The Republican Party, Racism and Mormonism

There are many who believed that the Christofascist base of the Republican Party might not support Mitt Romney even though Romney has done everything short of selling his soul - or maybe he has - to win the support of religious extremists in the GOP base.  But perhaps there is something that ties Romney to these religious extremists: racism and the belief that white privilege must be protected.  This could be particularly true in the South where racism has long flourished for many reasons, one of which is that poor whites have always needed someone to look down on in order to fell good about themselves.  In my New Orleans belle grandmother's view, nothing was worse than "white trash."  Well, the white trash used racism against blacks to convince themselves that there were not the lowest of the low.  How does this tie in with Mitt Romney and Mormonism?  What denomination continued open discrimination as Church policy longer than any other?  The Mormon Church, of course.  The Church in which Romney was raised and to which he gives millions of dollars each year.  Which political party had only 2% of its attendees made up of blacks?  The GOP, of course.  Andrew Sullivan looks at this bizarre double standard that would never allow to go unchallenged in a Democrat candidate and asks some hard questions that need to be asked of Romney.  Here are excepts:

Imagine for a moment that Barack Obama had never attended Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago and had decided to attend services, and proselytize for, a black separatist, nationalist church that refused to allow whites to participate in crucial religious services because white people had been condemned by God for their iniquity in the ancient past and had been for ever marked white so black Americans would know instantly to keep their distance.

Imagine further that backing this racist church was not a youthful folly on Obama's part, but a profound commitment - that he went on a mission abroad to convert Christians to a new religion based on black racial supremacy, and has often said that the most important thing in his entire life to this day is a church whose sacred scripture declares white people to be cursed by God for their past sins - and the sign of this curse is their white skin.

A simple question: Do you think this issue would not come up in a general election or a primary?   .  .  .  .  I raise this because it is a fact that Mitt Romney belonged to a white supremacist church for 31 years of his life, went on a mission to convert Christians and Jews and others to this church, which retained white supremacy as a doctrine until 1978 - decades after Brown vs Board of Education, and a decade after the end of the anti-miscegenation laws.

[T]he key question: what did the Romneys do to confront their own church's non-secular position on the inherent spiritual inferiority of blacks? Nothing, so far as I can find. If any reader can find some, please send it to me and I'll post it. And Joseph Smith's admirable early abolitionism was soon trumped by Brigham Young who took the Book of Mormon seriously:

2nd Nephi 5:21 "And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, and they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them."

The inherent spiritual-racial iniquity of blacks places them at the very bottom of the pile on earth, and they will achieve salvation only in the hereafter - and then only after every other race has had their turn. Now listen to Romney's response to Russert again:

My faith has always taught me that in the eyes of God every individual merited the fullest degree of happiness in the hereafter and I had no question in my mind that African-Americans and blacks generally would have every right and every benefit in the hereafter that anyone else had.

My italics. There's nothing in Romney's answer that violates the old Mormon doctrine - still there in the Book of Mormon - that for some reason, people with black skin suffer some kind of inherited curse that will only be lifted after everyone else has been saved in the hereafter. 

people still don't see how Mormonism - its utilitarian use of truth, its studied mainstream all-American appeal, its refusal to be completely transparent to outsiders, and its insistence on never having to account for itself - isn't integral to Mitt Romney's personality and beliefs. Romney will no more let outsiders look at his finances than the LDS church will allow non-Mormons inside their Temples after they have been consecrated. 

[I]f you asked a Catholic candidate whether it was wrong for the Church to have treated Jews as cursed and sub-human for so long, I cannot imagine any Catholic politician not saying yes. Unequivocally. Is there a mite of evidence that Mitt Romney ever challenged the white supremacism in his religion and its active racism while it was in existence and he was still a missionary and member for 31 years of his life?Listen again to the last question and answer in the Russert interview:

Russert: But it was wrong for your faith to exclude [African-Americans] for as long as it did?
Romney: I've told you exactly where I stand. My view is that there is no discrimination in the eyes of God and I could not have been more pleased when the decision occurred.

Why could he not just have said "yes"?

You see, Romney is in some ways the PERFECT candidate for white racists, particularly those in the South where viewing others who are different as less than fully human has a long tradition.  Perhaps Romney's Mormonism is the dog whistle that is attracting racist and bigoted whites who cannot tolerate a black president and who find the Mormon Church's historic white supremacist past comforting.  Perhaps even validating.  What do others think?