Spill Thy Blood

Note: The title of this post was chosen at random by flipping through The Portable Arabian Nights and randomly pointing out a single line from the book. In no way is it meant as an attack on the people I’m about to talk about. You got that?
“Unbeknownst to much of the general population,” writes the author A.M. Homes in her memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, “the reason the Mormon Church has such wonderful genealogical records is that they’re collecting people–they hope to determine the genealogy of everyone in the world to prepare them for posthumous conversion. Basically they’re making Mormons from the dead–baptism by proxy.”

It struck me the other night that Mitt Romney is a Mormon. Not that there’s anything wrong with Mormons. Mormons, as people, are an okay bunch. They’re fun-loving (within limits), and know how to have a good time without substances (which I respect). So what if they don’t drink soda. So what if they’re parties are lacking in caffeinated drinks. So what if I can’t ever have an espresso with one of them. So what if Mitt Romney is a Mormon. Just like not all Muslims are Jihadists, not all Mormons are douchebags like Mitt Romney.

But we’re not talking about Mormons as a people here, at least I’m not. What started bothering me about Romney’s Mormonism is their habit of posthumously converting the dead–even though they did say they stopped all that jazz after some family of Holocaust victims and survivors learned their dark little secret (yeah, they stooped that low, apparently). Even though they agreed to stop in 1995, the church continued to baptize by the dead as late as this year with Holocaust survivor/Jewish rights advocate Simon Wiesenthal. Anne Frank has been baptized several times and now belongs to the same religious organization as the man responsible for her death. Yeah, Hitler‘s there, too. Not fumed enough? In 2009, the Mormon Church baptized Stanley Ann Dunham, President Barrack Obama‘s mother who passed in 1995–the same year the church agreed to stop all this nonsense.

It’s a shady business the Mormon Church is running. One that makes me shudder to think about posthumous voting. The GOP is already notorious with fixing elections (see Fox News, Decision 2000, George W. Bush, Florida, and Texas GOP calling for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965–this has Ron Paul written all over it, by the way), so who knows what methods of chicanery the two of them will cook up for winning the election this November.

Once again, I’m not out to bash Mormons. I regard the religion like I do any other. The people I know are friends first, Mormons on their spare time (just as I like to believe they think of me as a friend first, and an asshole on my spare time). As a people, they’ve been nothing but nice to me. They’ve respected my beliefs (no matter how offensive I get sometimes), and I, in kind, pay them the same respect. But like any organization, religions can have a corrupted core. It doesn’t reflect on the people who are a part of it–as I don’t believe all Catholic priests are pedophiles, I don’t believe all Mormons are out to baptized my ancestors. It’s just that corruption breeds corruption. And if a church continues to betray people of other beliefs, then it should be held in suspicion.

If you asked me, however, I’d say that religion should play no significant role in electing a president. And if you believe differently, then you’re to blame for how shitty this country has become. End of discussion.