Would you vote for a Mormon?

The new Bloomberg/LA Times poll asks the musical question:

“Just thinking about a candidate’s religion, do you think you could vote for [see below] for president, or not?”

And the numbers:

Interesting thing #1: I’m just dying to know the number for ‘atheist’, but they didn’t seem to ask. My bet: just below ‘Muslim’.
Interesting thing #2: That Evangelical Christian number is scarily high.
Interesting thing #3: Mormons have terrible numbers.

It’s not fair. Mormons have tried and tried to be just like Evangelical Christians. They retooled the ‘curse of Ham‘ argument that Southern Baptist preachers used to justify slavery as a justification for not giving Black men the priesthood. They’ve turned up the ‘Jesus’ talk and the ‘saved by grace’ talk and dialed down the ‘works’ thing. Despite the failure of the U.S. Government to protect members back in the 1840’s, they’re the most reliably, flag-wavingly, unquestioningly pro-American group around. They’ve gone right-wing on issue after issue from abortion to gay marriage, and it still earns them no love among the Evangelicals or the people who vote for them.

Of course, this is all about Romney. Mitt Romney would be a great Republican candidate, by which I mean he’d be just as Neanderthal as Bush on issues, but not as big an idiot. The guy’s squeaky clean, no divorces, no scandal (let’s say), and he fits right in with Republicans on issues they care about. But for some reason, the Mormon thing is a deal-breaker. Why is it so?

Some Romney fans are saying a lot of the number is coming from Democrats who wouldn’t vote for a (presumably conservative) Mormon. That doesn’t wash. Many Democrats wouldn’t vote for an Evangelical Christian either, but their numbers are doing fine. Why the disparity?

Let’s head to townhall.com (1|2) and have a look at the comments. Be strong.

One may as well vote for an Islamist as vote for a Mormon male. They have the same basic philosophy.

But can a Muslim become president ??

For all those folks professing such strong spirits of “tolerance” and “inclusiveness”, how would you feel about a Muslim president ??

The trouble with Ms. Lopez’s argument that evangelicals would gladly vote for Mitt Romney is the fact that Mormons are not anymore Christian than Muslims.

Mormons, JW’s, and Other Cultists

Please don’t join a cult and then run for President thinking that your radical enjoyment of your first amendment privilege isn’t going to come back to haunt you.

Mormons who want to argue that their religion isn’t a cult now are missing the entire point. Perception is reality in politics, and America is not about to be made a laughing stock via our president’s cultish beliefs. A Mormon president is an oxymoron in the USA, it’s never going to happen this side of the 21st century.

Don’t be surprised when the votes start coming in that Romney doesn’t do all that well. It’s one thing to say that his religious veiws don’t matter, it’s entirely differant when you’re alone in a voting booth. That’s when you have decide if you really want to cast your vote for someone that acually believes in something as ludicrous as Mormonism.

I don’t intend to tar conservatives with these comments; I wouldn’t want to characterise liberals by the worst comments on DailyKos. Also, other commenters are vigorously defending the LDS Church and freedom of religion in general. Well and good. But what we see in these comments are a set of ideas about Latter-day Saints that do exist among a portion of the conservative electorate, and which are frequently repeated. Evangelical Christians hate the LDS Church with a fervour that is tangible. Mormons are right down there with Scientologists in their book. They’d stay home rather than vote for one.

In the last 20 years, the Republican party has decided to court the Evangelical vote, a goodly portion of which are the most frighteningly ignorant and bigoted mouthbreathers that have ever lived in the United States. Having tied their fortunes to these voters, the Republicans cannot now easily extricate themselves from them or refrain from catering to their beliefs. The irony (as Amy Sullivan has pointed out) is that now this strategy may block a quite suitable Christian from the Republican nomination.