If there is one good thing I can say about the Romney and Huntsman bids for the GOP presidential primary, it would be that it is getting people talking about the legitimacy of a Mormon running for the highest elected office in the US. We already have Mormon Congressmen, Senators, Governors etc, but we have yet had a Mormon President. If it weren’t for my disdain of Romney and Huntsman’s politics, I might be convinced to seriously consider them for president.
All this is leading to a lot of people talking about Mormons. One instance of this is a recent Blogging Heads discussion between two journalists, Erica Grieder and Kathrine Mangu-Ward.
I have embedded the two relevant sections of the discussion below. Aside from some serious inaccuracies of the founding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they do raise some good points on why the anti-Mormon efforts to belittle the legitimacy Romney and Huntsman bids for president are unfounded.
One of the best things about this video is that they are debating on who of the two of them like Mormons more. The next interesting thing is that Erica brings up the fact that Mormons are questioned more often and with more harshness than many other people. To her it seems that it is unfair to single us out in that way.
Next Erica puts out a request for Romney or Huntsman to actually speak about what it means for them to be a Mormon. More on that in the next video.
She brings up Romney’s speech on faith from his last bid for president in which he really didn’t talk at all about why he is a Mormon or what it means to him. His speech was primarily about religion in general. In this section they also compare the idea of a Mormon president to JFK and how people had similar concern about his Catholic faith and how people were concerned that he would take orders from the Pope while in office. We learned that those concerns were unfounded and we will see that those same concerns about Mormons are unfounded as well.
What is also neat is that they recognize that most of the resistance comes from the Christian right that doesn’t recognize that Mormons are not “valid” Christians.
Over all, I found this to be a really positive discussion and look forward to more discussions like this one.
