Mitt Romney's Mormonism & Gay Marriage

"You might be able to ask Mitt anything, but it doesn't mean you'll ever get a 'straight' answer from him." - Bud Meyers, 2012

Purpose of Marriage / Mormonism / Romney Family History / Today's Argument

Mitt Romney recently said:

"Marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman. I believe that marriage has been defined the same way for literally thousands of years by virtually every civilization in history." (Editor's Note: If Romney was being truthful, shouldn't he have said "Between one man and three women"?)

Most marriages in earlier Western societies were often arranged. Moreover, the wife usually had much fewer rights than her husband and was expected to be subservient to him. To a considerable extent, marriage was also an economic arrangement. There was little room for romantic love, and even simple affection was not considered essential. Procreation and cooperation were the wife's main marital duties.

On the other hand, Sparta, while encouraging sexual relationships between men, nevertheless insisted on their marrying and producing children to populate their military.

Marriage was usually treated as a practical matter. A father arranged the most advantageous marriage for his son. As a rule, the bridegroom was in his thirties and the bride was a teenager.

In addition to this disparity in ages, there also existed an inequality in education and political rights. Women were considered inferior to men and remained confined to the home. Their main function as wives was to produce children and to manage the household while their husbands were away tending to public affairs and prostitutes (like many do today).

For their erotic needs, men often turned to prostitutes and concubines. As Demosthenes, the orator, explained it: "We have prostitutes for our pleasure, concubines for our health, and wives to bear us lawful offspring."

Many men also cultivated intense emotional and sexual relationships with male adolescents (paiderastia). The legal inequality of the sexes was further reflected in the divorce regulations. It was always easier for a husband to divorce his wife than vice versa. However, since a divorced woman could take her dowry back with her, men normally asked for a divorce only in cases of female adultery and infertility. (Read More...)

To better understand Mitt Romney (and maybe his own "arranged" marriage), let's explore his core beliefs and what guides him through life (excluding his assault on that young gay man while he was a senior in high school.)

The religion of Mormonism was invented by a (Vermont-born) New Yorker named Joseph Smith Jr. in 1830. That was only 182 years ago, almost two millennia after Christ, and 40 years before my great-grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Germany.

According to Joe Smith, beginning in the early 1820s he had visions. In one such vision an angel directed him to a buried book of golden plates, inscribed with a Christian history of ancient American civilizations. (I'm just guessing but, this may be where the History Channel got their idea for the series Ancient Aliens).

17-year-old Joseph Smith said he had found these "golden plates" on September 22, 1823 at a hill near his home in Manchester, New York after an angel directed him to a buried stone box.

These plates were described as weighing from 30 to 60 pounds, being golden or brassy in color, and being composed of thin metallic pages, engraved on both sides and bound with one or more rings. Smith named these golden plates the "Plates of Nephi".

(Pictured below, top left) A full-scale model of Joe Smith's golden plates based on his own description (along with some other inventions of the day).

Smith said at first, the angel had prevented him from taking the plates, but instructed him to return to the same location the following year.

Four years later in September 1827, on his fourth annual attempt to retrieve the plates, Joseph Smith returned home with a heavy object wrapped in a frock, which he then put in a box. Though he allowed others to heft the box, he said that the angel had forbidden him to show the plates to anyone until they had been translated from their original "reformed Egyptian" language. (He said the angel had directed him to translate them into English, but didn't say American English, Old English, Middle English, or British English.)

Joe Smith dictated a translation using a seer stone in the bottom of a hat, which he placed over his face to view the words written within the stone. It was translated at an average rate of eight or more of its printed pages a day.

Smith published the translation in 1830 as the Book of Mormon.

Scholarly reference works on languages do not, however, acknowledge the existence of either a "reformed Egyptian" language or "reformed Egyptian" script as it has been described in Mormon belief. No archaeological, linguistic, or other evidence of the use of Egyptian writing in ancient America has every been discovered.

According to Joe Smith's Book of Mormon, a Nephite (e.g. the "Plates of Nephi") is a member of one of the four main groups of ancient settlers to America in 600 B.C. The other early settlers described in the Book of Mormon include the Lamanites, Jaredites and Mulekites.

