As some of you know, one of the U.S. Republican candidates, Mitt Romney, is a Mormon. I’m personally willing to consider them a sect of Christianity, but many evangelicals don’t. And, unlike me, evangelicals often vote on dogma. So, he’s making a speech to try to convince Evangelicals to move
So here’s a quote from his speech:
I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end -- where all men and all churches are treated as equal -- where every man has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice.
Wait, no, that was JFK’s speech where he was trying to deal with the ’Catholic issue.’ Here’s Romney’s speech:
Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom....Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.
....Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests.
I nabbed these quotes from Kevin Drum who goes on to say:
I know, I know. He’s just doing what he has to do. Evangelical base and all that. But I’m not religious, and yet, mirabile dictu, I still
manage to support freedom, have a conscience, and understand the law. I’m tired of people implying otherwise.
Ezra Klein similarly goes after Romney and notes the dividing line between the good parts of the speech and the bad.
After the cut, my take and a clip of part of JFK's speech.
My view: Freedom sometimes requires a degree of zealotry. Machiavelli points out that a Prince shouldn’t screw with religious groups because they’re effing crazy. Securing freedom does require people to care strongly enough about some things that they’ll undertake great hardship to overthrow any threat to that which they love. However, this passion by no means has to be for religion. Many of America’s founders were deitist after all.
On this one, I’m with the atheists. I don’t care what people believe or don’t believe about some next world, I care how they act in this one. If their religion or philosophy demands public policies I don’t like, I’ll oppose them. But if I merely find their beliefs different from my own or even outright kooky, it doesn’t matter.
Religious moderates, agnostics, and atheists have a critical advantage over the anti-pluralist fundamentalists. We can work together. The fundies however, will be inevitably riven by differences in dogma, theology, and ideology. In seeking purity they turn their guns on one another. I do not think this speech will save Mitt Romney. He will likely fall to anti-Mormon sentiment. What’s more, he has it coming. Romney has drawn a line with in-groups and out-groups based on religious belief. Moving that line to exclude him is perfectly fair.
Via Sullivan here’s a clip of part of the JFK’s speech to the Houston ministers. His starts at 1:30. The quote from above doesn’t come up yet by this point in the speech unless I missed it. In this bit he’s making the appeal more to believers in other faiths including Jews, but he doesn’t explicitly reach out to agnostics or atheists.
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