Romney's lies: Do Mormons approve?

I've been really annoyed at the lies pouring out of the Romney campaign.  For example, the "welfare work requirement".  He claims the Obama administration has eliminated it, when every major fact checking organization points out that is just NOT TRUE. NPR:

Republican Mitt Romney keeps saying that President Obama has gutted the law, even though every major fact-checking organization says the attacks are false.
...

• The fact-checking website PolitiFact says Romney's claims are"pants on fire" bogus.
• The Washington Post's fact checker awarded four Pinocchios, its highest rating.
• And Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck.org reached the same conclusion, that the claims are false. 

Even CNN.

 [T]he essential goal of pushing welfare recipients to work remains in place. That's pretty much it. This is clearly not an effort by the President to kill off the welfare work requirements. That's why even some Republicans backed away. Governor Romney's claim doesn't work. And we rate it false.

Why is he lying?  Well, first of all a the NPR story tells us, because it works.  It's a dog whistle to the right, hearkening back to the Reagan presidency where there was a myth of "welfare queens" (generally imagined as black women) pulling up in a Cadillac to collect their check.  Or having more babies just so they could get the food stamps.  The idea that a black president is siphoning money to Those People is part of the implicit racism that runs throughout the Romney campaign and the cynical  New Republican party.  And it's disgusting.

But Romney is supposed to be a man of great faith.  A Bishop in his church, chosen by God. So should't he reject lies as beneath him and beneath his faith?

I mean, I grew up being told that lies were wrong.  Honesty was a HUGE deal in my family, and wrongs were to be admitted.  It wasn't just growing up Catholic with a Christian ethos  (Thou shalt not bear false witness....)  It was fundamental morality, like being a Girl Scout.  Lying was a cardinal sin.

But apparently lying is a Mormon thing.  From the Daily Beast:

[Brigham Young's gt-gt-granddaughter] Emmett says she thinks Romney’s biggest fault is that he has a “serious problem telling the truth. ….This kind of thing has sadly been a part of the church from the very beginning. Some modern apostles actually taught that it is not always the best thing to tell the truth if it interferes with preaching gospel.” 

Emmett says the notion of “Lying for the Lord,” as it has been called, implies that teaching the whole truth about the church should be avoided. … [Ken] Clark, who worked as a teacher for the LDS Church Education System (CES) for 27 years....tells The Daily Beast, “Lying has become an institutionalized method of administrative control with the church….Every Mormon grows up with the idea that it’s OK to lie if it’s for a higher cause".

Even Joanna Brooks, Mormon columnist at Religion Dispatches admits

[I]n some Mormon circles one does hear bitter accusations of “lying for the Lord,” and sometimes one does witness among Mormon people today the remnants of a deep-seated sense that telling a complete, straightforward story is not always good for LDS interests. 

The most penetrating assessment of this Mormon cultural phenomenon comes from linguistic anthropologist Daymon Smith, who ties defensive communication mechanisms—telling outsiders one story in order to protect another version of the story for insiders—to Mormon polygamy and particularly to the decades in the late nineteenth century when federal prosecution of polygamy sent many Mormon men on the “underground.” … 

Double-speaking on polygamy continues. I myself wrestle with it whenever I’m obliged to talk about Mormon polygamy in public. …. 

Was I lying for the Lord? Or was I a regular Mormon struggling to tell a complicated story to a world that often reduces us to stereotypes? What should I have said? 

How about the truth?  Messy, complicated, but.... well, TRUE.

It's quite something to think that Romney's mendacity is not in spite of his faith, but because of it.  (I am sure that many good Mormons are disturbed by this as well--and as Brooks points out, many are clearly discomfited by other behaviors of their hierarchy.  As with the Roman Catholic laity, I call on rank-and-file Mormons to SPEAK OUT.)

But regardless of its source, Romney's mendacity disqualifies him for the office he seeks.  and it CERTAINLY disqualifies him from receiving my vote, or that of anyone else who values the truth.

75% of donations for Prop 8 from Mormons

Religion Dispatches carries the story of the LDS (Mormon) involvement of Prop 8:

On Wednesday, January 20, in a federal courthouse in San Francisco, plaintiffs in the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger trial challenging the legality of California’s Proposition 8 introduced two documents (over strenuous objections from the defense) indicating close but cautious coordination between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Yes on 8 campaign.

The documents, according to plaintiffs’ witness Gary Segura, a professor of political science at Stanford University, indicated a desire on the part of the Church to create “plausible deniability or respectable distance between the church organization per se and the actual campaign.”

