Posts from — December 2007

As most researchers know, it is largely impossible to prove a negative. Example: How can anyone say with certainty, “George Romney did not march with MLK”? But when the Boston Globe wants to do a hit piece on a Republican or a Mormon or, better yet, a Republican Mormon, they don’t let impossibility or the facts get in the way. So it was that, on December 21, 2007, the Boston Globe, desperate to derail Mitt Romney, pretended to know the unknowable:

Susan Englander, assistant editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, who is editing the King papers from that era, told the Globe yesterday: “I researched this question, and indeed it is untrue that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King.”

What sort of researcher is willing to assert, about the activities of any human being, at any time, let alone 40+ years ago, “I researched this question and indeed it is untrue that so-and-so did [fill in the blank]“? How could Susan Englander think, no matter what her title, that her file cabinet contains the whole story and cast of characters of any MLK march? The only way she could prove such a negative would be to conclusively prove a mutually exclusive positive as in:

“I have authenticated video footage of George and Mitt Romney, during every moment of every MLK march, at locations so distant from the march that they could not possibly have marched with MLK.”

Who has that kind of data?

The evidence is now in, thanks to Mark Halperin. Englander’s database isn’t as comprehensive as the BG wishes it were. Romney did march with Martin Luther King and was cheered by black civil rights leaders in Atlanta, according to relatively contemporaneous reports including these:

1. In Their 1967 Book, Stephen Hess And David Broder Wrote That George Romney “Marched With Martin Luther King Through The Exclusive Grosse Point Suburb Of Detroit.” “He has marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb of Detroit and he is on record in support of full-coverage Federal open-housing legislation.” (Stephen Hess And David Broder, The Republican Establishment: The Present And Future Of The G.O.P., 1967, p. 107)

2. In 1967, George Romney Was Praised At A National Civil Rights Rally For His Leadership. “Michigan Gov. George Romney walked into a Negro Civil Rights rally in the heart of Atlanta to the chants of ‘We Want Romney’ and to hear protests from Negroes about city schools. ‘They had invited me to come and I was interested in hearing things that would give me an insight into Atlanta,’ the Michigan Republican said. Led by Hosea Williams, a top aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the all-Negro rally broke into shouts and song when Romney arrived. ‘We’re tired of Lyndon Baines Johnson,’ Williams said from a pulpit in the Flipper Temple AME Church as Romney sat in a front row pew. ‘Johnson is sending black boys to Vietnam to die for a freedom that never existed,’ Williams said. Pointing to Romney, Williams brought the crowd of 200 to its feet when he said, ‘He may be the fella with a little backbone.’ Williams said Romney could be ‘the next President if he acts right.’ The potential GOP presidential nominee left the rally before it ended.” (”Romney Praised At Civil Rights Rally In Atlanta,” The Chicago Defender, 9/30/67)

Too many bloggers, journalists and “scholars” are in such haste to publish that they fail to perform basic factual due diligence. For the same caliber of false reporting, corporate executives (who inform the public about relatively trivial stuff like the value of corporate stocks) are sent to prison for a decade or more. What does it say about our societal values that, in contrast to corporate fraudsters, journalists and scholars who lie to voters about candidates for the nation’s military commander-in-chief (who will then make life and death decisions for millions) go on holiday to the Bahamas?

p.s. Changing topics just slightly, for some great material on the history and trajectory of the blacks in the priesthood issue, I highly recommend the FAIR Topical Guide. FAIR has done a masterful job of aggregating and organizing credible thought on the topic. I would have a hard time adding to their trove of papers and historical footnotes.

Dan Balz reports in his Washington Post blog that Huckabee’s “closing speech [in Iowa] . . . was long on values” and “filled . . . with stories about himself and his family [that] conveyed an underlying message of morality and responsibility . . .”

While Huckabee issued no “calls for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion,” he “used story-telling to remind the audience that none of them are free agents in deciding right from wrong.” (Emphasis added.) With this odd turn of phrase, Balz segues into an equally odd story about

one of [Huckbee's] sons, who was apparently difficult at a young age and who was left behind at home one day while the rest of the family went out. When Huckabee returned, his son presented him with a cake he had just baked — a cake that turned out be inedible.

His son, attempting to interpret unfamiliar phrases in the recipe, decided that “a dash of salt” meant a cup of salt — and in doing so, ruined the cake. The audience was in stitches as Huckabee described the result, a cake no human could eat, but as he said, if you set it outside, the cows would lick it for a week.

