tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692053.post1322032620356939086..comments2023-11-03T06:35:48.003-05:00Comments on Shark and Shepherd: Mitt Romney is no JFK. His speech was better.Rick Esenberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07280070509167910367noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692053.post-69233613863472579412008-01-21T07:37:00.000-06:002008-01-21T07:37:00.000-06:00It is ok to use what ever criteria you want in cho...It is ok to use what ever criteria you want in choosing a president. Is it useful to judge someone by a religion? I would say no. It is someone’s personal qualities and their actions that I think are most important in choosing a president. <BR/><BR/>I can't think of one religion that doesn't have (lets not mince words) crazy ideas. Including those of every candidate. Are all the other candidates to be held responsible for everything written in the Bible? Things like world created in 7 days or the entire population originating from a single man and woman that had two sons, talking snakes, or biblical writings on slavery. Is it right or even useful to hold any of that against Hillary or Obama? Is it fair or useful to discount any democrat because of the parties long history with the KKK including a current senator who was a member of the KKK? Personally I say no. I don’t think it is productive to judge anyone based on anything other than their own actions. I also cannot think of a weaker objection to anyone than guilty by association.<BR/><BR/>People that bash Mormonism in political conversations today are not, I expect, as worried or offended by Mormonism as they claim to be but simply use it as a club to bash Romney with or they would not apply their criticism so selectively. All the criticism about Mormonism could be heaped on Mormon democrat senate majority leader Harry Reid but (surprising no one) isn’t.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692053.post-18506585500771661512007-12-09T09:26:00.000-06:002007-12-09T09:26:00.000-06:00Well, it worked in the preview... My apologies for...Well, it worked in the preview... <BR/><BR/>My apologies for sloppy formatting. The column is from David Brooks.<BR/><BR/>----------<BR/><BR/>Bottom line for me: Doesn't it matter that Romney believes Native Americans were originally white people who God made nonwhite <I>as a punishment</I>? Shouldn't it matter that he belongs to an organization that was formally white supremacist until the '70s, when he was an adult? Wouldn't I want to consider a candidate's adult membership in an all-white country club?<BR/><BR/>Isn't it okay to consider these things when asking if he should be President?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20692053.post-18968099564390468412007-12-09T09:20:00.000-06:002007-12-09T09:20:00.000-06:00Then there's , who offers a sounder opinion: When ...Then there's <A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/opinion/07brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin" REL="nofollow"/>, who offers a sounder opinion:<BR/><BR/> When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.<BR/><BR/>The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I’m assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press.<BR/><BR/>The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.<BR/><BR/>In Romney’s account, faith ends up as wishy-washy as the most New Age-y secularism. In arguing that the faithful are brothers in a common struggle, Romney insisted that all religions share an equal devotion to all good things. Really? Then why not choose the one with the prettiest buildings?<BR/><BR/>In order to build a voting majority of the faithful, Romney covered over different and difficult conceptions of the Almighty. When he spoke of God yesterday, he spoke of a bland, smiley-faced God who is the author of liberty and the founder of freedom. There was no hint of Lincoln’s God or Reinhold Niebuhr’s God or the religion most people know — the religion that imposes restraints upon on the passions, appetites and sinfulness of human beings. He wants God in the public square, but then insists that theological differences are anodyne and politically irrelevant.<BR/><BR/>Romney’s job yesterday was to unite social conservatives behind him. If he succeeded, he did it in two ways. He asked people to rally around the best traditions of America’s civic religion. He also asked people to submerge their religious convictions for the sake of solidarity in a culture war without end.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com