Segura’s words soon rippled across the gay blogosphere, as trial watchers from The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan to Julia Rosen of the California-based Courage Campaign latched onto the phrase “plausible deniability” as an “explosive” indictment of the Mormon Church’s allegedly behind-the-scenes relationship to the Proposition 8 campaign.
But to Mormons in California—both those who supported the Yes on 8 campaign and those who opposed it—the relationship between the church and the Proposition 8 campaign has always been undeniable.

When will anyone challenge their tax exempt status?

Demographics: who are these Episcopalians?

A while back a question came up asking how religious denomination correlates with education. The data exist, thanks to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public LIfe. I downloaded the data and processed it for you.

Due to how the data are collected, the Episcopalians are generally lumped with "Mainline Protestant" on the big comparisons and broken out separately only on sub documents that focus on Protestants. But I pulled the Episcopal data and added them to the Big Table for your interest. I named these a little differently from the Pew data: "Unaffiliated" means people of faith without traditional affiliation; "None" means no religion/atheist/agnostic, etc.

The first graph looks at levels of education, from no school, to high school, some college, college degree, or post-graduate work. The chart is sorted in descending order from those with most education (College + postgrad combined) to those with least. As you can see, the highest levels of education are non-Christian faiths (Hindu and Jewish), but the 'piskies are pretty high. More conservative Christian denominations such as the Roman Catholics or Evangelicals are much further down the chart, indicating that a larger fraction of those belonging to this group have lower levels of education.
The second chart takes the same groups and asks whether they have a positive or negative view of gay people. Although there is some expected agreement, this chart does not completely correlate with the education chart; for example, Hindus are much less favorable to gay people, although very highly educated. The unaffiliated group is most gay-positive, and the Roman Catholics are right up there with the Episcopalians. Perhaps someone should tell the RC Bishops, who are busy attacking gay marriage around the country, that they've lost the people

Still, a recent study from Florida notes that more educated people are more favorable to gay rights.

The study found education was about five times as important as race in determining whether a county's residents favored the ban. .....
"There's a lot of evidence showing increased education leads to greater tolerance," Smith said.

I don't think any of us are surprised with that. But it is interesting how different the denominations are, don't you think?

ARIS; A look at the faithful in the USA (updated)

The ARIS -- American Religious identification Survey is released.
Big news:

The percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, has now increased to 15 percent. ....

Only 1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. But based on stated beliefs, 12 percent are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unsure), while 12 percent more are deistic (believe in a higher power but not a personal God). The number of outright atheists has nearly doubled since 2001, from 900 thousand to 1.6 million. Twenty-seven percent of Americans do not expect a religious funeral at their death.

So, organized religion is a big turn-off, not only to the secularists who don't believe, but to many who do. This agrees with surveys from The Barna Group suggesting that Christianity is no longer the "default religion" in the USA. Why do you think think this might be? I have a few ideas. And a big part is that the daily news isn't exactly giving Christianity a good image.

Item: Brazilian Bishop with approval of the Vatican excommunicates the mother and doctors who provided an abortion to 9 year old girl, who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather. The doctors felt it was life-threatening for the child to carry babies to term. The Bishop didn't think that was justification for the surgery. However, the stepfather wasn't excommunicated. Raping a child is forgiveable, it seems. Saving her life isn't.

Item: A ski lift operator shot the general manager of a Colorado ski resort, after announcing he would kill any co-workers who weren't Christian. Ironically, the manager was (and stated he was) Catholic. The killer shot him anyway.

Item: The Roman Catholic Church and the Mormons united in an unholy alliance to attack gay marriage in Proposition 8 and impose their religious values on the public. They used explicitly religious arguments prior to the vote, and stated that gay marriage discriminated against Christians. Following the election the archbishops of San Francisco and Los Angeles told the gay community to shut up and get over it. Other Prop8 supporters complained that gays upset by the vote are no better than terrorists. This has led to considerable anti-religious rhetoric in California.

Item: National Association of Evangelicals fired Rev. Richard Cizik as its vice president for governmental affairs for daring to support civil unions (not gay marriage, mind you, just civil unions).

Even young evangelicals are increasingly put off by the focus on social (sexual) "hot button" issues to the exclusion of other aspects of faith. They are no longer lockstep conservatives. Intolerance alienates young people and others from religion generally.

The irony is that Christianity is based at some level on a pacifist hippie who preached poverty, unjudging love and mutual respect. All of which seems conspicuously absent in the dominant expression of Christianity and indeed religion, in the US. No wonder there's a recruiting problem. The challenge is for liberal Christians to be identified with something conspicuously different than the sex-obsession of the conservative denominations. It may be too late.

