When a politician says he's "profoundly religious" and that explains what he is doing, do we shrink from the question of sincerity?

I'm asking the general question, which I've thought about a lot (having taught a course on Religion and the Constitution for more than a decade). But you know the prompt for my question, Mitt Romney's assertion:

"I am profoundly religious. My faith is at the heart of who I am. I take an oath before God as enormously consequential... I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the president, the leader of my own party, would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong."

When religion is used like this, does it silence critics? Does it cheapen religion? If you're skeptical and think he's parading religion, being sanctimonious, do you hold your tongue, because you worry that you'll look bad or offend some people if you question the sincerity of a profession of religion? Religion is a strong force, and it can motivate political decisions, but if your political argument is a religious argument, what can be said? Does the politician successfully put himself on the high ground, deserving admiration and fending off debate?

Now, Romney is different from a politician who says his religion gives him the answer to a particular question. He's only using religion to emphasize that he takes the oath seriously. Presumably, he means that for him, violating this oath would wreck his afterlife, so he needs to make this decision exceedingly carefully and without any element of hoping for worldly benefits. He then goes on to analyze the law and the facts and the arguments and to present his decision as based on what the oath said, and it's not as if the oath required him to vote the way God dictates.

[M]y promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and political biases aside. Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience.

I’m aware that there are people in my party and in my state who will strenuously disapprove of my decision, and in some quarters I will be vehemently denounced. I’m sure to hear abuse from the president and his supporters. Does anyone seriously believe that I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?

That last question is very strange! It implies that a highly principled atheist would not follow the process demanded in the oath but would necessarily yield to the pressure of partisan politics. Only religion is enough to keep people on an honest, dutiful path?

That's a rather offensive thing to say about nonbelievers, yet you can see why he said it. He said it to vouch for his own profession of profound religiosity: Only a profoundly religious person would do X, I am doing X, therefore, I am profoundly religious.

Can we question the sincerity? Or must we stand back in awe of the great man? God help us if the answer depends entirely on whether you wanted to see Donald Trump continue as President or be out on his ass.

"Orrin Hatch, Utah Senator, to Retire, Opening Path for Mitt Romney" — but Does Mitt Romney live in Utah?

The headline is in the NYT, which says:

Mr. Hatch, 83, was under heavy pressure from Mr. Trump to seek re-election and block Mr. Romney, who has been harshly critical of the president....

Mr. Hatch’s decision clears the way for the political resurrection of Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee who is now a Utah resident and is popular in the Mormon-heavy state. Mr. Romney has told associates he would likely run if Mr. Hatch retires.

“It would be difficult to defeat Mitt Romney if he were running here,” said David Hansen, a longtime Utah Republican strategist and chairman of Mr. Hatch’s political organization.

I associate Romney with Massachusetts, but that says he's a Utah resident. And here's a WaPo article from 2015, "Romney, ahead of 2016 run, now calls Utah home, talks openly about Mormon influence."

After losing two straight presidential races, Mitt Romney packed up his home in Massachusetts and journeyed west to Utah, building a mansion here in the foothills of the Wasatch Range that has served as his sanctuary from defeat....

“He feels very at home here,” said John Miller, a close friend in Utah who has been talking with Romney throughout his recent deliberations. “This is a very prayerful thing. . . . In the end, it’s really a decision between he [sic] and Ann and their belief system, their God. That’s the authentic Mitt.”...

In Holladay, an upscale suburb of Salt Lake City, the Romneys have built a manse complete with a “secret door” hideaway room and an outdoor spa off the master bath. They consider it their primary residence, near their son Josh and his wife and children.

Together with another family, the Romneys also bought an 8,700-square-foot ski chalet in nearby Park City. They still own a lakefront estate in Wolfeboro, N.H., and a beach home in the La Jolla area of San Diego, which made news in 2012 because of planned renovations that include a car elevator. Last year, the Romneys sold their Boston-area condo; they stay at Tagg’s Belmont, Mass., home when they visit....

ADDED:

First screenshot: 3:12 PM EST today

Second screenshot: 5:45 PM EST today

See if you can spot the difference. pic.twitter.com/OuxM7sc2cd

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 2, 2018

"Evangelical voters are rallying strongly in favor of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump."

"Indeed, the latest Pew Research Center survey finds that..."

... despite the professed wariness toward Trump among many high-profile evangelical Christian leaders, evangelicals as a whole are, if anything, even more strongly supportive of Trump than they were of Mitt Romney at a similar point in the 2012 campaign...

