Romney’s Stupid and Insulting Speech
by Snarksmithy, 6 December 2007
“Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.”
Had Mitt Romney simply left it at that, he’d have passed the biggest sniff-test on his religion by giving the public a sworn commitment to which it could hold him. This is what JFK did, greasing the wheels for his own galloping folly of an administration.
Yet I can’t see how Romney’s speech, taken as a whole, doesn’t come off as anything other than a verbal and philosophical disaster. Take this fatuous remark:
“We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.
There is no such thing as the “religion of secularism.” It ranks not as even a cute form of semantic jujitsu. An atheist who goes to the Supreme Court asking that his son be excused from delivering a pledge of allegiance with the words “Under God” in it is an atheist who chooses not to be anesthetized by warm consensus and to hold the First Amendment to its own clear language. There is nothing “religious” in this. Laws exist either to be broken or upheld. Although it is refreshing to see the faithful using the term pejoratively, sneeringly for a change — if only they followed this line of thought to its logical conclusion.
“The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust.
“Under God” was a phrase used by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. It was then added, at the bullying insistence of the Catholic Knights of Columbus, to the pledge of allegiance in 1954 as way of underscoring our providential mission in the cold war. In neither case is this meaningless preposition a gift from the founders.
But what should really set one’s teeth on edge is this bit from Romney’s speech:
And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.
A fine follow-up sentence would be: “So do those Americans without belief.” Alas, too bad for Mitt. I wasn’t voting for him anyway, but now I count him a political enemy.
Update: Hitchens on same here (hat at jaunty angle tip - Mustafa in comments).
Thursday 6 December 2007 at 22:48
This seems to be a good day for facetious crap from Republican politicians:
STUDENT: Recent polls show you surging… What do you attribute this surge to?
HUCKABEE: ‘There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people. (Applause) That’s the only way that our campaign can be doing what it’s doing. And I’m not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite. There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has. And it defies all explanation, it has confounded the pundits… until they look at it, from a, just experience beyond human, they’ll never figure it out. And it’s probably just as well. That’s honestly why it’s happening.’
Jeeesus Christ.
Friday 7 December 2007 at 2:28
voice of reason:
http://www.slate.com/id/2179404/fr/rss/
Friday 7 December 2007 at 3:36
I’ve only heard one speech of his on YouTube, but I like Ron Paul. Kind of Libertarian, as we say over here.
But I won’t buy up shares on one speech!
Friday 7 December 2007 at 3:43
There seem to be Christians, Mustafa, who look at the gospels as a kind of action movie, and they imaging themselves, as children do for other action movies, in the lead role.
Friday 7 December 2007 at 6:56
My wife used to live in Paul’s district, so I’ve been watching him awhile. And I’m not getting the Paul love atall.
It looks to me like he’s not so into liberty, and paranoid.
He’s as much into the Christianity-as-victim narrative as Romney.
Friday 7 December 2007 at 11:40
From the Guardian’s piece:
But Romney, fearful of evangelical suspicions that his religion is a cult, uttered the word Mormon only once
I think Suzanne Goldenberg would find that evangelicals are not merely suspicious, but absolutely convinced Mormonism is a cult. If anything they’re likely to be even more hostile to Romney than religiously unconvinced Republicans. This is why, if you’ll pardon the expression, he doesn’t have a prayer. This is the background to his downplaying Mormonism but dangling the carrot of allowing more god stuff in the ‘public sphere’ - which amounts to subverting the American constitution. In this sense I wouldn’t agree his speech was stupid, exactly. Decidedly creepy, though. And bound to fail - thank goodness.
Saturday 8 December 2007 at 9:31
Off topic, but I got a post on my blog recently that is from a “group” that apparently supports violence against teachers on my blog. It seems too stupid to be true, but there it is, and I think it should be something people see for themselves.
Saturday 8 December 2007 at 14:35
”
Yet if Romney was playing it safe by avoiding theology, he was treading on dangerous ground when he appealed to the American tradition of religious tolerance to make his case. Instead of trying to persuade the evangelicals that he was basically on their side, he did the worst thing he could do: he put them on the defensive. In his speech Romney came perilously close to suggesting: If you don’t support me, you are violating the cherished principle of religious tolerance. But such a claim is simply untenable and, worse, highly offensive.
“The Christian evangelicals who are troubled by Romney’s candidacy do not pose a threat to the American principle of religious tolerance. On the contrary, they are prepared to tolerate Mormons in their society, just as they are prepared to tolerate atheists and Jews, Muslims and Hindus. No evangelical has said, “Romney should not be permitted to run for the Presidency because he is a Mormon.” None has moved to have a constitutional amendment forbidding the election of a Mormon to the Presidency. That obviously would constitute religious intolerance, and Romney would have every right to wax indignant about it. But he has absolutely no grounds for raising the cry of religious intolerance simply because some evangelicals don’t want to see a Mormon as President and are unwilling to support him. I have no trouble myself tolerating Satan-worshippers in America, but I would not be inclined to vote for one as President: Does that make me bigot? The question of who we prefer to lead us has nothing to do with the question of who we are willing to tolerate, and it did Romney no credit to conflate these two quite distinct questions. There is nothing wrong with evangelicals wishing to see one of their own in the White House, or with atheists wishing to see one of theirs in the same position.”
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=120707A