Nonesense to the Fore--the American Way

The nation holds it breath for Mitt Romney to explain his Mormon beliefs and why they shouldn’t harm his chances to be president of the United States and thus the free world.

No religious beliefs that I know of can stand the light of reason. Granting that, Mormonism is one of the wackiest around and by my lights anyone who believes such badly written nonsense automatically disqualifies him or herself from high office, if only on stylistic grounds. The Book of Mormon is one of the biggest hunks of claptrap that has ever sandpapered eyeballs. There’s not enough bourbon in the world to make it read well.

Yes, I know that in the U.S. of A., unless you confess a fervent belief in one of the main brands of religious fairy tales and attend services accordingly, you can’t get elected to anything except, perhaps, candidate for a lynching. (White Southerners used to lynch atheists, Catholics and Jews now and them just to keep their ropes stretched.) But one at least ought to have the taste to embrace Unitarianism, which, while nonsense too, at least expresses itself in sentences honorable to the English language.

While Romney spews justifications for what can’t be justified, it looks as if another national obscurity, Mike Huckabee, might overtake him and the rest of the sweaters panting in the Republican presidential marathon. That may be because Huckabee of them all seems to have a conscience about inflicting pain on others.

Huckabee, however, is a Southern Baptist minister, no great accomplishment. It’s a religious belief that eschews reason and science and until such views became unfashionable and then illegal, as a creed lent its powers to upholding slavery, then racial discrimination. It has never stopped wanting to burn evolutionists on the street corners.

To me his being a Baptist minister tells me that Huckabee, like Romney, has a brain partly paralyzed in its reasoning powers, a dangerous thing for a president to have. Few of our presidents, alas, could or can qualify as clear thinkers; the incumbent seems incapable of thinking at all. But until lately, the presidential job, while important, was not so important that, as now, the fate of the world depends upon it.

If Romney and Huckabee emerge as the two chief contestants for blessings by other Republicans and primary voters, I can predict one thing: The right-wing evangelicals, many of them led and stirred by Baptists, will crank up a hate-Mormons campaign.

As for the Catholic establishment that bundles now with the evangelicals over abortion, it’s pretty much certain they will not sprinkle holy water on Romney. To Catholics Baptists are bad enough; Mormons are, well, abominations.