The following is excerpted from here: The Unpleasant Truth
As I’ve written here before, during this Republican presidential campaign something very ugly arose. It manifested itself in various ways. For example:
- Mike Huckabee’s now infamous question about whether Mormons believe Jesus and Satan as brothers. What is Huckabee had said, “Don’t Catholics believe Mary and Jesus are co-redeemers of mankind?” He would not have dared say such a thing - and maybe that’s my point. But if he had, The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, and similar organizations, would have been all over him. There is no “Mormon League.”
- The official web site of a recognized candidate for President of the United States (Huckabee again) included comments like, “let’s dispose of that Mormon trash.” Insert the word “Jewish” or “Catholic” or “”black” in that sentence for “Mormon” and ask yourself if a hue and cry would not have arisen in those cases. But no hue and cry arose, and the candidate left those comments — and links to viciously anti-Mormon web sites - up on his own official site.
- Someone named Joel Belz wrote a long essay in World Magazine, a leading Evangelical publication, stating that Mormons as a group generally lie, and that Romney’s so-called “flip-flops” could be attributed to that Mormon tendency. What if Belz — or anyone, for that matter — had argued that “Jews steal,” and therefore Joseph Lieberman could not be trusted with control of the U.S. Treasury? You’re right, that unimaginable.
The unpleasant and undeniable fact is that in the United States today it is still possible to get away with making statements about members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that simply would not be tolerated regarding any other religious group.
Another unpleasant and undeniable fact is that by and large, such statements are not loudly and vigorously denounced, but get at most a sad shake of the head from observers who ought to be outraged.