* A Choclodite is a slang term that is often offensive and refers to an African American. A Hermaphrodite is an organism that has reproductive organs normally associated with both male and female sexes. The suffix "ite" is derived from the Greek word lithos (from its adjectival form -ites), meaning rock or stone. The first Greek-speaking tribes, known later as Mycenaeans, are generally thought to have arrived in the Greek mainland between 1900 B.C. and 1600 B.C.

Some Mormon scholars believe that the forebears of the Nephites settled somewhere in present-day Central America after departing Jerusalem. (Not to be confused with the Neolithic societies who lived along the Nile River from 3600 BC to about 3100 BC .)

The Book of Mormon is the sacred text of the Latter Day Saint movement who believes contains the writings of ancient prophets who lived in the Americas from approximately 2200 BC to AD 421.

Radiocarbon tests of carbonized plant remains where artifacts were unearthed along the Savannah River in South Carolina indicate that the sediments containing these artifacts are at least 50,000 years old, meaning that humans inhabited North American long before the last ice age.

The story about the ancient prophets begins with a family that leaves Jerusalem, just before the Babylonian captivity. They constructed a ship* and sailed to a "promised land" in the Western Hemisphere, where this civilization was supposed to have existed from around 600 BC and ending in 421 A.D.

During this time in history, in 525 B.C. the Persians conquered Egypt and Hieroglyphs (hieroglyphics) continued to be used under Persian rule. No "reformed Egyptian language" is ever referred to by historians.

* The first known vessels date back to the Neolithic Period, about 10,000 years ago, but could not be described as ships. By about 2000 BC, the Minoan civilization in Crete had evolved into a naval power exercising effective control of the sea in the eastern Mediterranean. According to Plato, Atlantis was a naval power lying "in front of the Pillars of Hercules" that conquered many parts of Western Europe and Africa 9,000 years before the time of Solon, or approximately 9600 BC. The Phoenicians were the Mediterranean maritime trading culture from 1550 BC to 300 BC. and then the Greeks gradually mastered navigation at sea, and were also exploring the Mediterranean. The ancient Romans rarely ventured out to sea. The traditional birth date of the Roman navy is set at 311 B.C. In recent years massive wooden planks, ropes, and cargo boxes were discovered in a series of caverns near the Red Sea and have been identified as parts of the oldest seafaring ships ever discovered. The find supports evidence that ancient Egyptian mariners set sail on ocean waters as much as 4,000 years ago on voyages that spanned about 1,000 miles each way. Previously, the world's oldest known seafaring ship dated from 1300 B.C., and only small fragments of it are left.

According to Joe Smith's Mormons, we can assume these ancient early Americans were not African-American either, nor related to American Indians -- and that the Italian, Christopher Columbus, didn't really discover America -- and that a "reformed Egyptian" language" had existed at a time in human history in 671 B.C. when the Assyrians had attacked Egypt.

Both the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society have issued statements that they have seen no evidence to support these claims in the Book of Mormon, and furthermore, no secular archeologist or historian has supported their existence.

The Fremont culture, a pre-Columbian archaeological culture, lived in what is now north and western Utah from approximately 600 to 1300 AD. - - Mormons first came to the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847.

After Joe Smith's translation of this mystery language was completed, Smith said he returned the golden plates to their angelic guardian. Therefore, if the plates ever existed, they cannot now be examined. Critics assert that Smith manufactured the plates himself.

Polygamy was taught and practiced by Joseph Smith and his Mormons openly practiced polygamy. After Joseph Smith died in 1844, Mormonism and polygamy was carried on and led by Brigham Young.

Brigham Young is credited with having been responsible for revoking the priesthood and temple blessings from black members of his church. He said, "Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so."

Does this somehow imply that Brigham Young though that Adam and Eve's first born son Cain was a black man? It's been said that the cradle of mankind was is Africa, and that President Obama himself, proved through DNA sampling, has genetic ties to this part of Africa. This might help explain Mitt Romney's resentment of Obama (envy).

Soon after Brigham Young died in 1877, Mormon colonies in Mexico were established near the Sierra Madre mountains in northern Mexico by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints beginning in 1885.

Many of the original colonists came to Mexico due to federal attempts to curb and prosecute polygamy in the United States. The towns making up the colonies were originally situated in the states of Chihuahua and Sonora, and were all within roughly 200 miles of the U.S. border.

Members of the Pratt-Romney family have roots in these colonies, including both Marion G. Romney and George W. Romney, both having been born there.

