition 8 hysteria), sainted atheist Bill Maher has chimed in, specifically agreeing with leading Romney religious critic Pastor Robert Jeffress about Mormonism being a “cult.”
Yawn. If Mormonism is a cult (which I don’t think it is — and I say this as someone who has had friends who joined actual cults), then so are many religions. While I don’t like much about Romney, as I explained several years ago, I find his Mormonism refreshing, because it opens up the possibility of alternative forms of Christianity being accepted within the rubric of the Christian mainstream.
I don’t like religious hegemony, and I cannot help notice that those who criticize Romney’s religion usually insist that their own views of the unknown constitute the ONLY view. Whether some form of fundamentalist Christianity (like Jeffress) or atheism (like Maher).
At the rate this nonsense is going, pretty soon the anti-Mormon WorldNetDailyists will end up in bed with the anti-Mormon gay activists.
What a party!
Comments
2 responses to “Strange bedfellows attack wicked “cult””
I wonder how many man-hours the liberal media had to spend finding someone on the right who was bigoted against Mormons — or at least someone who would pretend to be.
Expect to see a lot more anti-Mormon stuff over the next year. Some of it will be false-flag crap like this, trying to sow division within the anti-Obama coalition, and some of it will be genuine liberal bigotry against any religion practiced by pale-skinned people.
I am an orthodox Lutheran, and, as such, I have deep and significant theological disagreements with the LDS church.
That said, I know and like many Mormons as friends, and would never hesitate to vote for any of them for office (if they were running, and if their policies reflected my beliefs closely enough).
If didn’t vote for people who didn’t share my religious views, I would never be able to vote for anyone (including Michele Bachmann–she is, or was, a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran, and I’m a Missouri Synod Lutheran).