LAST NIGHT I once against asked the question about why Mormonism isn’t being examined, with Mr. Romney being asked about different aspects of his faith. At the same time Jeffrey Goldberg was doing the same thing. An excerpt:
The only Jew to ever get close to the White House was Senator Joseph Lieberman, who isn’t merely Jew-ish (as the saying goes), but a full-blown Orthodox Jew. When he was picked to be Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, the newspapers were filled with tales of his religious practices.
A New York Times reporter, Laurie Goodstein, detailed Lieberman’s exotic rites at length, in the manner of an anthropologist explaining a previously unknown Amazon tribe: “Many of Mr. Lieberman’s most basic religious rituals are intimate acts,” the article said. At morning prayer, “the senator lays on tefillin, the small leather boxes that contain four biblical passages written on parchment, binding the boxes to one arm and his forehead with leather straps.”
So what does the Romney camp find so frightening? [...] The great fear is not that Americans will see a Mormon politician as too sinister to lead the country (the way that some Baptist leaders once saw the Catholic John F. Kennedy) but that Americans will see a Mormon as too bizarre to be president.
Goldberg discusses, and I quote, the “’sacred underwear,’ the derisive term for undergarments worn by some Mormons to remind themselves of their religious responsibilities.” It’s okay for him, I assume, because he’s a conservative.
As Goldberg reminds readers, when Joe Lieberman was chosen as Al Gore’s vice presidential nominee, there were deeply detailed written articles on his Orthodox Jewish practices.
But for some reason reporters and traditional media outlets, new media as well, won’t do the same for Mormonism.
Faith is obviously important to Mitt Romney, to the tune of tithing millions and millions of dollars to his church, plus being a leader in the Mormon Church. The Mormon Church was also a principle booster to Prop 8 in California. From the New York Times in 2008, “Mormons Tipped the Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage”:
“We’re going to lose this campaign if we don’t get more money,” the strategist, Frank Schubert, recalled telling leaders of Protect Marriage, the main group behind the ban.
The campaign issued an urgent appeal, and in a matter of days, it raised more than $5 million, including a $1 million donation from Alan C. Ashton, the grandson of a former president of the Mormon Church. The money allowed the drive to intensify a sharp-elbowed advertising campaign, and support for the measure was catapulted ahead; it ultimately won with 52 percent of the vote.
A recent quote from Mitt Romney in a comfortable and safe setting had him once again declaring children are better off if they don’t have gay or lesbian as parents.
“This is what he’s been saying forever,” Mr. Williams said. “He’s always said that the ideal setting to raise a child is with the mom and the dad.”
Though Mr. Romney believes states should be allowed to give gay couples the right to adopt children, he has said in multiple interviews that he believes a heterosexual marriage is the “ideal setting” for children to grow up in. He opposes granting either marriages or civil unions to gay couples.
Americans need to know all of Mr. Romney’s beliefs and how they would impact this country, just as voters need to know about Pres. Obama’s policies and what he’s done in his first term in full light.
I do differ with Goldberg on one aspect of his post for Bloomberg.
Goldberg writes about “their ineffable niceness.” My husband’s children certainly are all reminiscent of that description, however, my interaction with the Romney camp is quite the opposite.
As I’ve written before, I’ve attempted innumerable times to be included in press releases from Mitt Romney’s campaign organization, same with the GOP. The latter included me until I dared to ask a serious question about death baptismal, tweeting his campaign. This morning, I tried yet again, with the following email sent:
Hello again. One last try to get on the press list, after several attempts. I’m a liberal political writer, yes, but I’m fair & tough on both presidential candidates.
I will not be voting in November in order to cover the race as best as I can.
Recently quoted in the New York Times on Ann Romney, I assure you that truth and facts are my compass. Here’s the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/14/fashion/ann-romney-is-writing-her-own-dress-code.html
I’d appreciate the same courtesy you’d give any other political writer. Emails & basic reporter access. So far that’s gone unanswered, but I hope it will change.
Taylor Marsh
Political analyst & author
Washington, D.C.
It doesn’t need to be said that if I were from the Washington Post, Mitt Romney’s team would include me and have to bear whatever I’d write. They don’t have to reach out to me, but it remains the right thing to do. It takes no energy to add my email to a massive press list.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that soon after I tweeted a sincere question about Mormonism I was cut off from the GOP, though I have never been afforded basic, generic press access to the Romney campaign emails, which go out to reporters and political writers across the country, no matter the level.
Only a few have been as relentlessly tough on Pres. Obama as I have, but his campaign team continues outreach no matter what I write. They know I’m a liberal, that I have a boutique audience of whip smart readers concentrated with women, too, and they also know they need every single vote they can muster in November.
Inaccessibility to elite politicians is as American as the Super PAC today. When you’re an independent writer that goes double. But knowing the stories of candidates and being able to write about them is part of the political process that is the foundation of our democratic republic.
On Mitt Romney’s presidential site there isn’t even an easy to find phone number to call for press inquiries. I can call colleagues and get a number, but that’s not really the point, now is it? Who you know to gain basic access to press releases and other Romney campaign events? There is a Chicago number to call well advertised if you want to reach Team Obama.
