Joe Conason offers a succinct and on-target take on the dust-up over Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and the GOP evangelical base’s antipathy toward him.
The issue is not whether a Mormon should be elected or could be elected, but why we should allow those who wish to impose their sense of faith on the American public. Romney, after all, offered this comment as part of his speech:
“Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom … Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”
As Conason writes, however,
This statement is so patently false that it scarcely deserves refutation. If Romney has studied the bloody history of his own church, then he knows that the religious fervor of its adversaries drove them to deprive the Mormons not only of their freedom but their lives, and that the Mormons reacted in kind. If he has studied the bloody history of the world’s older religions, then he knows that the most devout Christians of all sects have not hesitated to suppress, torture and murder “heretics” throughout history. Only the strictest separation of church and state has permitted the establishment of societies where freedom of conscience prevails — and those freedoms are firmly rooted in societies where organized religion has long been in decline.
That’s what makes the discussion about Romney important; it’s not the electoral math, but the constitutional implications of connecting religion and government.
And it is the implied religious chauvinism of Romney and former Arkansas Go. Mike Huckabee that should worry us all.
Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals — including agnostics and atheists — have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader — which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid’s religion.
Liberals and progressives have no apologies to make, or at least no more than libertarians and conservatives do. Cherishing the freedoms protected by a secular society need not imply any disrespect for religion. But when candidates like Romney and Huckabee press the boundaries of the Constitution to promote themselves as candidates of faith, it is time to push back.
I couldn’t agree more.
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Hank Kalet 