Meanwhile, religiously unaffiliated voters – those who describe their religion as “atheist,” “agnostic” or “nothing in particular” – are lining up behind Hillary Clinton over Trump, much as they supported Barack Obama over Romney in 2012... Religious “nones” are, however, somewhat less enthusiastic about Clinton’s candidacy (26% now strongly support her) than they were about Obama in June 2012 (37%).

Trump support among white evangelical voters on par with Romney in 2012....

Trump is so different from Romney. Isn't it odd that they get the same numbers when people are grouped by religion? Trump has been married 3 times and the media portrays him as immoral. (He is like Romney in that he doesn't drink.)

And those who've been pushing the idea that Trump is winning by attracting racists should wonder why his numbers with white evangelicals is no higher than Romney's. And why didn't Trump win some more of the nonreligious people? Aren't a good proportion of the country's racists nonreligious. 

One answer could be that Trump would get fewer evangelicals than Romney if Trump were not using racism, but the racism draws them back in.

"Why should a woman cook? So her husband can say, 'My wife makes a delicious cake,' to some hooker?"

From "61 Comedians Recall Their Favorite, First, and Life-Changing Jokes." That joke is from Joan Rivers, and the comedian who calls that her "favorite joke of all time" is Jen Kirkman. Most of the 61 comedians, by the way, don't identify a particular joke, so the headline is misleading. I chose Kirkman's joke for this post because it is a joke, it's funny, and it gives you something to think about.

You might think I chose it because CAKE! has been the subject of the week and the tendency of people to pay attention to CAKE!!! has been amply demonstrated. But I didn't. And I'm actually pretty sick of the cake-o-mania of the past week. I've got some really mixed feelings about this cake-focused exposure of the RFRA laws — laws I've studied and taught for many years. I feel as though I should explain things about which I have an overload of understanding, but I also feel hopeless about conveying that understanding. The political demagoguery will overwhelm the legal material. I'm absolutely convinced. I could do my professorly part, but why should I pour hopeless effort into the rehabilitation of RFRA laws, which I've never liked? When it's not hopeless, it's my practice to explain arguments for things I don't agree with. But it is hopeless here. The political noise is too loud.

Okay? Now, please acquire your cake somehow. Have cake and eat it and share it and stop being so obtuse about love.

 

AND: I wanted to replace that cake pic with a photograph of a cake that had "God is love" written on it. That would be a loftier ending for this post, but instead I'm going to return to the joke-y spirit I began with. Here's what Google gave me when I asked for a picture of a cake with "God is love" written on it:



What would Mitt Romney do?

"He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to... run."

Tagg Romney tells on his dad, Mitt.

"If he could have found someone else to take his place...  he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention."

Imagine what it would have been like if Mitt Romney had broken open and expressed all of this, but maybe that was inherently impossible. A self-effacing modesty was baked in.

In this context, here's a Ross Douthat column from last August, prompting Romney to reveal his Mormon faith:

The broader Mormon experience... could help make the case for his philosophy as well as illuminate his human core.... Conservatism sometimes makes an idol of the rugged individual, but at its richest and deepest it valorizes local community instead — defending the family and the neighborhood, the civic association and the church. And there is no population in America that lives out this vision of the good society quite like the Latter-day Saints.

Mormonism is a worldlier, more business-friendly religion than traditional Christianity, but it does not glorify wealth for wealth’s sake... Mormonism represents “our country’s longest experiment with communitarian idealism, promoting an ethic of frontier-era burden-sharing that has been lost in contemporary America.”

Imagine if all of that were opened out and shown to the American people. Well, you can't. I can't. Not in one modest man's campaign. Not with all the predictable pushback.

Ridiculous WaPo headline + photo combination.

"A detached Romney tends wounds in seclusion after failed White House bid"?

He doesn't look detached or wounded and he's obviously not in seclusion while riding a roller coaster. The text emotes:

Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There’s no aide to make his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and e-mailing his CEO buddies who have been swooping in and out of La Jolla to visit. He wrote to one who’s having a liver transplant soon: “I’ll change your bedpan, take you back and forth to treatment.”

The media never got Romney, did they? WaPo is presenting "I’ll change your bedpan" as abject and pathetic. Are they only pretending not to understand or does it truly escape them?

Harry Reid goes holier-than-thou, Mormon-style, on Mitt Romney.

