Since Mormonism teaches blacks are “accursed of God”, perhaps that makes them fair game for bashing their religion, since they are so beneath whites? This would make Romney supporters consistent, at least.
All during Romney’s rise, we here at docweaselblog were voices in the wilderness, pointing out the racism, hypocrisy, hate-teaching, sexist beliefs and practices and intolerance of other religions endemic in the Mormon cult.
Again and again, McCain hating rightbloggers, who had no other credible alternative because they also detested Huckabee (and his evangelicalism) embraced Romney and again and again decreed that “religion is out of bounds”. You can’t attack a candidate on his religion, you can’t even discuss it.
There is a great deal of self-righteous puffery going on among various right-bloggers over Obama’s ties with racist preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama has distanced himself from the minister, but that’s not enough for these newly enlightened and self-appointed guardians of what is and what is not acceptable sermon material for a religious leader.
First off, Dan Riehl, in high dudgeon over the fact Obama refuses to condemn Wright’s statements:
Unbelievable – what is he stupid, or just stubborn? Two new headlines on the “Obama, not the Wright stuff” affair:
Obama Rejects Minister Ally’s Fiery Words
But he doesn’t reject it. The item offers nothing but what we’ve already read:
CNN, quoting from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, said Obama took issue with Wright’s comments.
“What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice,” Obama told the Chicago Tribune in January 2007. “He’s much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I’m not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in national politics.”
And at about the same time, this – which is utterly ridiculous, especially given Obama’s crying about Geraldine Ferraro. Not only will this be in the news all weekend, come Monday nothing will have been resolved. Stick an audacious fork in Hope … he’s done. He should do SNL this weekend, perhaps the other Not Ready for Prime Time Players can show him how it’s done.
The Obama campaign says they have no plans to ask the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to step down from a campaign spiritual advisory committee. They’re stressing that this committee — the African American Religious Leadership Committee — was a laundry list of people associated with the campaign and didn’t really do anything. The group never actually met.
They say Wright has no formal role on the campaign (unlike some others on this committee who do have a formal role in faith-based outreach). They say he was included mostly out of respect to his long relationship with Obama.
When confronted with his hypocrisy, Riehl deleted the comment and banned the IP of the computer used to ask the question. So much for accountability from Dan Riehl.
Where the fuck was Riehl’s outrage over Mitt Romney’s church preaching shit like this. annotated from the Book of Mormon, which Romney stated he believed LITERALLY, and from a cult of which he is a 3rd generation elder:
# The Jews were wicked, performed abominations, and killed prophets. 1:19
# The Native Americans are the decedents of those “who dwindled in unbelief.” As a punishment for their disbelief, their skin was darkened and they became “a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.” 12:22-23
# Nephi sees the “great and abominable church” (Roman Catholic Church) and its founder, the devil. 13:6
# The Nephites (Mormons) were “white and exceedingly fair.” 13:15
# Nephi sees the “great and abominable church” (Roman Catholic Church) who has taken away the plain and most precious parts of the gospel. 13:26
# The “great and abominable church” (Roman Catholic Church) has taken away the plain and most precious things from the book. 13:28
# The plain and most precious parts of the gospel have been removed by that abominable church. (Roman Catholic Church) 13:32
# The “great and abominable church” (Roman Catholic Church) was “founded by the devil” to lead souls to hell. 14:3
# The “great and abominable church, … the mother of abominations, whose founder is the devil.” (Roman Catholic Church) 14:9
# There are only two churches: the church of the Lamb of God, and the church of the devil.You either belong to the good chuch or the bad church (the mother of abominations, the whore of all the earth). (Roman Catholic Church) 14:10
# “The whore of all the earth sat upon many waters.” (Roman Catholic Church) 14:11
# The church of the Lamb of God had few members “because of the wickedness and abominations of the whore who sat upon many waters.” (Roman Catholic Church) 14:12
# The “great mother of abominations” recruits people from all over the earth to fight against the Lamb of God. (Roman Catholic Church) 14:13
# “The wrath of God was poured out on the great and abominable church.” (Roman Catholic Church) 14:15
# “The wrath of God is upon the mother of harlots.” (Roman Catholic Church) 14:16
# “The wrath of God is poured out upon the mother of harlots, which is the great and abominable church … whose founder is the devil.” (Roman Catholic Church) 14:17
# There’s an “awful hell” prepared for the wicked. (Catholics and non-LDS Protestant sects) 15:29
# The members of “the great and abominable church” ,the whore of all the earth, (Roman Catholic Church) will kill each other and get drunk on their own blood. 