“Defensive Communications”: Does Mormonism Encourage LDS People To Lie?
Newsweek/Daily Beast reporter Jamie Reno published a provocative interview this week with Sue Emmett, a direct descendent of Brigham Young and a former LDS Church member, that plumbs controversial aspects of Mormon faith and culture, including the status of women in the faith and a tendency among some Mormons to manage the way they speak with non-Mormons about complicated aspects of our history and religious practice.
Flagging concern about how this highly managed communications style has impacted the Romney campaign and might shape a Romney presidency, Reno quotes a former LDS Church employee, who states, “Every Mormon grows up with the idea that it’s OK to lie if it’s for a higher cause.”
That doesn’t quite ring true to my own experience, though I do understand well the truth-swerving phenomenon Emmet and Reno describe. In fact, I cringe when I see the way it connects to Romney’s own tendency to avoid frank disclosure—this week, it’s tax returns—and the frequent charges that ambition and opportunism rather than consistent principle shape his policy stances.
Of course, it’s nothing shocking that an American minority group might develop its own way of talking to outsiders. But in some Mormon circles one does hear bitter accusations of “lying for the Lord,” and sometimes one does witness among Mormon people today the remnants of a deep-seated sense that telling a complete, straightforward story is not always good for LDS interests.
The most penetrating assessment of this Mormon cultural phenomenon comes from linguistic anthropologist Daymon Smith, who ties defensive communication mechanisms—telling outsiders one story in order to protect another version of the story for insiders—to Mormon polygamy and particularly to the decades in the late nineteenth century when federal prosecution of polygamy sent many Mormon men on the “underground.” (Read an excellent summary of his dissertation here.)
Double-speaking on polygamy continues. I myself wrestle with it whenever I’m obliged to talk about Mormon polygamy in public. Since 1890, LDS Church leaders and members have stated publicly and repeatedly that we do not practice polygamy, that the practice has officially ended. This is an earnest effort to distinguish contemporary members of the mainstream LDS Church from ultra-orthodox splinter groups of fundamentalist Mormons. And it is true that any Mormon who were to marry and cohabitate with a two living spouses today would be excommunicated.
But polygamy has not been eliminated from Mormon life. (I’ve discussed this topic at length here.)
The fact is that current Church policy does allow for a living man to be “sealed” (married for eternity) to more than one woman at a time. For example, a widower or divorced man who has elected to terminate his civil marriage but not his LDS temple marriage is permitted to marry another woman in an LDS temple with the assurance that both first and second marriages would be eternal. The same is not possible under current Church policies for living LDS women who have been widowed or civilly divorced.
This may seem like a technicality. But when combined with the fact that polygamy has never been renounced as a doctrinal principle by the Church and that it remains on the books in the Doctrine and Covenants, a book of LDS scripture, it fosters a belief among many mainstream LDS people that polygamous marriages will be a fact of the afterlife. Some mainstream Mormons dutifully anticipate polygamy in heaven. Others take an agnostic view. But many others quietly harbor feelings of grief, anger, and worry. I have experienced these feelings myself, and I hear them from other Mormons all the time. All the time Mormon men and women ask, “What kind of God would expect me to live in an eternal marriage that I would hate?” Not the God I believe in.
Polygamy remains a fact of mainstream Mormon thought and belief—whether as a doctrinal remnant or as a live article of faith, no one knows for sure. And the tensions created by the dissonance between the Church’s public denial of polygamy and the private continuance of the doctrine creates tensions that lead more than a few Mormons to leave the faith.
Given this complicated and conflicted situation, what should a Mormon say when she is asked whether we practice polygamy?
