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Maureen Dowd gives me a chance to get down something on Romney's Mormonism, and particularly on this bizarre practice of posthumously baptizing people into their religion.
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Just as Romney did not step up immediately after Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke “a slut,” he has yet to step up as the cases have mounted of Jews posthumously and coercively baptized by Mormons, including hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims; the parents of the death camp survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal; and Daniel Pearl, the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. (His widow, Mariane, told CNN she was “shocked.”)
Believing that only Mormons can get into the highest level of heaven, the Celestial Kingdom, and that others will be limited to the Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms, they have baptized anyone and everyone, including Anne Frank, Gandhi, Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin and Elvis.
Asked by Newsweek in 2007 if he had done baptisms for the dead, which involve white garb and immersion in water, a startled Romney replied, “I have in my life, but I haven’t recently.”
Mormon feminists got upset this winter when they found that young women in some temples had not been allowed to do proxy baptisms while they were menstruating.
Church leaders have lately stepped up efforts to stop such baptisms, reminding church members that their “pre-eminent obligation” is not to celebrities and Holocaust victims but to their own ancestors. (Ann Romney’s Welsh dad, who disdained organized religion, was baptized.)
Matthew Bowman, who wrote “The Mormon People,” says Mormons “have a hard time understanding why people from other religions find this so offensive. Mormons don’t think of these people as being made Mormon unless their spirit accepts the Gospel. They just think they’ve given them an opportunity. Mormonism is wildly optimistic.”
Mormons had designated Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, as “ready” for a posthumous proxy burial, even though he is very much alive at 83 and still teaching at Boston University and in Florida.
Wiesel calls “the whole process very strange,” and faults Romney, a Mormon stake president: “After all, Romney is not simply a Mormon. He’s been a bishop of the Mormon Church. He could have called and told me he wanted me to know that he spoke to the elders and told them to stop it. Silence doesn’t help truth.”
He added: “They have baptized over 600,000 Holocaust victims. There is nothing positive in what they are doing. It’s an insult. You cannot ask the dead their opinion.
“Poor Anne Frank. As if she didn’t suffer enough.”
-- Maureen Dowd at The New York Tiimes
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On one hand, it is a little touching that they should want more people to enjoy the highest level of heaven, even Hitler. On the other hand, it is disturbing that our most serious Republican contender for the presidency seems to have a deep and literal belief in these strange metaphysics. Though, as a practical matter, I am more concerned about his cold plutocratic instincts to favor the rich and be indifferent to the poor, but that is Republicanism through and through, and apparently Jesus is not enough to get them to turn away even a little from that.
_ _ _
Just as Romney did not step up immediately after Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke “a slut,” he has yet to step up as the cases have mounted of Jews posthumously and coercively baptized by Mormons, including hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims; the parents of the death camp survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal; and Daniel Pearl, the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. (His widow, Mariane, told CNN she was “shocked.”)
Believing that only Mormons can get into the highest level of heaven, the Celestial Kingdom, and that others will be limited to the Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms, they have baptized anyone and everyone, including Anne Frank, Gandhi, Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin and Elvis.
Asked by Newsweek in 2007 if he had done baptisms for the dead, which involve white garb and immersion in water, a startled Romney replied, “I have in my life, but I haven’t recently.”
Mormon feminists got upset this winter when they found that young women in some temples had not been allowed to do proxy baptisms while they were menstruating.
Church leaders have lately stepped up efforts to stop such baptisms, reminding church members that their “pre-eminent obligation” is not to celebrities and Holocaust victims but to their own ancestors. (Ann Romney’s Welsh dad, who disdained organized religion, was baptized.)
Matthew Bowman, who wrote “The Mormon People,” says Mormons “have a hard time understanding why people from other religions find this so offensive. Mormons don’t think of these people as being made Mormon unless their spirit accepts the Gospel. They just think they’ve given them an opportunity. Mormonism is wildly optimistic.”
Mormons had designated Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, as “ready” for a posthumous proxy burial, even though he is very much alive at 83 and still teaching at Boston University and in Florida.
Wiesel calls “the whole process very strange,” and faults Romney, a Mormon stake president: “After all, Romney is not simply a Mormon. He’s been a bishop of the Mormon Church. He could have called and told me he wanted me to know that he spoke to the elders and told them to stop it. Silence doesn’t help truth.”
He added: “They have baptized over 600,000 Holocaust victims. There is nothing positive in what they are doing. It’s an insult. You cannot ask the dead their opinion.
“Poor Anne Frank. As if she didn’t suffer enough.”
-- Maureen Dowd at The New York Tiimes
_ _ _
On one hand, it is a little touching that they should want more people to enjoy the highest level of heaven, even Hitler. On the other hand, it is disturbing that our most serious Republican contender for the presidency seems to have a deep and literal belief in these strange metaphysics. Though, as a practical matter, I am more concerned about his cold plutocratic instincts to favor the rich and be indifferent to the poor, but that is Republicanism through and through, and apparently Jesus is not enough to get them to turn away even a little from that.