22:13
# All those that fight again Zion (Mormonism), like “that great whore, that great and abominable church” (Roman Catholic Church) will be destroyed. 22:14
# They who fight again Zion (Mormonism) will be cut off. 22:19
# You must do whatever the prophet (Jesus or Joseph Smith) says. Those who don’t will be cut off. 22:20
# Soon all the churches of the devil (all non-Mormon churches) will be destroyed. 22:23
2 Nephi
# God cursed the Lamanites (the ancestors of the Native Americans) causing their skin to turn dark and making them “loathsome” to His people. 5:21-22
# God forbids intermarriage between the Nephites and Lamanites. Those who do will be cursed by God with “the same cursing”. 5:23
# God’s curse on the Lamanites (Native Americans) also caused them to “become an idle people, full of mischief.” 5:24
# Those who don’t fight against Zion (the Mormon Church) and who don’t join “the great and abominable church (the Catholic Church) will be saved. 6:12
# God will force (Roman Catholic Church members) to eat their own flesh and drink their own blood. 6:18
# Many children will die because of their practicing Catholocism. 10:2
# Jews are wicked. Only the Jews would crucify their God. 10:3
# America was consecrated by God to the seed of Nephi (Mormons). God likes America better than any other country. All Americans will someday worship God. (And become Mormons) 10:19
# The Jews created abominations and works of darkness. 25:2
# The devil is the founder of all those “secret combinations.” (non Mormon Christian sects) 26:22
# More about “that great and abominable church, the whore of all the earth.” 28:18
If anyone dared mention this type of hate teaching, Riehl quickly reverted to calling them “anti-Mormon bigots” and shut down any and all debate about Romney’s religion. Why? Because of Riehl’s almost obsessive hatred for John McCain,and at that time Romney was the only (seemingly, later disproved completely) contender to defeat McCain. Oh, the hypocrisy!
What did Dan have to say about anyone criticizing Mormonism?
. Could we please get these detailed discussions of anyone’s religion out of the national discussion on who our next president might be? There is no religious test. And some of these freaking evangelicals better get it, or there will be an independent bid. I am sickened by the intolerance I am seeing by some aligned with that faction.
“Detailed”. As in 8 posts in 24 hours about Jeremiah Wright and Obama’s religion.
Now that the political shoe is on the other foot, Riehl has written post after post condemning Obama for not rejecting Wright. Obama attends the Wright’s church, but Romney is and was a very powerful leader in the LDS. Romney has never rejected nor condemned any racist or sexist or intolerant beliefs taught by his cult. He has never apologized nor even addressed the fact that Mormons didn’t allow blacks into their Temple, nor their priesthood, until 1978, 16 years after Romney bragged his father marched with Dr. Martin Luther King (later, he admitted this was a lie to begin with).
Selective outrage based on political expediency. Just what Dan condemns on the left. This is beyond hypocrisy, it pretty much calls into question Riehl’s basic credibility or reliability on any and all political opinionating. For him to be fulminating about matters of morality and racism is pretty rich.
The Powertools are just as bad, running a series on Obama’s supposed acceptance of racist theology. Where was there series on Mormon racism? I’d appreciate a link to that, I must have missed it.
AOSHQ is quite put out at the fact that CNN gave Romney shit about his racist theology, and in Ace’s humble opinion aren’t hard enough on Obama. With the shoe on the other foot, where are Ace’s posts condemning Romney as he is now condemning Obama’s minister? In the past, Ace has posted dozens upon dozens of times about how unfair it is to examine Romney’s Mormon history of racism. But somehow, Obama and Wright are different than Romney and, well Romney, since he’s a church elder.
Not to be outdone, St. Charles Johnson of LGF, always one to blow his own horn about what a leader he is among rightbloggers, is all over Kos for defending the racist Wright.
Where are Johnson’s posts condemning Romney’s racist religion? What’s a matter, cat got your tongue? What say you, furry britches?
Baldilocks notes that Obama distancing himself from Wright would be like “cutting off his own right arm”- to Romney, a 3rd generation elder in a dynastic family of Mormon leaders, it would be like cutting off his head. Where was Baldilocks when Romney was riding high?