Mitt Romney's grandfather, Gaskell Romney, was one of those in the Mormon colony in Mexico, and was mentioned in the book "The Real Romney". He had been a successful carpenter, house builder and farmer (Mitt called him a "contractor"). Gaskell headed the most prosperous family in the colony. Mitt's father, George W. Romney, was born there in 1907 to one of Gaskell Romney's three wives.

By the early 20th century, many of these Mormons were very prosperous. However, in the summer of 1912, the colonies were evacuated due to anti-American sentiment during the Mexican Revolution and many of their citizens left for the United States to never return.

Just like today with the top 1%, more than 95% of Mexico's land had been owned by less than 5% of the population, and helped spark the uprising because of wealth inequality. This vastly unequal distribution of land—and, therefore, wealth—had plagued Mexico for many years, to the anger and dismay of the working classes, as this corrupt system allowed the rich to get richer while ensuring that the poor remained poor, or got even poorer.

Mitt's father, George Romney, was about five years old at the time. The Romney family fled and returned to the United States in July 1912, leaving their home and all of their Mexican property behind.

The Romney family lost most of its money and moved from State to State, much like unemployed hobos. Gaskell Romney eventually found success again as a builder in Utah, but lost much of his money again in the Great Depression.

"He never took out bankruptcy, which he could have done several times," George Romney wrote of his father, according to the book "The Real Romney."

Fast forward to exactly 100 years later in 2012. Mitt Romney explains, "My dad, as you might know, was born in Mexico and, ah, of American parents who'd been living there for some time. There was revolution in Mexico, around the early part of the 20th century, 1910 or so, and so his family came back to the United States and his dad went from place to place. His dad was a contractor, and as you may know contractors have financial difficulty from time to time." (Yes they do Mitt, yes they do.)

But when Mitt Romney says that "marriage has been defined the same way for literally thousands of years by virtually every civilization in history", he's excluding his own faith, his grandfather, and his family history to make the argument against gay marriage...especially when Joseph Smith had only invented the religion Mormonism a mere 182 years ago in 1830...when marriage for them was defined as between a man and a wife and a wife and wife and another wife (usually very young and perky wives, teenagers usually. Others call this pedophilia.)

Marriage should only be defined by his or her own religious beliefs and/or their Church -- the government is obligated respect that. It's called freedom of religion. Just like Glenn Beck is free to practice his Mormonism, Mitt is also free to practice his Mormonism...and his cronyism; but at least allow other people to practice their own beliefs too, so long as nobody is getting hurt.

(Pictured below, left to right) In 1965 when Mitt Romney was 18 years old, he led a group people in an assault again a gay boy, held him down, and cut his hair. One year later after graduating from high school in 1966, Mitt dashed off to Europe for 2½ years to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. In 1969 he came crawling back to the U.S. to marry his sweetheart Ann, to keep from losing her to another man after receiving a "Dear John" letter from her. In 1977 Mitt became a ruthless (but proud) corporate raider at Bain and Company, laying off people, cutting their wages, stealing their pensions, and generally ruining other people's lives for personal gain. The Republicans call this "success".

(Pictured below) A young Mitt gives his dad a little sage advice.

(Pictured below, left to right) Mitt's grandfather, Gaskell Romney, Salt Lake City, 1917 - Mitt's father, Governor George Romney - Governor Mitt Romney (still competing with his father, just like the younger George Bush did with his father.)

Today Mitt Romney claims:

1. he doesn't remember the attack on that gay boy,
2. but he does remember that back then, he didn't think of gay people in that way.

When Mitt Romney was asked about the assault, he shrugged it off and chuckled as though recalling a fond memory. But only a sadistic sociopath would answer," If anybody was hurt by that, or offended by it, obviously I apologize."

Maybe it was his good Mormon upbringing that taught him to be polite when he was caught in bad behavior.

But just like poor people, God must love gay people too, because He created so many of them -- and they've been around much longer that Joe Smith and Mitt Romney's family.

I'm always amused when I hear the pompous "believers" use the Biblical argument that "God didn't create Adam and Steve, He created Adam and Eve." So by their own words, because God is always referred to as "He", therefore there must be a Mrs. God solely for the reason of pro-creation (or necessary for creation), and that it's not possible to procreate with only one sex, such as hermaphrodites.

Full Disclosure: I'm not gay, never have been, never will be; but just like Mitt Romney's family, I do have family members who are gay.