A few weeks ago, I sat in front of a radio microphone for the BBC program “The World”; with me on the program was a high-ranking public relations official for the LDS Church. Together, we did the same program twice: two back-to-back hours of the same hour about Mormonism, one time for the American audiences, and a second time for the whole world. During the first hour, taping for American audiences, when the inevitable polygamy question came, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to convey in a soundbite the terrible complexity of Mormonism’s relationship to polygamy: how while it is true that Mormons today no longer plurally cohabitate, polygamy has never been eradicated from our doctrine, our scriptures, and even from current policy, and that this causes many Mormon women and men a great deal of worry and resentment. My description sounded jumbled alongside the clear and familiar official message: no, we do not practice polygamy, not at all. I felt self-conscious and incoherent and nervous about publicly contradicting Church PR officials, but also determined not to obscure the more complicated and difficult truth. When we deny those truths, their private emotional costs multiply.
Then came the second hour of programming. Our audience in this second hour was not just BBC’s American listeners, but the world. I thought about the global reach of the BBC—the reach of the former British empire. When the question about polygamy came, I imagined listeners in Wales and Bangladesh and Kenya, listeners who had no concept of Mormonism, perhaps, beyond the most rudimentary and familiar stereotypes; including nineteenth-century Mormon polygamy. I squeezed my eyes shut. “No,” I said, “we no longer practice polygamy,” agreeing this time around with the LDS Church public-relations official. As I did, I registered an old, familiar, sinking feeling. I tried to tell myself it was the best I could do.
Was I lying for the Lord? Or was I a regular Mormon struggling to tell a complicated story to a world that often reduces us to stereotypes? What should I have said? Mitt Romney has said, “I can’t imagine anything more awful than polygamy”—even though polygamy remains a live element in Mormon doctrine and practice. Is that what he really believes? Is that what he felt he had to say? Is this the best we can do?
By: Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches, August 8, 2012
“Mitt Romney Is Still Mitt Romney”: Mitt Romney’s Problem Isn’t Obama—It’s Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney has a problem. And it isn’t his campaign strategy or strategists. It isn’t President Obama’s campaign strategy or strategists. Mitt Romney’s problem is Mitt Romney.
The current rash of polls clearly show that with more exposure, more time on the campaign trail, more time traveling abroad to “highlight” his foreign policy credentials, and the more he hides his tax returns, the worse Romney does with voters.
While President Barack Obama’s blackboard is pretty much completely written on, Romney’s blackboard is getting filled with information about the former Massachusetts governor that is hurting him, especially among independents. Sure, some of it is due to Obama ads and the national dialogue, but most of it is due to Romney himself.
This is all about who Mitt Romney really is; this is about his background, his judgment.
Both the new CNN and Fox polls show the public is beginning to get Romney’s number. Over the summer, his favorable rating dropped six points to 48 percent; his negative has risen five points. It is worse with independents, with favorable ratings dropping eight points. These numbers are according to Fox, which has Obama leading Romney by 49-40 percent.
CNN has Obama leading by 52-45 percent, with similar drops in Romney’s favorable and increases in his unfavorable ratings. With the crucial swing voters who identify themselves as independents, Romney has seen his unfavorable go from 40 percent to 52 percent.
The key question asked by CNN was whether or not Romney favors the rich over the middle class. Basically, two thirds of all Americans see Romney as a creature of the super wealthy who fights for the super wealthy. Now, 64 percent of all Americans believe Romney favors the rich over the middle class and 68 percent of independents have that belief. Even 67 percent of independents say he should release more tax returns.
Bottom line: Voters are not comfortable with who Mitt Romney is. They weren’t comfortable during the primaries and they aren’t comfortable now. The more they learn about Mitt Romney, the less they like him.
Do they believe he changes his positions on key issues on a dime to get elected? Sure. Do they believe he has a tin ear and can’t seem to get it right, as with his foreign travels or liking to “fire people?” Sure. Do they feel nervous about his time at Bain Capital, his foreign bank accounts, and shell corporations? Absolutely.
