Oh my goodness. So I listened to Mitt Romney's speech on "Faith in America," which really should have been called "Why the fact that I'm a Mormon shouldn't matter, but God help us if we get an atheist in the White House." And oh, do I ever wish I had liveblogged it. There was just. SO. MUCH.
First, you have Mitt's covers of other religions' greatest hits:
In every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims.
Seriously, Mitt, was it so much of a stretch to come up with something nice to say about Islam that the best you could do was commitment to frequent prayer? And I notice that the only religions that even got a mention were the monotheistic ones in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Come to think of it, this was basically the only mention of any non-Christian religions in this whole grand paean to religious tolerance. Where are the pagans, Hindus, Unitarians, Buddhists, and (gasp!) atheists? Not here, for sure. Religious tolerance, my ass. Christian religious tolerance is more like it. (I'm not even going to get into the whole are-Mormons-Christian thing. In my book, if someone says "I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the savior of mankind," then they're Christian.)
And then there was this:
Almost 50 years ago another candidate from Massachusetts explained that he was an American running for president, not a Catholic running for president. Like him, I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith.
Of course you would compare yourself to JFK. But here's the difference: that speech was all about the separation of church and state, and how there should be no religion test to hold public office. But you took a totally different (and, to me, totally abhorrent) tack -- railing against the "religion of secularism" and advocating for the role of religion in public life. So essentially, there shouldn't be a religion test for public office, so long as you're religious. Um, thanks but no thanks.
But anyway, after the speech I went poking around the Salt Lake City Tribune's website to get a sense of the Mormon response to the speech. But forget the Mormon response -- the most interesting thing I found was the way the Tribune handles comments on its articles. When you comment on an article, your comment appears among all the other comments on that article. Which of course is normal. But then, anyone else on the site can give your comment a "thumbs up" or a "thumbs down" which results in a net "score," as in +3 or +10 or -16, based on others' ratings of your comment. And needless to say, comments that advocate liberal points of view tend to score WAY LOW. But here's the worst part: IF YOU SCORE BELOW A -6, THE TRIBUNE HIDES YOUR COMMENT from the general comment chain, and people can only read it if they click on it. Um, censor much?
Now, I understand moderating comments to remove vulgar or obscene content, content that is completely off-topic, or content that constitutes a personal attack. I do that on this site. But this is something entirely different -- it's essentially community-driven viewpoint censorship. And worse, here is a newspaper, whose job (ostensibly) is to provide a neutral forum for civil discourse, giving the community the means to decide whether a particular viewpoint has value and removing that viewpoint from the discourse if a (slight) majority doesn't like it. Now if that's not tyranny, I don't know what is.