Here is an especially sweet and rich little quip by Macsmind, defending Romney’s execrable racist cult against Dobson and purporting to school him on how we don’t judge others on religion here in the good old US of A:
This is not because Romney is, at this time, my first choice for the GOP nomination. This is not because he and I are of the same religion. This isn’t because I am a fan of Fred Thompson’s acting (I’ve liked his performances, but I will freely admit that CSI and its spinoffs have trumped Law and Order in me). This is because Dr. Dobson seems to have not just a poor understanding of what we are trying to elect (to wit, a President of the United States/Commander-in-Chief, not a Pastor-in-Chief). He also seems to have no trouble sitting in moral judgment of others.
And here is Macmind today:
No one – unless they are a brain-dead moron – would sit five minutes under Wright’s racist and anti-american rantings without walking out. Barak has sat there for twenty years. That’s not distancing oneself, it’s complicity.
Yeah, well I couldn’t sit there for five minutes listening to you Mormon scumbags ranting on about how my Grandmother’s church of choice is an abomination of Satan, how blacks are accursed of God and how women are chattel To each his own, I guess.
Stop the ALCU has an entire roundup of sanctimonious pricks judging Obama’s religion. Not one of these sorry ass motherfuckers ever mentioned a peep about Romney’s racist cult, and in fact most of them condemned any debate about it as being “anti-Mormon”. Because of course, Mormonism is unassailable, because its run by white people. And, as Mormonism teaches, white=delightsome and holy and pure, and dark skin is accursed by god. So, its ok to criticize the pagan darkie religion, God hates them.
HotAir, that paragon of hypocrisy and demagogery, posts a big roundup with plenty of troglodyte comments. The racism is barely under the surface over there all the time anyway, due to the “illigal immigrant” (read “dirty fucking Mexicans”) debate, so now that its a black man’s religion, its open season and no holds barred.
Commenter Lily:
Docweasel: I believe the LDS religion has worked to overcome their racist past. Rev. Wright was preaching this hate just a few months ago. Also, this is not really about religion. Its about a presidential candidate with a hateful, anti-American spiritual advisor.
They have, huh? You haven’t worked too hard, since you are here bashing a black man’s religion. So did they rewrite the passages of the Book of Mormon, which you purport to believe literally, condemning the Catholic Church as an abomination? Do they not still teach that almost all Protestant and Catholic churches were created by, and are run by, Satan, and are a force of evil in the world today? Or that dark skin is a curse of God? Because the Book of Mormon I own, which I purchased just to check this stuff out, DOES still have this.
Now you can rant on with justifications and rationalizations, but the REAL point is, when Romney was being pelted with this stuff, people like you said it was out of bounds. Romney himself went on TeeVee to whinge that it was unfair to make him defend his theology and the teachings of his church, and that you can take apart any religion and post the inflammatory part.
My point is, you are doing the same God damn thing you condemned those “anti-mormon bigots” for doing. You don’t know Obama’s religion. You are referencing cherry picked quotes and saying he needs to distance himself from his religion.
If that’s not hypocrisy in the highest sense, then what is? Would you like to defend every line in the Book of Mormon, or have it demanded you condemn your own church and distance yourself from it?
Ask Romney about Mormonism’s intolerance
The fundamental raison d’être of the Mormon Church is the core belief that no other Christian denomination whatsoever —- whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Assemblies of God, Baptist, Anabaptist, you name it —- is valid. In fact, Mormons assert that there was no legitimate Christian church whatsoever, and therefore no legitimate Christians, virtually from the time the last remaining apostles died off at the end of the first century until the founding of the Mormon religion in 1830 by the self-proclaimed latter-day prophet Joseph Smith. They refer to this nearly 1,800-year interregnum as the “Great Apostasy,” which pretty much speaks for itself.
Smith was born in Vermont, one of eight children of a struggling farmer and occasional schoolteacher. By 1816, the family had moved to Palmyra, N.Y. Smith’s father was reputedly religious but unchurched. In 1820, young Joseph was pondering which of the most prominent Protestant denominations of that day to join. Smith’s mother, two brothers and a sister had become Presbyterians. According to an account he wrote 18 years later, the 14-year-old Smith repaired to the woods to seek God’s guidance as to which church merited his allegiance.