Is that okay? Because if that's okay, should we dissect Obama's religion?

Should we go at both Romney and Obama for how well they embody the religion they espouse?
	Sure!
	Only Romney. Not Obama.
	Only Obama. Not Romney.
	No. Neither. It's a bad approach to political debate.
pollcode.com free polls

Romney on "Meet the Press."

Video here. Transcript here. Romney's performance, responding to tough (but nice) questioning by David Gregory, made me think Romney would appeal to moderate voters when he goes up against Obama in the debates. There are a lot of similarities between the 2 men, in that both seem rather low-key and temperate.

I wanted to highlight the discussion of Mormons:

GREGORY:  I want to ask you something a little bit more personal.  You-- you both are guarded about in your faith.  You talked more about it in the course of the convention.  We came across a-- a quote from a biography written about your father in 1968 and he said about being a Mormon, "I’m a member of a religion that is among the most persecuted minority groups in our history."  And here you are, the First Mormon to be the nominee of the Republican Party, you could be the first Mormon president.  I wonder how much pride that gives you, how much pride you think it gives others in the church?  Is it similar to what many Catholics felt with President Kennedy?

Email from John Kerry: "I have one message burned into my memory..."

What?! I can't believe Kerry would evoke his old "memory which is seared — seared — in me" line. If you don't have that seared in your memory, here's a 2004 WaPo article, "Kerry's Cambodia Whopper."

It's weird to get email from a character from the past and have it begin with, essentially, remember me, the big liar. The email reads:

I have one message burned into my memory for everyone who cares about the outcome of this year's presidential election:

Respond quickly and powerfully to attacks from the other side...

If you tune in to the convention, you'll see that Mitt Romney and his allies have no qualms about misleading voters if it means defeating President Obama.

But their attacks won't work if enough people step up to protect the President's record.

Meanwhile, over on Rush Limbaugh's show, the complaint is that the Republicans are afraid to attack Obama. After the first night of the convention, he quotes Fox News commentator Ed Rollins, who said: "Not hitting on Obama was a perfect way to go. We all know the Obama record and don't need to have it reinforced." That exasperates Rush:

Is the caricature of Romney as "hollow, cynical and inauthentic" attributable to downplaying Mormonism?

Ross Douthat seems to think so.

... Romney clearly does have deep convictions: the evidence is in his intense commitment to his church, as a local leader and as a philanthropist. Between the endless hours of unpaid, “love thy neighbor” efforts required of a Mormon bishop and the scope of his private generosity, the caricature of the Republican candidate as a conviction-free mannequin mostly collapses....

Conservatism sometimes makes an idol of the rugged individual, but at its richest and deepest it valorizes local community instead — defending the family and the neighborhood, the civic association and the church. And there is no population in America that lives out this vision of the good society quite like the Latter-day Saints....

Obama adopts Newt Gingrich as a surrogate crybaby.

Strange! This is an official Obama ad. Watch for Gingrich at the end.



It's also weird in that it shows Romney making his harshest attacks on Obama.

It's also dishonest. The idea is to portray Romney as a hypocrite for attacking Obama when he also makes attacks. But the material at the beginning — "Is this the level that the Obama campaign is willing to stoop to? Is this up to the standards expected of the presidency of the United States?" — refers to the Obama campaign's making deceptive statements about Romney and Bain Capital. Has Romney ever lied about Obama? Has he ever made statements that are proven false without correcting them and apologizing? That's the comparison that needs to be made. That's what Romney said was beneath the standards of the presidency.

ADDED: I was curious about Romney's statement — in the ad — that Obama wanted to make America a "less Christian nation." I found this:

"Black Mormons and the Politics of Identity."

Another NYT article about Mormons and the presidential election.

The conversion of blacks in this country has been a challenge, given the church’s turbulent history of excluding people of black African descent. Until 1978, black males were not allowed to become priests or bishops; dark skin was considered a biblical curse. During the 1960s, when Mitt Romney’s father, George, made civil rights a personal priority during his time as Republican governor of Michigan, his progressive views put him at odds with church doctrine. Over the last decades, however, there has been an aggressive campaign to diversify, and racism in the church — which was itself once powerless and persecuted as a cult — has been repeatedly denounced...

And here's a joke that, according to the NYT, is "making the rounds" with black Mormons:

Mr. Obama calls Mr. Romney to say he thinks it is time the country had a Mormon president. But just as Mr. Romney is thanking the president for the apparent concession, Mr. Obama interrupts him to say, “My baptism is on Saturday.” 

