Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is considered by many to be the most likely person to have a chance against President Obama in the 2012 election.
To counter this, according to a widely cited Politico article, the president’s advisers plan to counter by “preparing to center the president’s re-election campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background.”
The article also states “none of the Obama advisers interviewed made any suggestion that Romney’s personal qualities would be connected to his minority Mormon faith, but the step from casting Romney as a bit off to raising questions about religion may not be a large step for some of the incumbent’s supporters.”
So now apparently a person’s religion is grounds for personal attacks, even if indirectly.
President John F. Kennedy had the same problem when he was running – he was Catholic. Protestant Christians may make up a majority of the nation’s religious demographic, but that is not the point.
Several of the first colonists who forged this nation left England because they were considered weird. The Mormons themselves fled the United States to live in Mexico for the same reason.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion. While mudslinging between the two parties is nothing new, an assault on a person’s religion is too low.
A person’s faith is a part of him or her, no matter how small. Is Romney supposed to change his religion? Alter a facet of his personality, faith, and system of beliefs to appease some idea of normality?
I might be making a big deal of this, but I doubt even Republicans would stoop to this level of personal attack. To see it from the advisers of such a prominent Democrat makes me question what else those advisers have said or thought.
There are more honorable ways of attacking political opponents, and ideally the attacks should be done on their policies, and not on them personally. Such an ideal is unlikely to be reached, but keep religion out it. Add it to the list of things not to be used as cannon fodder, along with children and wet gunpowder.
Romney’s religion might not be the key point of his weirdness, but the implication that it’s what people will think of first as a defining “weird” trait is annoying.
A person’s faith is his or her business and the business of his or her religion’s related officials, and no one else’s. This applies to all politicians, be they Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, Jedi or Druid.
If one of America’s founding principles can be flouted just for ammunition in a political campaign, the future of this nation is a bleak one. Those principles cannot be abandoned on a whim. That’s the opposite of what a principle is.
A principle must be adhered to or changed as time requires, not thrown out the window without thinking of the implications. That’s how great nations fall; they corrode their principles and crumble from within as much as from without.
