The press is pawing over Mitt Romney’s religion, and the candidate may just welcome this scrutiny. It...diverts attention from...Mitt Romney, flip-flopper.

Critics point shrilly to well over a dozen strong positions he has conveniently changed...Romney’s concessions...are not uncharacteristic of the church to which he belongs. Mormonism has its own history of political accommodation.

Both the official church and Mormons...backed away from certain beliefs they had gone into the wilderness to secure: ...theocracy of melding secular government with religious hierarchy, a communal living order very like socialism and...plural marriage. These were bedrock doctrines, touchstones of Mormon orthodoxy that could not...be reconciled with...larger American culture, so without repudiating these teachings, Mormons simply gave them up.

...By the 1930s, under Mormon Prophet Heber J. Grant, an aging patriarch who...married his three wives when polygamy was still permitted, harsh punishments awaited any mainline Mormon who taught or claimed the church sanctioned any marriage other than that of one man to one woman. In the 1930s, he excommunicated members of the church in Short Creek, Arizona who refused to sign a loyalty pledge to the church and renounce plural marriage. This action provoked a schism and the formal beginning of the Mormon fundamentalist movement...

Among today’s mainline, church-going Mormons, polygamy is virtually never mentioned. A modern Sunday school manual based on the life and teachings of Joseph Smith, who declared plural marriage essential and who married at least 33 women, is fronted by a short biography that lists a single wedding and a single spouse. There is but a single mention of plural marriage anywhere in the manual’s 586 pages...

...many Mormons celebrated when in 1976 the Mormon prophet announced a revelation reversing a long-standing policy denying the priesthood to black members...If God wanted to change his mind, why fault Him for opportune timing?

From the article: The press is pawing over Mitt Romney’s religion, and the candidate may just welcome this scrutiny. It...diverts attention from...Mitt Romney, flip-flopper. Critics point shrilly to well over a dozen strong positions he has conveniently changed...Romney’s concessions...are not uncharacteristic of the church to which he belongs. Mormonism has its own history of political accommodation.

(I've been saying this for about a year now...nice to know Lds are even agreeing with me on this...and Chandler does a better job of historically laying this out!)

Still...maybe he's reading FR...I highlighted this angle twice in March -- March 8 and March 16:
* March 8: Who is Mitt Romney? [Ex-Lds author reveals why Mitt's wishy-washy culture waffles & flip-flops] (see article & post #2)
* March 16: Mormons have a rightward bent reputation...but the Mormon church can be liberal when it wants to...and it's been awfully convenient for that to happen more and more the last few years

Examples given by Neal Chandler?

* Mormons forcing communism -- and then not (United Order)
* Theocracies under its first two "prophets" -- and then not
* Polygamy -- and then not
* Blacks excluded -- and then not
* Other examples (click on link & read the whole thing)

From the article: ...many Mormons celebrated when in 1976 the Mormon prophet announced a revelation reversing a long-standing policy denying the priesthood to black members...If God wanted to change his mind, why fault Him for opportune timing?

Ah. What did I say Jan. 12, 2011 on a FR thread?

Source: Would You Vote for Someone Just Because They're Mormon?:

The Mormon god is "shifty," too, is he not?
Did he not...
...Condemn polygamy in the 1830 Book of Mormon,
...Only to have Joseph Smith to start "practicing" it with his 17 yo live-in maid, Fanny, in 1831?
...Only to then CHANGE HIS MIND & push polygamy underground in 1890?
...Only to then have his "general authority" Lds servants "solemnize" a couple hundred more plural arrangements between 1890-1910? (See B. Carmon Hardy's book A Solemn Covenant)
...Only to then root it out almost completely by the 1930s?
...Only to then "inspire" Lds apostle Bruce McConkie in his book "Mormon Doctrine" to say that polygamy would be re-instituted when the Mormon jesus returned?
[And don't Lds believe in eternal polygamy -- even if they now eschew earthly polygamy]
Boy, talk about ambivalence!
IF THE MORMON GOD CAN FLIP-FLOP AND BANDY ABOUT THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE as frequently as that over a 180-year period, then Mitt is just a chip off of the old block!
And it doesn't end there.
Several Mormon sacred books have racist comments about skin color, and blacks were kept out of the Mormon priesthood til 1978. At that point, THE MORMON GOD CHANGED HIS MIND about the priesthood, yet only changed his mind about one of those racist verses in their sacred books -- one in the Book of Mormon -- where he had his "servants" rewrite a word supposedly written in a "gold plate" and then interpreted by the "power of God." The Mormon god told Lds leaders to change the phrase "white and delightsome" to "pure and delightsome."

