Forget Big Love And Get Ready For Big Hate

 M2RB:  The B-52s

 

 

Huggin' and a kissin', dancin' and a lovin'
Wearin' next to nothing, 'cause it's hot as an oven
The whole shack shimmies, yeah, the whole shack
shimmies
The whole shack shimmies
When everybody's movin' around
And around and around and around

Everybody's movin', everybody's groovin', baby

Folks linin' up outside just to get down
Everybody's movin', everybody's groovin', baby
Funky little shack, funky little shack
 

Only Presidential candidates, who practise religions like Black Theology and have pastors that say things like "God Bless America. No! No No! God damn America" and “Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger. Hillary has never had a people defined as a non-person,” get a pass.  Religion-bashing becomes fashionable on the Left when the minority religion is practised by a candidate on the right.  In that case, full-bore hate is perfectly acceptable.

By Daniel Allott on 4.18.12 @ 6:09AM

Liberal attacks on Mitt Romney's Mormonism begin to intensify.

It's often taken for granted that Christian conservatives' uneasiness with Mormonism best explains why Mitt Romney has struggled to win-over those voters.

In Inside the Circus, a new e-book about the 2012 campaign by Politico's Mike Allen and Evan Thomas, the Romney campaign is depicted as so consumed with worry that the candidate's faith would hurt him with the evangelicals that dominated the Iowa caucuses that it failed to anticipate Rick Santorum's rise. "Part of the reason for the ceiling [of support], quite frankly, is the Mormon thing," a Romney aide told the authors. "If he was even an Episcopalian, he'd be better off today."

“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion.  It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’”

- Bill Maher

Negative perceptions of Mormonism so worried Romney's 2008 presidential team that, according to Politico, "the dilemma had its own acronym in campaign power point presentations: TMT (That Mormon Thing)."

"[Joseph Smith] was an obvious conman. Mr Romney has every right to believe in conmen, but he should not be running the country if he does."

- Jacob Weisberg, Slate

Of course, Romney's ideologically malleability and political opportunism -- not his faith -- has always been his biggest liability with conservatives. But the Mormon angle allowed the media to portray conservatives as bigoted theocrats.

The media's preoccupation with anti-Mormon sentiment on the right has distracted from what is arguably a much more pervasive anti-Mormonism on the secular left.

 "They've got three RCs, or two RCs- two Roman Catholics- running and a Mormon, so three cultists running, and they gotta pick one of the three cultists, as they see them."

- Chris Matthews, MSNBC, 13 March 2012

Reams of polling data make clear that anti-Mormonism is not exclusively, or even predominantly, a problem on the right. A 2011 Gallup poll found that 27% of Democrats said they wouldn't vote for a Mormon of their own party for president, 50% more than the 18% of Republicans who felt that way. In a Quinnipiac survey, 46% of Democrats said they wouldn't be comfortable with a Mormon president, while 29% of Republican respondents felt similarly.

And a Pew poll found that 31% of Democrats and 23% Republicans said they would be less likely to support a candidate if he were Mormon. The poll also found that the more liberal the respondent, the more anti-Mormon they were. Forty-one percent of liberal Democrats said they would be less likely to support a Mormon candidate.

Given these findings, it's no wonder that, since becoming the Republican Party's presidential nominee in waiting, Mitt Romney -- lifelong LDS member, former Mormon Bishop, Stake President and lay minister -- has been under attack for his beliefs from liberals in the media.

Writing in New York magazine in January, Frank Rich heralded the liberal attacks on Romney’s Mormonism as "the big dog that has yet to bark, and surely will by October."

October is a political eternity away. Slate's Jacob Weisberg has written that Romney's Mormonism should disqualify him for the presidency. Other liberal writers, including the New York Times' Maureen Dowd and Charles Blow, have mocked Romney's Mormonism as well.

Earlier this month, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell said:

"Mormonism was created by a guy in Upstate New York in 1830 when he got caught having sex with the maid and explained to his wife that God told him to do it. Forty-eight wives later, Joseph Smith's lifestyle was completely sanctified in the religion he invented to go with it, which Mitt Romney says he believes."

