On Romney’s Mormonism and Religious Tolerance

Strap yourselves in, because this is going to be a long one.

One morning I tweeted a thought that had been tossing around in my mind for a few days.  It went like this:

Anyone notice that libs hardly ever put down Mormonism when Harry Reid was the most prominent Mormon in politics?

And it and a few reactions got me thinking it was time to put into words some thoughts I had about what religious tolerance really means.

What we have been seeing recently is a great number of attacks on Mormonism as a faith.  And it’s not that I think that it is wrong to denounce Mormon theology or doctrine.  In my humble opinion Mormonism is one of the less plausible answers to the great questions in life.  But this recent criticism is very selective: Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is held against him, but not Harry Reid’s.

And that is a good place to start.  I have said before that I am a Presbyterian and my wife is a Catholic and that we didn’t do the “compromise conversion” thing where the couples convert to a “compromise faith” in order to go to the same church.  Instead sometimes we go to a Presbyterian church, and sometimes we go to a Catholic one.  Frankly we more often go to the Catholic church because Catholics are supposed to take mass ever week (or pray the rosary), but for Presbyterians church going is less important than a deep relationship with God, so my faith allows me to be a little more flexible about actually going to a Presbyterian church.

Once Again, the Blogosphere Gets a Scoop the MSM Missed... By Reading Obama’s Books

Update: Oh my, there seems to be a discrepancy in the story told by one of the witnesses.

While we are waiting to talk about my big story (trust me, this is going to be a blockbuster) I am going to pay attention to other news.

So a few weeks back we had the unbelievable silliness of talking about how the candidates treated their dogs.  First, we learned that Mitt Romeny put his dog on top of a car in a pet carrier for a drive, because the car was full.  A little stupid, yes, but kind of a silly thing to worry about when the debt is $15 trillion and counting.  Then Jim Treacher did some deep investigative journalism in the form of reading Obama’s book, and discovered that he actually ate a dog.  Which seems kind of worse, and indeed led to great deal of Obama-ate-a-dog jokes.  And then to top it all off, we then discovered that Romney actually saved a family from drowning, including their dog.

And so now today we get the Washington Post doing an in-depth investigation into how Romney acted in high school, giving us this shocking story:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

So first, I am sure the family of the late John Lauber (he died in 2004) really appreciates the whole world knowing that he might have been gay.  For all we know he could have been going through a phase and married a woman and had a dozen children by now.  So let’s thank the Washington Post for respecting his privacy...

Still, turning to Romney’s behavior, of course what he did was wrong, and mean.  And I am sure Obama never did anything as bad as...

Oh, except Obama bullied a girl.  Yes, really, according to Talk of the Times.  And how did these internet sleuths discover this...?

Come on, you read the headline, right?  By reading Obama’s books (and I verified the quote on Amazon.com):

That is from Dreams of My Father, of course.

The reality is this.  We do not spring forth from the head of Zeus as fully-formed adults.  We go through a period of life called “childhood” in which we make mistakes and we learn.  Things like decency, compassion, kindness, all of those things are learned, and not something we figure out just by the virtue of being born.  There is a process called maturing and there are often speed bumps along the way.

Don’t believe me?  Okay, who is the coolest basketball player in History?  Michael Jordan, right?  I mean the man had such grace and power you would swear that he had a gravity belt:

And off court he was the definition of cool—always dressing very sharp (we are overlooking his facial hair for now).  And I am sure he was always an awesome guy, right?  Right?

Yeah, and there’s a whole gallery of this stuff.  Oy vey.  (By the way, Cracked, can we stop calling every black person who happens to be a nerd “Urkel?” The conscious “race”-matching is creepy.)

And you know that brooding Eminem guy?  This was him in high school:

We were all dorks once.  Even when we thought we were cool, we were dorks.  Look at the teenagers in The Karate Kid:

Ralph Macchio, allegedly the dork in the movie, actually comes off looking cooler in hindsight than most of the guys beating him up.  We have to recognize that there is a God-given right to be young and stupid at some point in your life and give both Obama and Romney a pass on this bullying.

But if we are going to play this game, then I see your Romney bullying story and raise you one #ObamaBulliedAGirl.

Or at least I thought we should ignore what they did as teenagers.  Then I found out something and I will share it with you.  Below the fold I am going to put a truly shocking photograph of Romney as a teenager that proves once and for all that he should never be president.  Look at your own risk:

I Don’t Care About Ann Romney’s Life Experiences (And I Shouldn’t Have To)

First, dear reader, I will have to apologize for the very light blogging this week.  It’s not for any bad reason.  For instance, just this week I obtained a solid court victory over the convicted terrorist (bomber technically) and perjurer Brett Kimberlin (and if you don’t know about my struggle against this cretin, you should catch up here—it might be very important in the coming days).  And my parents are in town taking up pretty much what little spare time I had.

And bluntly you should pay attention to this space.  Big, original reporting might be in the offing depending on how things work out.  But I will have to be vague on this point.

Let's just say you might have a need to get out the popcorn.

But I have been watching in the background all week as we have seen this silly dustup where first Hilary Rosen and then various other liberals criticized Ann Romney for being... a stay-at-home mom.

And I could go into how this used to be the ideal.  Or how millions of American women would prefer to be a stay-at-home mother, but because of finances couldn’t afford it.  Indeed many feel guilty for not being a stay-at-home mother.

I could point out that feminism has created this situation.  By increasing the number of women in the workplace, they increased the supply of labor.  If you increase supply, you reduce prices—a.k.a. wages—and so soon the wages of men and women are depressed until many lower income women have no choice but to work.  And that is in the classic nuclear family.  The sexual revolution has accelerated the rise of rise of single motherhood and other non-traditional living situations, increasing the financial pressure that very often forces women to work when they might prefer to be a full-time mom.

And before you get all huffy and say that I am blaming feminism for forcing women into choices they might not prefer I will emphasize that there is a difference between causation and blame.  There was nothing wrong with the many women deciding that they were not destined to stay at home.  Lord knows I don’t want people dictating my career choices to me, and I will be damned if I do so for anyone else.  So long as you can do the job, it’s not my business to stop you and I generally prefer to figure out if a person can do a given job by letting them try and succeed, or fail.  But I can’t deny that there has been a cost to feminism.

But more fundamentally than all of that, I don’t care about Ann Romney’s qualifications, politics or anything.  The job of the first spouse not to do anything that matters.  So you take up some cause that no one can get too bent out of shape over, like Nancy Reagan asking kids nicely not to do drugs, or Michelle Obama asking kids nicely to get in better shape.  Yeah, I apply the rule equally to Michelle Obama, too.  Yes we might suspect that Michelle Obama’s request might later become Barrack Obama’s demand, but the fact is as far as I can tell Barrack is his own man and to the extent that they think alike it is simply the mind meld you expect happily married couples to have.