I wrote previously on this site

I believe that the knee-jerk response against religion in the political sphere is largely driven as a response to the conservative religionists who are attempting to force their view of morality on all others by "majority rules". (Just think: if "majority rules" ruled, then "activist judges" would never have de-segregated the South). This is because it is the conservatives who are most active in limiting the fundamental rights of others. How do we establish meaningful discourse and protect ALL our rights, when we have such profound disagreements?

Why do Mormons in Utah affect votes in California?

The Salt Lake City Tribune reports over $2.7 milliion in support for Prop H8 from Utah Mormons, the next biggest state involvement to California.

Utahns and the LDS Church spent significantly more than previously reported on last-minute efforts to push passage of California's ban of same-sex marriage, newly filed financial disclosures show. ....More than half the Utah donations poured in during the final three weeks before the Nov. 4 election, totaling about $2.5 million.

Officials with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also have filed new disclosures detailing at least $134,774 in previously unreported nonmonetary expenditures to help Prop. 8 proponents, much of it in staff time by church employees. Only $55,000 in LDS Church donations had been reported before, by California-based ProtectMarriage.com, the main pro-Prop. 8 group.

Between them, the filings add new dimensions to Utah's heavy involvement in California's same-sex-marriage ban, which carried 52 percent of the vote and now is being challenged in state courts. Encouraged by church leaders, Mormons across the country gave money to the campaign...

Along the same lines, the Bay Area Reporter has discovered (H/T James)

two 11-year-old documents authored by Utah State University professor Richley Crapo, Ph.D., which describe the genesis of the church's HLM (defined by Crapo as "Homosexual Lesbian Marriage") strategy.
....
Crapo's timeline begins in 1988 when the LDS, under then-President Gordon B. Hinckley, hired the marketing firm Hill and Knowlton to "monitor and promote the church's stance on gay issues in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress."
....
Crapo also described how the LDS first reached out to Catholics at the genesis of its HLM strategy in Hawaii, inviting then-Honolulu Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo to vacation with Hinckley at the palatial LDS estate on the island. This was the beginning of a dialogue that eventually recruited the U.S. Catholic bishops to the LDS cause, according to Crapo, whose chronology calls into question the recent assertion by San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer that he invited the Mormons to become involved in the Yes on 8 fight.

So, a few questions.
1) Was it the Catholics who co-opted the Mormons, or vice versa?
2) Why are out-of-state Mormons providing funding for California constitutional issues?
3) If a church can instruct its followers to donate money to a cause, is that a religious issue, or a political one?

By the way, the "no-on-8" donation lists are also public. You haven't heard of people trying to hide their donations for equality. As we've discussed before here, the Yes-on-H8 folks tried to blackmail the opposition back in October, presuming they'd be ashamed of their contributions. THe response was "publish and be damned". Telling, that, don't you think?

Update Cany points us to some reflections on the response to the Mormons on her blog. The magnitude of the LDS involvement (newly revealed) as well as the long history show us that the LDS church is an implacable foe to GLBT marriage rights, moreso than the Catholics or any other group, and any campaign to restore our rights is going to have to neutralize their threat.

Protests Target Mormon Church

In other news stories, there have been complaints by Mormons about yesterday's protests against them that they are entitled to exercise their rights to participate in the political process on issues that they're concerned about. That's true, of course. But if they do it in the same way as Rovian political hacks instead of Christians, they're entitled to be treated as such. ---"Dr. Primrose" in a comment on yesterday's post

CNN IReport has video of the Prop 8 protest at LA's Mormon Temple. Mike in Texas also has information up about a petition to revoke the Mormon Church's tax exemption.

The Mormons and Prop8

From the San Diego Union Trib (which itself came out against Prop8):

Mormons are being asked by their church leaders to step up their already considerable efforts to pass a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage in California.

Senior elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made a televised appeal to members Wednesday night and laid out a week-by-week strategy for boosting Mormon involvement before the Nov. 4 election.

....Mormons have been active participants in the campaign both as volunteers and financial contributors, giving $8.4 million to the Proposition 8 campaign, according to the Web site mormonsfor8.com.....

During Wednesday's taped satellite broadcast, church leaders asked for 30 members from each California congregation to donate four hours of week to the campaign. They also called on young married couples and single Mormons to use the Internet by text messaging and blogging to help pass the initiative.

and from our side?

A few lonely voices. Check out the new blog from Fr Geoff Farrow, who is waiting to be fired from the RC church for opposing Prop8. Over at James' site, he describes manning the anti-Prop8 booth at a farmer's marker. Susan Russell is feverishly doing local events with characteristic passion. Of course the Episcopal bishops had a nice news conference. But in terms of organized faith communities actively joining together to oppose Prop 8, the hate amendment?

::crickets::