From the article: ...By the 1930s, under Mormon Prophet Heber J. Grant, an aging patriarch who...married his three wives when polygamy was still permitted, harsh punishments awaited any mainline Mormon who taught or claimed the church sanctioned any marriage other than that of one man to one woman. In the 1930s, he excommunicated members of the church in Short Creek, Arizona who refused to sign a loyalty pledge to the church and renounce plural marriage. This action provoked a schism and the formal beginning of the Mormon fundamentalist movement...

See...Here, Heber J. Grant had his THREE wives. But like a roller derby skater calling off the jam after he got his points in, he was THE provocateur of a schism and was basically THE cause -- THE creator -- of the fundamentalist Mormon movement by his schismatic excommunication of something he himself engaged in!

The mainstream Mormon church did not have a monogamous "prophet" leading its helm until 1945!!!

Mitt's flip-floppiness, wishy-washiness, waffling style was gleaned DI-rect from Mormon leadership!!!! Among today’s mainline, church-going Mormons, polygamy is virtually never mentioned. A modern Sunday school manual based on the life and teachings of Joseph Smith, who declared plural marriage essential and who married at least 33 women, is fronted by a short biography that lists a single wedding and a single spouse. There is but a single mention of plural marriage anywhere in the manual’s 586 pages...

From the article: Both the official church and Mormons...backed away from certain beliefs they had gone into the wilderness to secure: ...theocracy of melding secular government with religious hierarchy, a communal living order very like socialism and...plural marriage. These were bedrock doctrines, touchstones of Mormon orthodoxy that could not...be reconciled with...larger American culture, so without repudiating these teachings, Mormons simply gave them up.

Let's break this down a bit: We'll start with Mormonism's 19th century "communal living order very much like socialism" -- still on the Mormonism's "Scriptural" 'books' in Doctrines & Covenants...this was known as "The United Order":

Here's what Lds “prophet” John Taylor said about the "United Order" communism of late 19th century Utah in Orderville: "We had NO EXAMPLE OF THE 'UNITED ORDER' IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE WORD OF GOD ON THE SUBJECT... (Lds author George W. Givens, 500 More Little-Known Facts in Mormon History, p. 169)

Taylor was the third Lds "prophet." He realized no scriptural basis for United Orders & dismantled the one in Orderville, Utah (he also cited other reasons such as "Our relations with the world and our own imperfections prevent the establishment of this system at the present time, as was stated by Joseph in an early day, it cannot yet be carried out."

Lorenzo Snow, before becoming an Lds "prophet" in 1898, founded the United Order community of Brigham City.
A Utopian author (Bellamy) then visited Brigham City in 1886. It reinforces his ideas in his book.
Lenin gets ahold of his book; and further injected utopian Marxism into Soviet Russia.
In the interim (back in Utah), a ballad crops up about Orderville after it appears that one of the sons of the Lds presiding elder of that town (Alvin Heaton), murders a pregnant girl (Mary Steavens) he refused to marry in 1890. Apparently, he was convicted & sent to prison. (see Givens, p. 190)

(So much for Mormon "Utopia")

Yup...and here the United Order was supposed to be "everlasting," was it not? That was Joseph Smith's "revelations" in D&C 82:18-19 and 104:1, 48, 53.

Even George Givens, a Mormon author, described Brigham Young’s communist-built community of Orderville, Utah as “pure communism”: "When Brigham Young established Orderville and similar United Orders, John Taylor was less than enthusiastic. He realized that enterprises such as Orderville were pure communism and not the law of consecration. He made this plain after he became President, when in 1882 he sent an epistle to all authorities of the Church in which he bluntly stated: 'We had no example of the 'United Order' in accordance with the word of God on the subject...Our relations with the world and our own imperfections prevent the establishment of this system [i.e. the system of consecration and stewardship spoken of at times as the 'United Order'] at the present time, as was stated by Joseph in an early day, it cannot yet be carried out.'" (George W. Givens, 500 More Little-Known Facts in Mormon History, 2004, p. 169)

The truly unfortunate thing for world history is that John Taylor didn’t go far enough, for while he dismantled Orderville, he left another “United Order” community (Brigham City, Utah) alone.

Here is Givens again (a faithful Mormon author):

"One of the most famous utopian books ever written was Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, published in 1889. Some scholars believe Looking Backward had considerable influence in the making of Lenin's Soviet Russia. If this is true, then [ensuing Lds "prophet"] Lorenzo Snow and the Latter-day Saints must receive some of the credit--or blame. Hearing of the success of the United Order in Brigham City, Edward Bellamy made a special trip to Utah in 1886 to study its operation. There he spent three days with Lorenzo Snow, Brigham City's founder and forty-year resident. Impressed with the thirty to forty industries run by its 2,000 inhabitants and the vitality at that time of one of the most successful United Orders, Bellamy returned home and wrote his influential book." (500 More Little-Known Facts in Mormon History, p. 185).