"Mitt and Ann Romney’s marriage is strong because they believe they will live together in an eternal afterlife..."

Writes Jodi Kantor in the NYT, citing "relatives and friends" as the source of information. It's a whole long article about Mitt Romney's Mormon faith.

Fascinating! But what I'd like to know is what Barack and Michelle Obama are picturing for the afterlife. NYT, can you clue me in? Because I feel like there are so many things we never found out about Obama the first time around in 2008. How about now?

But, of course, Jodi Kantor published a whole book about the Obamas. It's called "The Obamas." I bought it. On Kindle! So let me do a little search for an answer to my question. How are the Obama's planning to spend their eternal life? Do they believe there's a heaven, and do husbands and wives stay together there?

Word searches in "The Obamas" that returned 0 results: afterlife, afterworld, immortality, immortal, beyond the grave....

Other fruitless searches: eternal (2 matches, both to Obama's calling himself "the eternal optimist"), eternity (some short period of time is referred to as "an eternity in presidential time"), heaven (at the inauguration, Beyoncé Knowles sang "At Last" to the Obamas — "Life is like a song... Here we are in heaven").

In fact, there are only 2 occurrences of "religion" in the text of "The Obamas."

The Democrats' "jewbag" problem.

Have you noticed this controversy? It's the kind of thing that makes you want to say that if Republicans made a misstep like this we would never hear the end of it. It would be a "macaca" moment.

The staffer for DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz who posted the controversial 'Jewbag' photo on her Facebook page in 2006 is no anonymous aide -- but the daughter of Mark and Nancy Gilbert, two major Florida donors who have raised more than $500,000 for the Obama campaign.

Danielle "Dani" Gilbert, according to party sources, was tapped by Wasserman Schultz to serve as a liaison to the Jewish community, even though party officials and people close to Obama told her that more senior Democrats were already handling those responsibilities.

Wasserman Schultz has thus far refused to fire or discipline Gilbert, whose gallery of candid photos and personal commentary has since been removed from her public Facebook page, according to Democrats.

(Also on POLITICO: Wasserman Schultz says Mormonism off limits)...

Thanks, Politico. Thanks for inserting Wasserman Schultz's banal pronouncement about that other religion. I guess there's some relevance. Let's read that:

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz fired back Wednesday at Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch’s claim that Democrats would attack Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith in the fall election, saying the charge was “nonsense” and that the issue of religion was off-limits....

“That suggestion is utter nonsense. Let’s remember that President Obama has had so many things hurled at him – birth certificate questions, whether he is or is not a Christian,” Wasserman said. “For them to suggest that religion will be injected [into the election] by President Obama and the Democratic Party, I mean, I think they need to take a look inward at the accusations that their party and their supporters have hurled before they take that step.”

Well, I hope she's right about that, but of course, there will be many things the DNC won't control. It's hasn't been the RNC going after Obama over his religion, has it? And I seem to remember John McCain going out of his way to put Obama's religion far out of bounds, even declining to use the terribly juicy anti-American spoutings of Obama's pastor.

ADDED: What does "jewbag" mean? Urban Dictionary has definitions like "cheap; selfish person," "A greedy jew or a handful of greedy jews," and "someone who screws over another person on an extreme level." The "conservative web site" referred to in the Politico article is The Washington Free Beacon, which says:

The Democratic Party’s newly appointed Jewish outreach liaison is pictured on Facebook in a series of provocative photos with her friends holding dollar bills and referring to themselves as “Jewbags” and the “Jew cash money team.”

I'm inferring that the "-bag" part refers to moneybags, rather than — to point to other meanings of "bag" —  

1. an "unattractive or elderly woman," which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, goes back to 1924 (P. Marks Plastic Age xviii. 202,   "I don't... chase around with filthy bags or flunk my courses"); or...   

2. "scrotum," which the OED locates back in the 1598 writing Frenche Chirurg: "The Scrotum, which we call the bagg wherin the testicles are contayned," which is the use of "-bag" in the present-day political slang term "teabagger," though I note that the 4th most-approved-of definition of "jewbag" at Urban Dictionary includes a second meaning "the action of tea-bagging a jew or someone of jewish descent."

"Romney, like all Mormon politicians, usually tries to walk a thin line."

Gordon Smith analyzes Mitt Romney's presidential aspirations.