This story, to me, doesn’t seem that funny. I guess maybe you had to be there to see the humor. How old do you have to be to know that a “dash” isn’t a cup? Whatever.

Then came the message. “My son did not set out to do anything that turned out so horrible,” he said. “His motives were pure. His actions were admirable. He was dedicated to the task. And he intended in every way to do something good. But he made one colossal mistake. My son had made his own definition of what a dash meant…. When we start defining right and wrong with our own definitions…no matter how well intentioned we are, no matter how sincere, the result is a disaster.”

Looking past the revealing awkwardness and circularity of the rhetoric (”made his own definition,” instead of simply “defined dash for himself,” and “defining right and wrong with our own definitions” instead of “defining” ), Huckabee’s simplistic moral absolutism is striking. Many have speculated about how Mitt Romney’s religion might affect his conduct in office. What about Mike Huckabee’s?

Who is to define right and wrong in a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” if not each of us who is, individually, “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [including] Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Can such a nation — whose very essence is wrapped up in cultural, political and religious pluralism — survive a chief executive who so boldly denies the agency of man? Could such a simpleton-executive effectively represent the interests of the United States in negotiations with leaders of nations who do not share his personal interpretation of right and wrong?

Juxtapose Huckabee’s absolutism with this:

11 For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so . . . righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. . .

13 And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away.

In other words, we owe our very existence to the duality in nature and eternity. Without the dark we could never recognize or appreciate light. No cold, no hot; no bad cakes, no good cakes; no war, no peace, and so forth. In this sense, Fogarty’s “Don’t You Wish it Was True” is a nihilistic fantasy. Thank God it’s not true.

14 . . . [T]there is a God, and he hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.

15 And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of man, after he had created our first parents, and the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter.

16 Wherefore, the Lord God gave unto man that he should act for himself. Wherefore, man could not act for himself save it should be that he was enticed by the one or the other. . .

27 Wherefore, men [and women] are . . . free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death . . . (emphasis added)

These insights are courtesy of the Book of Mormon, translated by the first Mormon presidential candidate, Joseph Smith. How does all of this relate to the choice of a U.S. President in 2008? Wearing my law professor hat, I’ll answer the question with a question:

How should Americans expect a president — whose interaction with others and the world around him is informed by the doctrines set forth above — to behave differently from one who, in contrast, is utterly convinced that the only possible “right and wrong” in the world is his and that men are, ultimately, creatures without agency sent to Earth not to act but only to be acted upon? Whose recipe is most likely to produce a palatable political cake — Romney’s or Huckabee’s?

John Fogarty’s latest album, Revival, begins with a wistful ballad whose lyrics run like this:

I dreamed I walked in heaven just the other night
There was so much beauty so much light . . .

An angel took my hand
Said you don’t have to hurry
Got all the time in the world don’t worry . . .

But if tomorrow everybody was your friend
Anyone could take you in
No matter what or where you’d been
But if tomorrow everybody had enough
The world wasn’t quite so rough . . .

He said the worlds gonna change and it’s startin’ today
There’ll be no more armies no more hate . . .

And all the little children would live happily
Ther’d be singin’ and laughter and sweet harmony . . .

But if tomorrow everybody under the sun
Who’s happy just to live as one
No borders or battles to be won
But if tomorrow everybody was your friend
Happiness would never end
Lord Don’t you wish it was true

It’s fun to speculate about what the world would look like if this or that seemingly small event had not happened or, alternatively, happened differently. Today, the world wonders what things might have been like if Benazir Bhutto had survived to lead Pakistan. Don’t you wish it was true? (Not if you’re Ralph Peters.) But speculatin’s fun anyway.

History offers tantalizing what ifs, but no mulligans or do-overs.

What if, on the afternoon of November 9, 1620, Master Jones of the Mayflower had carried his Pilgrim passengers south to the Hudson River (their original destination) instead of north around Cape Cod? There would have been no Plymouth Colony, no meeting between Miles Standish (who, by most accounts, was a brutal thug) and Massasoit and, probably, no King Philip’s War. The relationship between English settlers and “local indigenous peoples” (they usually just call themselves “Indians”) may have been entirely different.

What if, roughly 200 years later, on July 2, 1863, Confederate General John Bell Hood had disobeyed his orders at Gettysburg and, instead of charging stupidly — if courageously — straight up the rocks surrounding Devil’s Den, had gone “to the right” and rolled up the Union flank as he almost certainly could have?