Republicans are concerned that with Romney as their nominee, the anti-Mormon attacks will only get worse. Last week Mormon Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said that the Obama reelection team would "throw the Mormon Church at [Romney] like you can't believe."

  

"Let me just tell you this Mitt 'Muddle Mouth': I'm a single parent and my kids are *amazing*! Stick that in your magic underwear."

 - Charles Blow, New York Times columnist, 22 February 2012

The Obama campaign insists it won't raise Romney's Mormonism as a campaign issue. "Attacking a candidate's religion is out of bounds, and our campaign will not engage in it," Ben Labolt, a spokesman for Obama's reelection campaign, told the Huffington Post in November. But it may not have to if its proxies in the media and elsewhere do the attacking.

The left's hostility toward Mormonism has less to do with church doctrine and much more to do with the doctrines of conservatism to which most Mormons strictly adhere.

"I care a lot if a candidate is going to be a Trojan horse for a sect that believes it has divine instructions on how we should be governed. So this season I’m paying closer attention to what the candidates say about their faith and what they have said in the past that they may have decided to play down in the quest for mainstream respectability."

- Bill Keller, New York Times Executive Editor

 

Related Reading:

Forget The Big Love Shack And Get Ready For The Big Hate.

Polygamy, Too! 

Don’t Know Much About Theology

When the Archbishop Met the President 

Love Shack

If you see a faded sign at the side of the road that
says
'15 miles to the love shack', love shack, yeah, yeah
I'm headin' down the Atlanta highway
Lookin' for the love getaway, headed for the love
getaway

I got me a car, it's as big as a whale
And we're headin' on down to the love shack
I got me a Chrysler, it seats about 20
So hurry up and bring your jukebox money

The love shack is a little old place
Where we can get together
Love shack, baby
(A love shack, baby)
Love shack, baby, love shack
Love shack, baby, love shack

Love shack, baby, love shack
(Love baby, that's where it's at)
Love shack, baby, love shack
(Love baby, that's where it's at)

Sign says, 'Stay away fools'
'Cause love rules at the love shack
Well, it's set way back in the middle of a field
Just a funky old shack and I gotta get back

Glitter on the mattress
Glitter on the highway
Glitter on the front porch
Glitter on the highway

The love shack is a little old place
Where we can get together
Love shack, baby
(Love shack baby)
Love shack, that's where it's at
Love shack, that's where it's at

Huggin' and a kissin', dancin' and a lovin'
Wearin' next to nothing, 'cause it's hot as an oven
The whole shack shimmies, yeah, the whole shack
shimmies
The whole shack shimmies
When everybody's movin' around
And around and around and around

Everybody's movin', everybody's groovin', baby

Folks linin' up outside just to get down
Everybody's movin', everybody's groovin', baby
Funky little shack, funky little shack

Hop in my Chrysler, it's as big as a whale
And it's about to set sail
I got me a car, it seats about twenty
So come on and bring your jukebox money

The love shack is a little old place
Where we can get together
Love shack, baby
(A love shack, baby)
Love shack, baby, love shack
Love shack, baby, love shack

Love shack, baby, love shack
(Love baby, that's where it's at)
Love shack, baby, love shack
(Love baby, that's where it's at)

Bang, bang, bang, on the door, baby
(Knock a little louder baby)
Bang bang bang,on the door, baby
(I can't hear you)

Bang bang bang, on the door, baby
(Knock a little louder sugar)
Bang bang bang, on the door, baby
(I can't hear you)

Bang, bang, bang, on the door, baby
(Knock a little louder )
Bang, bang, bang,on the door, baby
Bang, bang
(On the door, baby)

Bang, bang
(On the door)
Bang, bang
(On the door, baby)
Bang, bang, your what? Tin roof, rusted

Love shack, baby, love shack
Love shack, baby, love shack
(Love baby that's where it's at, yeah)

Love shack, baby, love shack
(Love baby that's where it's at)
Love baby, love shack
(Huggin' and a kissin')
(Dancin' and a lovin' at the love shack)