Bloodless Coup

It's the Mormon thing. As MSNBC rants about whether America's ready to elect a black President, the numbers suggest America is ready. The prejudice that more of America agrees to is by the anti-religious and the Protestants alike, most of whom agree that Romney is an outsider. Massachusetts is not America, as we could have learned from John Kerry. It's not racial diversity that is threatened in America (as opposed to in South Africa); it's religious diversity.

Why are you equating religious diversity being under threat with the LDS church being unpopular?

As to the anti-Mormon point, I'll agree that it's unpopular (among my generation and yours I'd put a lot of that at the feet of Trey Parker and Matt Stone). But I think Romney being a tremendous phony has a good bit to do with his unpopularity. A Mormon like Gov. Huntsman would present problems with public opinion, but probably not on the scale that Romney would.

And the shot at Kerry's kind of uncalled for. He got 59 million votes and would've won if Ohio had gone the other way. In 84 Reagan only got 54 million votes, and in his overwhelming win in '96 Clinton only got 47 million - a lot of Americans seem to have been fine with Massachusetts' John Kerry.

Not many states more populous than Massachussetts are populated with a majority that hates abortion, teh gays, and all things religiously and socially pluralist. I'm getting really tired of hearing about how the states where everything is (and in Mass.'s case, where this whole fantastic experiment began), and where a great degree of the country's wealth is generated, are not chock full of Americans. Really really really tired. The original 13 are sine qua non to that whole part of the country that castigates them as elitest and out of touch. One might argue that they're far more in touch with what this whole thing is supposed to be about than, say, Nebraska.

What I'm saying is that our country is more religiously exclusive than racially exclusive. Given Obama's support, at least until America began to figure out what he represents beyond his skin color, it's obvious that America is ready to elect someone darker than Howard Dean's vanilla milkshake governor's cabinet. I've been disappointed in conservatives' response to Romney because religious conservatives have objected to him on the grounds of religion. And of course liberals are scared of what someone with religion could do to our society's generous anomie.

It would be the same way if someone with attachments to unconventional sacred texts like Madonna ran. The problem is that the solution of with-us-or-against-us which typical liberals play in opposing religion and typical religious conservatives play in opposing anything outside traditional religion impedes the course our flexibility by limiting our options to two, and sets the country up for division against each other, a game which only political elites win. With us or against us is most effective in win loss scenarios (when if terrorists win they kill us), not when win win is an option.

I reject the equivalence of liberal's rejection of pre- and proscriptive behavior foisted on everyone by law (if any number of religious conservatives have their way -- for example, how about turning off the f*&king station instead of fining it tens of millions of dollars when an athlete uses a word that those same conservative prigs have used on football fields) and religious conservatives' rejection of any American with the temerity to disagree (and concomitant efforts to invade television, the schools, and america's bedrooms).

They are not equal. One is traditionally liberal; one is effectively fascist. Granted, the prime movers among the latter reflect a small minority of Christians, but a majority of Christians fail to repudiate them, and thus embolden them, in the process sullying the more open, charitable, inquiring aspects of their various faiths.

As for this: "And of course liberals are scared of what someone with religion could do to our society's generous anomie."

It's not anomie, not a loss of values, if it's merely the refusal to allow people to reject the imposition of particular values on people against their will. Once again, I ask which is more American: Live and let live or establish what amounts to a state-sanctioned religion?

If you call liberty, freedom of conscience and thought (and not mere freedom of those things in hiding), even the very freedom the terrorists hate us for (I take it you submit that Falwell and Robertson, et al., hate us for our freedom in a different way?), then yes, I'm a little worried about what a religious zealot might do. This is especially true if electoral gamesmanship is such that the views of perhaps 10 percent of the country come to determine who governs, with, you know, my Bill of Rights. But then, abstractly, that's precisely the sort of tyranny Jefferson warned us about, no? Tyranny of the electoral base. How sad; now it doesn't even take a majority to oppress me.

Actually, among zealots, Romney's the least scary of the lot -- I actually believe his faith is for real, and thus would bristle before forming a true juggernaut with the fundagelicals with whom he disagrees on any number of things. I'm much more concerned by the opportunists -- Giuliani; McCain -- who get into bed with any nutjob who will have them for convenience's sake and learn too late that it's a very slippery slope.

"Actually, among zealots, Romney's the least scary of the lot -- I actually believe his faith is for real, and thus would bristle before forming a true juggernaut with the fundagelicals with whom he disagrees on any number of things."

And that's the point, exactly. I get with Huckabee's comments about AIDS patients being quarantined, he could be dangerous. But Romney? I don't see it. That's why the lack of support for him is due not to the tyranny of a base but to the tyranny of the bases, the one George Washington warned us about. Romney took many moderate to liberal positions in his career, and he explicitly disavowed his church's involvement in his government. But liberal baseheads like Sally Quinn led a paranoid charge against him because he even mentions religion.