In 1864, Abraham Lincoln was locked in a close re-election campaign, desperate for a major military victory to win enough votes to stay in office. Few school kids nowadays learn that it was only a month or two before the election that Lincoln’s electoral fortunes began looking up, starting with Sherman’s torching of Atlanta. Before Atlanta fell, the odds were heavily against Lincoln winning a second term. If he didn’t win, the Democrats were poised sue for peace with the Confederacy.

What if, in that situation, Jefferson Davis had left the siege-tamer Gen. Johnston in charge of the Atlanta’s defense instead of replacing him with the hard-charging-guts-and-glory Gen. Hood? I once helped a colleague run an EMBA simulation of the battle of Atlanta. The conclusion of the simulation: If Johnston had stayed in charge, Atlanta would have weathered Sherman’s siege, Lincoln would have lost the election, and today there would be (at least) two separate countries occupying the territory of the United States. Eventually, the South would have abandoned slavery on its own, but it may have happened more gradually. We weren’t the first to speculate on this question.

There is, however, another “what if” scenario involving the Civil War that few commentators have pursued. My first post ended with the suggestion that if Joseph Smith had escaped martyrdom in 1844 and had won the presidency (not as farfetched as some may think) there may have never been a Civil War. What if? A key element of Smith’s campaign platform was a plan to buy the freedom of the slaves in the South by selling public lands in the western territories. Lord, don’t you wish it was true?

The fate of millions often turns on what seem at the time, to ordinary people leading their ordinary lives, unseen or utterly insignificant developments. In a future post, I’ll tease out what might have been, in 1844, and what it may tell us about the 2008 presidential election. I’ll also take a shot at Heidi’s comment about why it would never have made sense for George or Mitt Romney to publicly challenge the now-abolished ban on blacks holding the priesthood and dismember Jason L. Riley’s article, one smelly piece at a time.

Media outlets of all varieties have over the years offered a robust sampling of strident anti-Mormonism. However, the volume and intensity of the rhetoric has measurably increased with Mitt Romney’s run for the presidency. Never have so many written so much about that which they understand so little. Blogs, newspapers and talk shows are overflowing with pundits too busy, too important, or too impatient to study the facts about a Church and people who have done incalculable good across the globe, including in Central Africa, for the past century and a half. But there appears to be more to the phenomenon than mere lack of understanding.

Romney has become a sort of voodoo doll through which longstanding critics can get at the Latter-Day Saints as a people. After Jason L. Riley launched his racial bomb at the Church in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, I decided that my silence might be misinterpreted as acceptance. Riley is wrong. Whether through malice or ignorance it is unclear. Regardless, I believe that thoughtful, objective observers will eventually see that he tortures the facts in an apparent bid to discredit the Church and its people, including Romney. The truth, when it comes to race, is that few organizations have done as much as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to build bridges and heal wounds.

Playing up Riley’s attack, some protestant commentators, like Paul Edwards, whose home page features pics of Mike Huckabee and (ironically) John Calvin, suggest that George Romney (Mitt’s father) should have just “walked out” or “used his considerable influence” back in 1964 to force the Church to change its then policy on blacks and the priesthood. A brief response to this suggestion is that just “walking out” would accomplish nothing. Romney would have had less influence after “walking out” than he did, in reality, by remaining in the Church. As to using his influence, can Edwards or anyone else know what kind of influence Romney exerted? For all we know, he did everything possible.

Meanwhile, back to Riley.

Riley asserts that the Church’s policy (during a period between about 1850 and 1978) banning blacks from the priesthood “was a manifestation of a central belief that blacks are unfit to be full members of the church on Earth, or to exist alongside whites in heaven.” The falsity of this assertion is demonstrated by official Church doctrine as well as the behavior of the Church and its leaders from its organization in 1830 down to the present day.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (often called the “Mormon” or “LDS” church or simply “the Church”) has historically been a leading advocate of civil rights for blacks, women, and everyone else. (Civil rights trivia question: Where in the United States were women first granted the right to vote by the territorial legislature, in 1870, and then denied it by the U.S. Congress? Hint: It wasn’t Alabama.) The essence of the LDS egalitarian racial sensibility is captured in the following quote attributed to Joseph Smith, the first President of the Church:

“They [Negroes] came into the world slaves, mentally and physically. Change their situation with the whites, and they would be like them. They have souls and are subject to salvation. Go to Cincinnati or any city, and find an educated Negro, who rides in his carriage, and you will see a man who has risen by his own mind to his exalted state of respectability.” (History of the Church 5:217)

Smith ran for the U.S. presidency, in 1844, on a platform that proposed, among other things, to free the slaves by financing their purchase from their owners by the sale of then plentiful public land. In return for this kind of progressive thinking, he was vilified and then assassinated by religious bigots and slaveholders who saw him as a political threat. In this sense, it is ironic to hear the Church that Smith formed criticized today for a temporary ban against blacks holding the priesthood that was lifted three decades ago. For more insight into this topic, try Robert C. Webb’s The Real Mormonism: A Candid Analysis Of An Interesting But Much Misunderstood Subject In History, Life And Thought. Don’t want to buy the book? Read the abundant excerpts at http://books.google.com!

