I found Governor Romney’s speech on religion to be little more than pandering to right-wing religious enthusiasts. It may help in the primary process with southern and midwestern evangelicals, but should he get the Republican nomination, it will not help him in the general election. He does not seem to embrace the fact that this nation has more than just religious voters.

The fact that Governor Romney is a Mormon has constituted no problem for me. Indeed, I am suspicious of those for whom it is a problem. That arises, I suspect, out of the fact that America’s “Religious Vote” (a category that does not include me, I hasten to add) seems to be eager to impose its view of both God and the universe on this nation in violation of our Constitution. I could support no candidate who would pack the Supreme Court with religious ideologues, seek to create a theocracy in America, or go to war after consulting with his heavenly father. Those have been the tragic mistakes of this administration.

Governor Romney was a more appealing candidate to me before he made the “Faith in America” speech. I was impressed with his demonstrated ability to run the Olympics and to be an effective governor of Massachusetts. When he reversed his position on abortion, gay rights and gun control, I became less enamored. Now that he panders to militant fundamentalism, I am no longer willing to consider his candidacy at all. I once regarded him as the most competent candidate on the Republican side. I think the choice now offered by the Republican Party is quite threadbare. If I were to vote in the Republican primary, I believe my present choice would be John McCain, but I would cast that vote with no enthusiasm.

I found Governor Romney’s speech on religion to be little more than pandering to right-wing religious enthusiasts. It may help in the primary process with southern and mid-western evangelicals, but should he get the Republican nomination, it will not help him in the general election. He does not seem to embrace the fact that this nation has more than just religious voters.

The fact that Governor Romney is a Mormon has constituted no problem for me. Indeed, I am suspicious of those for whom it is a problem. That arises, I suspect, out of the fact that America’s “Religious Vote” (a category that does not include me, I hasten to add) seems to be eager to impose its view of both God and the universe on this nation in violation of our Constitution. I could support no candidate who would pack the Supreme Court with religious ideologues, seek to create a theocracy in America, or go to war after consulting with his heavenly father. Those have been the tragic mistakes of this administration.

Governor Romney was a more appealing candidate to me before he made the “Religious” speech. I was impressed with his demonstrated ability to run the Olympics and to be an effective governor of Massachusetts. When he reversed his position on abortion, gay rights and gun control, I became less enamored. Now that he panders to militant fundamentalism, I am no longer willing to consider his candidacy at all. I once regarded him as the most competent candidate on the Republican side. I think the choice now offered by the Republican Party is quite threadbare. If I were to vote in the Republican primary, I believe my present choice would be John McCain, but I would cast that vote with no enthusiasm.

This nation has a strange fetish with sexual sins. The press obsessed on President Clinton’s tawdry sexual behavior, but seems to regard the Bush administration’s distortion of truth about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify its military adventure in that land to be of lesser significance. Even the intelligence report on Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons reveals that this administration was caught once again in what can only be called deliberate acts of misinformation. President Clinton’s actions, distasteful as they were, did not cost the lives of some 4,000 American military personnel and thousands of innocent Iraqis. Yet the Congress wasted time and money in impeachment procedures on the Lewinsky affair. The far greater, but not sexual, nature of this administration’s crimes has not had a similar response.

We live in a time of changing sexual standards. Premarital sex is almost a universal practice in the developed world against which an “abstinence campaign” is laughably ineffective. The reasons for this are not that we have become an immoral generation, as ecclesiastical leaders like to presume. Rather, it is caused by the fact that we have created a 10-to-15-year gap between puberty and marriage. That is not a reality that contemporary moralists seem to notice. Better health practices have lowered the age of puberty in girls, while the opening of the doors to higher education and thus for career opportunities for young women has postponed the age of marriage to new and more mature age levels. In the Middle Ages when life expectancy was much shorter, females tended to marry within 12 to 18 months of puberty. Today marriage in the late twenties for young women is commonplace. In the past the double standard that governed sexual activity meant that the male was not expected to be chaste until his marriage. Today, not only has that double standard disappeared, but so has the rigid chaperone system we once employed to protect the virginity of upper class females.

Continue »