This might not seem like much, but it’s indicative of what Mitt Romney would do as president. Pres. Obama doesn’t always like the press, the questions or the intrusions, but even in his rarefied remoteness as the most powerful person in the world, Team Obama is reachable.
At this point, I’m just not sure whether Mitt Romney would be a president for all the people or just those with whom he can curry favor, while freezing out even honest critics in an attempt to marginalize their voice.
Why on earth would mittens’s religion be off limits? ESPECIALLY considering he is running as the representative of GAWDS OWN PARTY?!!!!!!
Don’t get me wrong….they are all superstition based nonsense with magical rituals and spells…..but if these superstition addled assmonkies are going to be veiwing the world through the fun house mirror of their particular mumbo jumbo don’t you think we all have a right to know what particular quirks mittens has?
I’m truly stunned at the traditional & new media press taking the Romney campaign’s cue on what can be asked of the candidate.
I’m a bit surprised that Romney’s campaign hasn’t discussed it already. Silence just lets people fill in the blanks with whatever fears and prejudices they already have. Being able to discuss an issue convincingly can help to dispel such suppositions before they take hold.
They’re going to let conservative bloggers & writers like Goldberg do the ramp up; all of them are talking about how “strange” Mormonism is in their writings.
It’s what I call the Jack Ryan theory of the art of political war.
Good grief, they have a form for press inquiries.
Romney’s is another one of those badly designed political websites that are alll too common. I suppose that’s a hazard of making a site that’s temporary in nature. This one doesn’t have a contact page, for instance, and you apparently have to enable a half-dozen javascript domains for the little e-mail button to work. I say “apparently”, because I gave up after three. The site lolks like a cross-site script (abbreviated XSS, if anyone wants to look that up) attack host just waiting to happen.
…and do you know how many times I filled out that frickin’ form?
Yeah, it’s pathetic.
Of course, if Christians weren’t a big majority in this country, we might be asking questions about the “bizarre ritual” of symbolically drinking blood and eating flesh every Sunday.
Really, this is grotesque. Religious rituals are, almost by definition, weird to people who don’t follow that particular religion. There aren’t enough real issues out there to focus on?
As I said in response to a similar post- I won’t be voting for ANY candidate whose campaign attempts to use religious bigotry to score points. Shame on any self-proclaimed Progressive who does, because they have stopped trying to be part of the solution and have become part of the problem.
until I dared to ask a serious question about death baptismal, tweeting his campaign.
Seriously? (pun intended)
Well, no one can accuse you of being a disciple of Dale Carnegie!
I mean that is just weird, my dear. What are they supposed to tell you that you can’t otherwise just look up on Wikipedia? And if they respond to a political reporter’s question on that topic, it would convey to me that somehow LDS religious practices are going to serve as a filter for secular decision making. I would have turned you down as well.
But, if you guys are that interested in being an email buddy, I get about 12 a week. I even have some from Ann Romney that you can probably reply to and ask a question about blouses.
Imagine my surprise at your reaction.
The press isn’t supposed to be Dale Carnegie, we’re supposed to ask questions that need asking, whether they like it or not.
Unfortunately, that’s not what anyone does anymore. Fox News, right wing radio & the Drudge new media crowd have made it possible for Republicans to skirt media they don’t like.
Democrats have MSNBC, but they’re inept compared to Ailes who’s a genius at what he does.
Like most, you also don’t know much about how press relations work with campaigns.
It was at a time when the story was exploding and I asked a simple question that others were also asking, but not directed at the campaign, because they were afraid of losing access.
Team Romney didn’t even have a formulaic response ready. That’s the point.
What Romney intends is to simply ignore the press when he wants. That has become very clear.
It’s dangerous, but no one seems to care. I don’t lose sleep, because I learned a long time ago I can only point these things out. As with Obama’s executive power fetish, your average partisan just shrugs when it’s their guy.
I have two (related) reasons at least why I think that Romney’s Mormonism is fair game. The first is that to my knowledge, Romney never refuted the story that he was against abortion before running for Governor of Massachusetts, but only took the pro choice position needed to win the state, after getting “permission” from the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City. (As most people on this site know, Romney again flip-flopped to pro life when running for President.)
As Taylor notes, JFK, the first Catholic president, specifically said that the Church didn’t speak for him and that he didn’t take orders from the Church. Can Romney really say that Salt Lake city will not call the shots when he is president? Especially since he has served as a Mormon bishop? Someone really, really, should ask.
The second question relates to just how, well, mean Romney can be on the subject of abortion. As noted in the February 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, when Romney was a bishop, one of his parishioners was having a complicated, dangerous pregnancy. Visiting the woman at the hospital, Romney told her to bring the pregnancy to term even though her chance to survive the baby’s birth would only have been 50/50. In these difficult circumstances, he even told the woman that the baby’s life was what mattered to him. not hers.
I would think that kind of casual cruelty is a legitimate issue. Even if Obama has also acted badly himself (as in, indiscriminately murdering civilians with drone strikes.)