Mormons are proud of Mitt Romney’s success but fear what comes next [View all]

[Playinghardball]

Tuesday night, fresh from hearing of Rick Santorum’s withdrawal from the presidential campaign, I went out for frozen yoghurt with a bunch of friends from church. I asked my friends, almost all of whom are Republican, how they felt about Romney being the Republican candidate. Conversation ended instantly as my friends slumped wearily. One woman spoke for everyone when she said: “I just want it to be over.”

In Mormon circles, news of Romney’s success is a decidedly mixed bag. Like every religious minority group, we are thrilled to be represented on such a large stage, and a largely Republican Mormon population is proud of the man and eager to help him on his quest for the White House. But all of us are fearful of the election cycle and what this attention will bring to our door.

We have good reason to be wary. Over our history, both press attention and government intervention has not been kind. From political cartoons that depicted Mormons as cultish rapists, to Arthur Conan Doyle’s description of a murderous prophet, the worst rumours have been exacerbated and publicised. Politicians have been so disgusted by polygamy that in the process of outlawing it, they have stripped Utah women of the right to vote and froze the church’s assets. In 1857, political manoeuvring led President James Buchanan to cancel mail service to Utah and advance troops, in an effort to replace the governor with one of his choosing. Twenty years before that, a Missouri governor issued an extermination order against Mormons that remained in effect until 1976. For our young church, these events still loom large.

While we no longer need to fear the threat of losing our property or livelihoods, today we do still worry about a press that doesn’t understand our traditions. Viewing what is tender and sacred to us as worthy of exposé, writers have approached me or my colleagues for pictures of our religious garments or for detailed descriptions of our temple ceremonies. These requests are not intended to be disrespectful, but it is difficult to explain how we feel about these things to people in our modern western tell-all culture. We appeal to traditions of Islam or Native American cultures to try to explain why we don’t talk about these things we hold dear, but in modern western society the only reason people don’t talk is if there’s something to hide. That gap worries us as we decide which is worse – being seen as suspicious and weird, or holding up our most tender ceremonies for public mockery.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/04/12/mormons-are-proud-of-mitt-romneys-success-but-fear-what-comes-next/