Has Mitt Romney Shown Religious Intolerance?
Here is a new rough draft for a TV commercial I will be producing for the Democratic Super PAC AmericanLP. Please send me suggestions and criticisms.
“Religious Tolerance”
:60 Second TV Ad
***
Opening video of Rev Jeremiah Wright “God Damn America!”
Voiceover: “Intolerance is ugly in whatever form it takes, especially when it flows from the pulpit.”
(Text only: “November 19, 1993,”) Voiceover “the Mitt Romney family baptized Mitt Romney’s father-in-law, Edward Davies, 13 months AFTER Davies had died. Davies was a lifelong opponent of organized religion. Was this tolerant of Davies Wishes?”
(Text and images: On March 22, 1969, Ed Davies daughter Ann married Mitt Romney.) Voiceover: “Neither of Ann Romney’s parents was allowed into the Romney wedding ceremony performed at the Salt Lake Temple. Non-Mormons are not tolerated at the wedding ceremonies of Mormons.”
(text: “From 1966-1969, Mitt Romney was a full-time employee of the Mormon Church. Romney was appointed Bishop in the Mormon Church. Romney became one of the largest multi-million dollar donors of the Mormon Church”) Voiceover: “Since the 60s, Mitt Romney has been a powerful, influential Mormon Church leader. Mormons did not accept that Black people had full souls equal to Whites until 1978. What kind of leader promotes an organization that had an official policy of racial intolerance?”
Closing graphic in text “In 2012, vote in favor of religious tolerance.”
“Paid for by AmericanLP”
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A specific, well-funded religion with a pretty good marketing firm and a lot of commercials, giant billboards, and Web ads already promoting them, so clearly having the capacity to advertise in response, in a way that illustrates the irony?
I don’t think I like it much. Seems to me it hands Romney a way to relate to Christian conservatives by acknowledging their persecution complex and going, “See? Secularists attack me, too!”
This ad is a pile of crap.
“there are a lot of reasons not to elect me.” A clumsily contrived manipulation of his religious heritage is neither necessary nor likely to be productive.
Let’s give Mitt a listen just this once and go after some of those many other well-aimed good reasons instead.
TJ — I am an outspoken progressive, and I prefer bugs in my cereal to Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. However, I have said repeatedly to any other progressive who will listen that while there are hundreds of valid criticisms that could be made about him, none of them should be about his religion. Persecuting anyone because of their religion is wrong. Period.
One of the basic tenets of this country is that each of us has the right to worship, or not worship, as we choose. We may privately despise, disrespect, disagree with, or question any particular faith, but each person has the constitutional right to choose their own. In my mind, to attack a person on the basis of their faith is to be un-American. Most progressives I know already agree on this issue. It is the rare progressive who does not.
Note, criticizing a candidate for being hypocritical is a whole ‘nother story. For example, the issue of saying one is “pro-life” when one has repeatedly voted for, or otherwise supported unnecessary wars which result in the deaths of innocent people, is fair game. Another example is when a candidate or legislator says, “I will take away your child’s right to an abortion (or to refuse to serve in the military under a draft, etc.) but for my own child, there’s a different set of rules.” In those situations, hiding behind one’s religion to justify hypocrisy should not be tolerated.
Nice try, TJWalker. Progressives aren’t your bogeyman. Try again.
If, in my tired crankiness, I misjudged your diary to be snark and it truly wasn’t TJ, I sincerely apologize. (I haven’t followed your posting history closely enough to know your style yet.) I am an admittedly intermittent Pols reader.
DO NOT ATTACK the particular religious beliefs of a person or a candidate.
is the face of AmericanLP, which is the liberal independent expenditure group that’s supposed to be battling Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.
Judging by the comments, it seems like it’s turning off liberals. Not exactly impressed if this is what the left has in store for the general.
They’re either really, really skilled at being conservative under the radar, or really, really bad at being progressive.
TJ Walker will run an ad about Rick Santorum’s baby who died, with the tag line “If he couldn’t keep his son alive for more than two hours, how does anyone expect him to keep the American economy alive?”
I agree with Nancy. Everything about this screams “fraud” to me. I see no evidence that TJ Walker even existed as a political figure more than a month or two ago, and now he’s the extremely public face of a Super PAC, saying unhelpful things nobody agrees with? Bullshit.
If there were ever such a thing as “false flag operations,” this is it.
Nothing about this says it’s a fraud other than wishful thinking on the Dems’ part. All the evidence says it’s a liberal Super PAC.
There would probably be people saying the same thing about Karl Rove’s ads if Republicans had consciences.
So as far as I can tell, TJ Walker didn’t exist before a few months ago as a political figure. There’s no evidence of him having any views whatsoever until about September 2011. His web site is full of uncited, likely-inflated self-promotion along with lots of extraneous terms to get a higher pagerank in search engines and commenters who exist just to promote their own sites. Which is fine, that’s like 78% of the internet, but how did this guy whose only book is deep in the bargain bin at Amazon get millions of dollars to run ads despite being essentially a blank slate?
I suppose eventually we’ll find out who the donors are and that will settle this, but so far I see no evidence either way, just a lot of really suspicious stuff. Karl Rove at least has a record dating back a few months.
All I know is that there’s essentially one “anti-Republican” ad that features Jeremiah Wright prominently and trashes religion generally, which means this guy is too stupid to be raising money from liberals on his own; and his previous work looks amateurish and unsuccessful enough for this guy to be independently wealthy. It doesn’t add up.
No one invokes Rev. Wright, except to point out that black people are scary . . . and that means Obama is scary too. (This subtlety of this message is risky, might be too hard for the GOPers out there to follow and make the connection?)
And, then to decry Romney’s alleged religious intolerance by being even more intolerant of Mormonism . . .
I’ll bet TJWalker is interested in girls too!
Or maybe our buddy Jason Salzman could. He’s good at stuff like that.
Can’t remember if it was Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh who started out liberal. As soon as it paid well to be conservative, they switched.
Swamp dwellers.