He reported a vision in the forest in which both God the Father and Jesus the Son appeared before him. Smith asked the spectral heavenly presences which denomination he should join. Here, in Smith’s own words, in “Pearl of Great Price,” a writing published by the Mormon Church, is the response he claims to have received directly from the mouth of God (my comments added in brackets):
“I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination [apparently, including the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed, the two most common summations of Christian belief] in His sight; that those professors [those who professed those creeds] were all corrupt; that ‘they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men. …’”
All Christian creeds an abomination? Every follower of an existing denomination corrupt? So much for ecumenical spirit — or even basic religious tolerance. This means, in Mormon doctrine, that the post-apostolic Roman Catholic Church has been apostate during its entire 2,000-year history; the Eastern Orthodox churches that split from Rome in 1054 also were and remain illegitimate; even the various denominations founded by the great Protestant reformers in the 16th century — Martin Luther, Thomas Cranmer, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, Jan Hus — are all null and void.
How does this hard-line theology play out in real life? Let’s take baptism, the nearly universally accepted, biblically mandated rite of initiation into the Christian faith (Jesus himself was baptized by John the Baptist). Even the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges the validity of baptisms carried out by other faiths if they are performed using water and the Trinitarian formula (”in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”). The overwhelming majority of Christian traditions also believe that emergency baptisms are valid even when administered by a layperson, say at a moment of great peril or impending death, when no ordained clergy are available.
But Mormons believe that no baptism performed between the extinction of the original 12 apostles and the founding of Mormonism in the 19th century was valid, and that even today, only holders of the Mormon priesthood can perform an efficacious baptism. The ubiquitous Mormon missionaries who circle the globe — Romney himself was one, in France, while he was in college — are trained specifically to proselytize and convert members of other Christian faiths and bring about their rebaptism into the Mormon Church.
What about all those billions of putative Christian souls through the last two millenniums who thought they were saved via baptism in a non-Mormon faith but were unwittingly lost? Mormons hold that only a posthumous proxy or “vicarious” baptism by a qualified Mormon practitioner, in temple ceremonies off-limits to non-Mormons, will ensure they end up in paradise. Hence the church’s famous focus on extensive genealogical research.
This “our way or no way” approach is pretty much unique to Mormons in this day and age. No doubt there remain some hard-liners in the Vatican who still believe Roman Catholicism to be the only “one true church.” But that attitude is most certainly not shared by rank-and-file Catholics in this country, millions of whom have abandoned the church of their upbringing and many of whom have defected to evangelical brands of Christianity. While there are still no doubt some anti-Semitic Christians who believe God doesn’t hear the prayers of Jews, most American Christians today believe that Jews are God’s chosen people and that they will be in heaven.
I wager that this exclusionary Mormon theology, once widely revealed, will come as a shock to most U.S. Christians, regardless of their particular denominational preference or worship style. This is a country where ecumenism and church shopping have been de rigueur for decades. Christians in our pluralistic society are accustomed to local interfaith councils, interdenominational prayer breakfasts, Shrove Tuesday pancake suppers shared by various denominations, fall harvest dinners that rotate among the church halls of different local denominations. They are accustomed to Lutherans and Presbyterians sharing their church buildings with Korean Methodists and to Episcopalians and Lutherans exchanging ordained clergy.
I believe that Mormon doctrine on this point, once made plain, will prove equally offensive to modern-day, ecumenical-minded Christians around the world, who in recent times have:
• Witnessed Pope John Paul II as the first pope to visit a synagogue, meeting in Rome with the grand rabbi and asking for forgiveness from Jews for the persecution and forced conversions of previous centuries. He also called on the grand mufti of Jerusalem on the Temple Mount.
• Observed several archbishops of Canterbury, spiritual leaders of the church formed by Henry VIII when he unilaterally broke with Rome in the 16th century (and was excommunicated by the pope for his trouble), make pilgrimages to the Vatican to meet with various pontiffs over the past few decades.
• Watched Pope Benedict XVI pray facing Mecca with an imam at Istanbul’s famed Blue Mosque and meet with the ecumenical patriarch of Eastern Orthodoxy. (For those who don’t know their religious history, after the Great Schism of the Western and Eastern churches in 1054, the pope and patriarch had excommunicated each other.)