Anti-Mormon Vibe Starting to Come Willard's Way

Candidate Kennedy felt the need to give a speech in 1960 stating that the Pope was not his Boss. In 2012, will anti-Mormon bias force Willard Milton Romney to do the same:

But there are other things about Mormons that are perhaps more disturbing and which have only been hinted at in the media. Mormons generally perceive themselves as a misunderstood and sometimes persecuted minority. Women are second class citizens who are expected to marry young and bear large numbers of children while playing much more limited roles than men in the church. Polygamy was only abandoned in 1890 when it was a precondition for entering the union as a state. Only in 1978 were blacks admitted to the priesthood. During the Vietnam War many young Mormons used their missionary obligations to avoid the draft, claiming a religious exemption. Mitt Romney was one who did so.

The Latter Day Saints demand absolute obedience from the top down with no questioning of doctrine or practices, enforcing the rules among church members through the use of disciplinary boards. The church’s leader Thomas Monson is regarded as a living prophet, one of several in the church hierarchy, whose word is the word of God and must be obeyed. Many of the church rituals are secret.

The secretiveness is the issue. Your average Teabagger can't walk in off the street and see what's going on at the church. That has always seemed odd to me. The Mormon founding story really is quite lame, but not so important. It starts with Joseph Smith finding golden tablets hidden away in upstate New York telling the story of the destruction of a lost tribe of Israelites who hung out with Jesus in the New World back in the day. Of course the golden tablets were written in something called "reformed Egyptian" which when using 2 magic rocks could be translated into good ol' red blooded American English. Smith of course did not allow other folks to look at the tablets or even use the "seer stones" to verify the text, because….. well…. that ….. would probably have been inconvenient.

I've been meaning to read the Book of Mormon some day which is supposed to be pretty good and well written. Of course nobody reads the Book of Mormon these days for literary value because Evangelical believe it is heretical and Mormons won't admit it is a fine work of fiction. Of course this admission would screw things up, so there you go.

But anyway this is all besides the point. All religions have their idiosyncrasies. The real questions are the secretive nature of the church and whether Willard Romney will feel the need to make a public declaration that the Church Bosses won't his be his boss as President. Kennedy wouldn't take orders from the Pope, so he said. Will Willard state that the Head Mormon Big Wig will play second fiddle to him if he's elected? I think he's gonna have to at some time.