In 1830, while some protestants in the United States were buying and selling slaves by the thousands, Joseph Smith was spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ informed, in part, by the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon, unlike the Holy Bible, clearly teaches that slavery is immoral. How was such a fundamental moral principle omitted from the Bible? Did its omission influence how American protestants viewed slavery?

Fast-forward 175 years to a small town near the Georgia-Florida boundary. In April 2007, Turner High School, in Ashburn, Georgia, for the first time in its history — extending at least into the early 1960s – sponsored a desegregated high school prom. In its write up of the event, a Reader’s Digest article noted how, in August 2007, “Gwendolyn Mathis, 49, associate pastor of a black [sic] church in Ashburn, still remembers being forced to sit upstairs in the balcony at the local movie theater in the 1970s, even after the schools were integrated. ‘When the theater burned down, it was never rebuilt because it would have to be black and white.’” Which religion predominates in Ashburn, Georgia? This much is for sure: there is no LDS congregation in Ashburn. Meanwhile, elsewhere across the South, hundreds of black protestant congregations have no white pastors.

In contrast, the LDS Church has thousands of black members and priesthood holders in the U.S. and in Africa where the Church has recently built three beautiful temples like the one shown below in Aba, Nigeria.

What do these costly temples say about LDS beliefs about the physical proximity of whites and blacks in heaven? You’d have to do more than visit a couple of anti-Mormon websites to get the right answer to this question.

LDS doctrine – found in The Holy Bible (KJV), the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price and teachings jointly approved by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles – emphatically holds today, as it always has, that people of all races are eternally equal in the sight of God who is our common Father. The Apostle Paul taught that we are all the offspring of God. As such, we share the ability to become as He is and to live eternally as He lives, in glory and happiness. We are all — regardless of our mortal skin color, finances or place of birth — equally eligible to live on the choicest real estate in the afterlife. Temples are the most powerful symbol of eternal life in the Church. They are, in a sense, gateways between Heaven and Earth.

Today, black and white members of the Church attend these temples side-by-side. Unlike things in Ashburn, Georgia, ain’t no white-only drinking fountains or restrooms in LDS temples, anywhere. Never in the history of the Church has there ever been a doctrine that blacks and whites would not live together in heaven. The temporary ban on black priesthood holders was always understood to be temporary; never was it a fact of eternal life.

Now, back to Mr. Edwards, Calvin, and Mike Huckabee. It is widely recognized, even by protestant scholars, that John Calvin’s regime in Geneva, Switzerland, shared disturbing features in common with a theocracy of more recent vintage, the Taliban. What with beheading, burning at the stake, and government-mandated given names, civil rights were not a priority under Calvin’s administration.

In contrast, LDS doctrine first enunciated by Joseph Smith, in 1835, teaches that while “religion is instituted of God,” “men are amenable to him, and to him only, for the exercise of it, unless their religious opinions prompt them to infringe upon the rights and liberties of others” and that

“human law has [no] right to interfere in prescribing rules of worship to bind the consciences of men, nor dictate forms for public or private devotion; that the civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control conscience; should punish guilt, but never suppress the freedom of the soul.”

One senses that Mike Huckabee, whose recent campaign spot used as a backdrop a slow-moving white cross (in the context of Huckabee’s aggressive emphasis on religion as one of his central qualifications for the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that this was just a coincidence), might find this doctrine difficult to live by.

No religious leader of the 1800s did more for the cause of civil rights than Joseph Smith. He and his Church were way ahead of their time. Today, no one feels the importance of civil rights any more viscerally than do the Latter-Day Saints.If the Paul Edwards of the world want to be taken seriously in a debate over religion and civil rights, they could start by distancing themselves from John Calvin. Alternatively, they might acknowledge that the world of politics, religion, and race is more complex and nuanced than Riley’s article pretends. If Joseph Smith’s critics had elected him President in 1844 and implemented his innovative proposal to end slavery, there likely would have been no Civil War.