If Romney believed in whatever aspect of Mormonism you find offensive but also believed in a constitutionally limited federal government bound by the enumerated powers that do not extend to ObamaCare/RomneyCare, in the legal and moral authority of the Second Amendment, in a balanced budget with government staying within its means, and in other conservative practices, would you still object to his religious quirks enough that you could not vote for him?
My objection to Romney is exactly the same as my objection to Obama - both are big government liberals who will inflict exceptionally grave damage on a country that I love. Obama claims to be Christian, although I have grave doubts. Romney claims to be LDS, although I find little in common between the tenets of his alleged faith and the actual decisions he makes when in power. I’ll vote based on their governmental actions, not their claimed religious beliefs. The bottom line though is that we reach the same final decision - Romney is unacceptable (in my case because of how he will govern, and in your case because of how he prays???).
If Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, George Bush -- or, when he was running, Ronald Reagan -- if ANY of them announced that they were "a god in embryo" (a fave Mormon "prophet" term to describe Lds)...
...who were eternally progressing toward godhood...
...and would one day receive worship, glory, adulation, adoration, appeal prayers from people, and have the Same creative abilities as God...
...you would 100% ignore that?
Seems to me that if any non-Mormon candidates claimed the above, it'd raise quite a rucus on FR & most media venues...for months on end...
But because a Mormon believes it, ho-hum.
Sorry...but the belief that somebody is god-bound on his way to running his own world raises some key questions for voters...
#1: If this wannabe leader of the free world is so readily vulnerable to deception in the supposed most important area of his life, how can we trust him with other highly important matters? Gullibility is a character & POTUS "job description" issue!
#2: If Hillary Clinton declared she was a goddess and would one day receive worship & glory as a goddess, I would call it out for what it is: A glory-hound whose pride knows no boundaries. That kind of arrogance is a severe character issue. And character is a key thing upon which to measure a candidate.
You? Sounds like you become an apologist for Mormonism...because you give their worldviews...their character...their gullibility...a pass...a pass that you likely wouldn't give others (especially Democrats) if they adhered to them.
“whatever aspect of Mormonism you find offensive”
The problem with your statement is that this is not about me being offended. Foul language offends me, but I wouldn’t disqualify a president based on that. There’d be no one left to choose from.
No, what motivates my concern is that there is a connection between one’s religious views and one’s policy views. For example, JFK was Catholic, yet he was supported by many Protestants. Arguably this is because he had no obvious conflict of interest being both Catholic and President. But would the people of that time have elected JFK if he were a top Catholic cardinal, in line to possibly become Pope one day? There is no constitutional barrier to such a scenario, but I have no doubt that voters in their wisdom would have sensed the potential for a serious conflict of interest and rightly rejected him. And they would be constitutionally free and morally right to express those misgivings at the polls.
But Mormonism takes that problem to a whole new level. In the history of religion there has always been a profound conflict between those who see God as the one, original Creator, as eternally distinguishable from his creation, and those who see deity as something more heterogeneous and evolutionary. This is really the great divide between traditional monotheistic religions and what is popularly called paganism. The belief in self-deification is expressly rejected as fundamental evil by example in the Genesis story. What was Lucifer’s temptation to Eve? “You will be as gods.” What is Lucifer’s temptation to Marxists? Same thing. What is the core principle of “magic” as understood by Anton Levey (of Church of Satan fame)? Self-deification.
So while you may or may not see such things with alarm, you may understand from the above why many simple, humble Christians just intuitively cringe at the idea of actually supporting for public office a high-ranking officer of a religion that is, at it’s core, the sworn and bitter enemy of almost all that traditional Christians hold dear.
There are other considerations, too. Many Christians see us at a crossroads in this country, where because we have culturally abandoned God (and we have), that God has every right to abandon us and surrender us to our enemies (and may well have done so in the person of Obama). But now, given a chance to repent of our national evils, instead we elect a President whose religion is a formal embodiment of that rejection of the God of traditional Christianity. Do you think God will bless that presidency? Or will it become the last straw for the Christian God? Do you get why some Christians just cannot pull the lever for Romney no matter what the political fallout?
And speaking of our bitter enemies, have you considered how the marketing of Jihad will be affected by the election of a polytheistic American President? I promise you, to our Islamofascist enemies, it would be seen and trumpeted as a clear sign from Allah himself that he has washed his hands of America, that it is now time to pull out all the stops. It would clear the conscience of many a young, more moderate Muslim worried about going against “the People of the Book,” (Christians and Jews), especially if the Americans freely chose by vote a polytheist to rule over them. Would that not mean they have all formally rejected the God of Abraham? I’d love to be a fly on the wall of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership, because they must be in deep conflict over whether a Romney presidency would help them even more than Obama has.
As for your core argument, that religion is irrelevant as long as some set of key conservative principles is observed, I don’t buy it, for two reasons. People are who they are. You don’t get to be a high bishop in a religion without that affecting your decision-making apparatus. Or if your religion has no effect on your policy, that’s even worse, because you’re religious life is all fraud and hypocrisy. Your religion *should* influence your thinking. Your beliefs about the great issues *should* define you.
But even if you disregard the role of religion in forming and informing Romney, please reconsider your premise: IF all these key conservatives principles could be maintained, then all these religious concerned could at least be diminished. Well, maybe. But with Romney we have better information that that. We KNOW how he governs, and it is NOT conservative. Therefore he is either lying or prevaricating. Take your pick. And I know this personally about him. I was a legal intern at a constitutional law firm during his governorship in MA, and I know for a fact his regime was working hard against Christian hospital workers trying honor the sanctity of life. They came to us crying out for help, but we declined, probably because the case was not desirable from a PR point of view. Yes, I know that’s bad. I didn’t like it either. But that’s how it went down. And that’s who Romney is. Like my dad used to say, you want know what someone will do, look at what they’ve done. It’s a good rule, and it applies here.