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• Wednesday, December 5, 2007 08:42 PM

  If we are not judged on our beliefs, then on what?

  I have to say that the refrain we hear that a candidate's religious beliefs ought not to be held against him or her by voters makes no sense to me at all. I suppose the implicit analogy is with religious persecution of ordinary citizens - because we think that's bad, we imagine that not voting for someone on religious grounds is also bad. I do not think that Mitt Romney should have fewer rights than non-Mormon citizens, but I also don't think that being President is a right. It isn't "anti-Mormon vitriol" to point out that to reasonable people Mormonism is insane, and that someone who accepts it as true, while well within his rights and by no means deserving of being discriminated against before the law, thereby forfeits the trust of reasonable people and has no claim on their allegiance. (The faint hope expressed in the article that Romney takes his religion cum granum salis basically admits as much; though there's no reason why these qualms should be inviolably private, quite the contrary - if Romney won't publicly assert that he doesn't really believe the nonsense, but takes it as symbolic of something higher, or as a curiosity of his childhood that he's now outgrown, or something, then he has no business asking for the votes of reasonable men and women.) The anti-Catholic prejudice that flourished before Kennedy's Presidential run and that threatened his candidacy was something quite different - tied up with nativist bigotry directed against Irish, Polish, Italian immigrants independently of what they believed and intent upon depriving them of anywhere to work or live at all, not just the use of the White House and the steering of the nation. It would be analogous to hating someone (not just not endorsing him or her as a leader) for having been born in Utah (and not for professing a particular faith). To the extent that anti-Catholicism was directed at Catholic doctrine, it wasn't bigotry but rather Enlightenment (and I say this as someone raised Catholic). Kennedy challenged it by in effect renouncing his faith while retaining his ethnicity - he was Catholic, but he didn't believe it when push came to shove. But had Kennedy announced that he believed all the tenets of the Catholic faith and that we were bigots for not wanting to be led by a Catholic priest, that would have been silly and insulting. Mormonism is not an ethnicity, it is a belief-system. It is also patently absurd. Mitt Romney has dedicated much of his life to advancing and promoting it around the world. If we can't judge someone's fitness to lead us on the basis of his beliefs, what on Earth can we judge him on the basis of?

  —jimmcf Read jimmcf's other letters
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