Romney’s Mormonism again
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg
Two political scientists argue that Mitt Romney needs to make a JFK-like speech, though I would hope that Romney’s speech would approach the subject of the relationship between religion and government with greater nuance than did Kennedy. I think that I’m closer to Rick Garnett, who called my attention to this op-ed, than I am to its authors.
12:03 PM / January 22, 2007
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Not to say that religion does not greatly shape one’s views, but I’m a little tired of hearing about Romney’s religion (here and elsewhere). While I’m no fan of Mormonism, I want to judge Romney on his positions and actions. Also I want his defeat to be tied to his positions, not his religion or else the GOP will lose a lot of Mormon votes.
He’s going down one way or another because Romney is fundamentally a liberal. He ran to the left of Ted Kennedy on some issues in 1994. He has a spotty record from the past, and his actions as governor are very weak and non-commital. Conservatives would be insane to trust him, either as a candidate or a President. I understand that he is "evolving" away but you can’t turn a monkey into a man, or a man into a god for that matter.
Is he Mormon?
Should I care?
Is he conservative or even just mostly mostly conservative?
I better damn care!
I read on the internet that Barack Obama believes that a virgin gave birth to a baby, and that some guy came back from the dead after three days. Do we really want as president the kind of nut who would believe that silliness?
Doesn’t this article implicitly set up the very thing they say (and David’s a friend of mine) they want to avoid, a religious test for office? The idea that Romney needs to give a JFK speech where he explicitly imposes the institutional separation of church and state onto his moral deliberations as a political office holder seems to me itself a claim that those who *refuse* to do that should be rejected "because of their faith." Isn’t the implicit claim here that unless you have, at least structurally, the same "faith" as JFK, you shouldn’t be president?
Kennedy’s speech strikes me as dated, reflecting a kind of unnuanced separationism that resides on life-support in certain school boards and on certain secularist websites.
I can’t imagine that a candidate would have to mouth similar words to be regarded as within the pale.
Also resides in many other places. "Unnuanced separationism" is unfortunately a very powerful mindset.