Way to go, 19th century Mormon leader-“prophets” of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor & Lorenzo Snow!!! They all unwittingly fueled Soviet Communism!

It was…
… Smith’s original idea of a United Order, something he falsely prophesied would be everlasting- see Doctrine & Covenants 82:20; 104:1 – I mean you haven’t taken scissors to those verses yet, have you Rip? So that must mean you still embrace these concepts as “Mormon truth”
…followed by Young’s implementation of these communistic ideas into Utah communities like Orderville & Brigham City…
…with Lds “prophet” Snow being the founder & long-term dictator of Brigham City, which in turn, influenced Bellamy, who in turn influenced Lenin!!!
…and while Taylor didn’t like the orders, he only did a half-mast job of taking apart Orderville, but leaving Brigham City untouched.

A part of the article not making the excerpt cut focused on party make-up in 1890s Utah Territory.

On March 1, 2012 in an interesting article entitled Mormons, GOP didn’t always get along so well, I mentioned: The GOP was THE social-issues party of the 19th century! It protected monogamy and took on slavery...to the point that the Mormons, as part of Utah Territory, were largely Democrats until its leaders began forcing select families to become Republicans in the early to mid 1890s right before being granted statehood.

And, last June Historical Democratic leanings of Mormons I mentioned in post #6:

From the review: ...most Mormons are rather uneducated regarding their political past, particularly the theocratic era that prevailed until the Edmunds–Tucker Act precipitated several changes, including the Manifesto in 1890 and the disbanding of the People’s Party in 1891. The fact that most Mormons at the time gravitated toward the Democratic Party might surprise some of their modern descendents.
Yup. Many Mormons were Democrats up until the early 1890s when Mormon leadership told many of the sheep to switch parties. They wanted to come across to national political leadership as more balanced so that statehood would not be denied them.
Imagine that. Mormons switching parties 'cause their leaders told them to!
Want a source?
During most of the 19th century, Utah was polarized along local rather than national party lines. Two local parties dominated the political scene: the “Mormon People’s Party” and the “Gentile Liberal Party.” When Mormons did think in terms of national politics, they were almost universally Democrat, as the Republicans opposed Utah statehood. Brigham Young was a life-long Democrat.
In order to gain the senate’s approval for statehood, Utah was required to “normalize its political allegiances.” The Church disbanded the Mormon People’s Party but feared that a mass Mormon migration to the Democratic Party would displease Republican senators. Church leaders sent Apostle John Henry Smith to visit LDS congregations. It was possible to be a faithful Mormon and a Republican, he explained to the amazement of many LDS faithful. In 1893, the Church even asked some specific families to become Republicans, a move that would be unimaginable today.
Largely because of this Church effort, Republicans and Democrats were both well-represented around the turn of the century. The Democrats had some impressive victories; in the first presidential election after Utah statehood in 1896, Democrats earned eighty percent of the presidential vote for William Jennings Bryan and elected many of their own to state, local, and national offices. Democrats also had great successes in the 1910s, in the 1930s with the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in 1964 with the Lyndon B. Johnson landslide
Original Source of last section: Mormons and politics

The Doctrine and Covenants

Section 132

Revelation given through Joseph Smith the Prophet, at Nauvoo, Illinois, recorded 12 July 1843, relating to the new and everlasting covenant,, including the eternity of the marriage covenant, and also the plurality of wives (see History of the Church, 5:501–7). Although the revelation was recorded in 1843, it is evident from the historical records that the doctrines and principles involved in this revelation had been known by the Prophet since 1831.

1–6, Exaltation is gained through the new and everlasting covenant,; .....

1 Verily, thus saith the Lord unto you my servant Joseph, that inasmuch as you have inquired of my hand to know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as also Moses, David and Solomon, my servants, as touching the principle and doctrine of their having many ^awives and ^bconcubines—

2 Behold, and lo, I am the Lord thy God, and will answer thee as touching this matter.

3 Therefore, ^aprepare thy heart to receive and ^bobey the instructions which I am about to give unto you; for all those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same.

4 For behold, I reveal unto you a new and ^aeverlasting covenant, and if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye ^bdamned; for no one can ^creject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.

5 For all who will have a ^ablessing at my hands shall abide the ^blaw which was appointed for that blessing, and the conditions thereof, as were instituted from before the foundation of the world.

6 And as pertaining to the new and ^aeverlasting covenant, it was instituted for the fulness of my ^bglory; and he that receiveth a fulness thereof must and shall abide the law, or he shall be damned, saith the Lord God.

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