Fundamentally, this is personal. They know that Romney has worked the system to his advantage, paid little or no taxes, hidden his operations behind a phalanx of accountants and lawyers. He might even get away with being a “master of the universe” if he supported policies that helped the middle class. He might be able to convince voters that he cared about them if he denounced loopholes like Swiss bank accounts, Bermuda dummy corporations, even something as fundamental to his wealth as the carried interest deduction. “Yes, I took advantage of things that were legal, but I am going to close these loopholes when I am president.”
But Mitt Romney stays with his fundamental belief system—stays with policies that give even more tax breaks to the super wealthy and leave the middle class paying the bill. This may be his Bain background, it may be what he really believes, but it is not what the American people believe or need right now when they are hurting. This is back to the future economics and it shows a lack of sensitivity to middle class families.
After all the ads, after all the polls, after all the back and forth, Mitt Romney is still Mitt Romney. And that dog won’t hunt.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, August 10, 2012
“Romney Throws A Hail Mary Pass”: Mitt’s Final Capitulation To The Right Wing
In a move somewhat reminiscent of Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, Governor Mitt Romney has put up his own Hail Mary pass in the effort to turn around a presidential campaign in decline and in need of a new storyline.
Romney has found that fresh storyline by confounding the experts and choosing Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan to be the Republican nominee for Vice President —a choice that is causing both liberal and conservative pundits, along with partisans on both sides of the political divide, to awaken to a very happy Saturday morning.
Reports had been circulating for days that conservative groups were pushing hard for the Wisconsin Congressman to be added to the ticket, despite concerns that Ryan’s views on such key issues as Medicare could cause the GOP to hemorrhage voters in some important, swing states.
Certainly, states like Florida and Pennsylvania, with their large population of senior citizens, will now become more difficult for the GOP nominees.
For committed conservatives, Ryan represents the best expression of their beliefs, values and the direction in which they would like to see the country go.
The choice also reveals Governor Romney’s final capitulation to the right-wing of his party and erases any hope that the GOP presidential candidate will attempt to move towards the center in the final days of the campaign. It’s an ‘all-in’ bet on the part of the Romney campaign—an effort to re-define their top-of-the-ticket candidate by hitching to the star of a number two with credentials far better defined than the boss.
History shows that such an approach is a risky gambit, rarely resulting in capturing the ultimate prize.
While conservatives will widely applaud the selection, Democrats have also expressed glee over the possible nomination of Paul Ryan, believing that he would put a right-wing, extremist face on the GOP ticket—thereby handing the Obama campaign an opportunity to paint the GOP as dangerous to the American middle-class and the poor.
While Ryan’s selection is reminiscent of McCain’s decision to do something dramatic as he saw his own prospects dimming, Paul Ryan is, to be sure, no Sarah Palin. There is little chance that Katie Couric is going to trip up the knowledgeable and intellectual Ryan with questions about the Congressman’s reading habits as you will likely find no better informed candidate than Mr. Ryan when it comes to matters of domestic policy.
The controversy that will likely arise from Ryan’s literary choices will come not from whether he is sufficiently well read but rather the choices he makes in reading material.
Paul Ryan is a known—and until recently—an avowed devotee of author Ayn Rand, the Russian-American moral philosopher and confirmed atheist who viewed government compassion and assistance for the poor as evil and destructive. Indeed, Ms. Rand is considered by the Cato Institute as one of the founders of American Libertarianism.
Ryan’s devotion to Rand’s perspective on government has been expressed in the Congressman’s own political philosophy—a philosophy that has made him a hero with American conservatives and libertarians. His commitment to Rand’s ‘greed is good’ outlook on life played a starring role in Ryan’s “Road Map For America”—a budget that converts Medicare into a voucher system that would result in senior citizens taking on a much larger portion of their health care costs and takes a hatchet to the social safety-net system upon which our poorest citizens rely so that taxes for the wealthy can be cut on the way to Ryan’s promise of getting our financial affairs in order in the year 2035 (a generation away).
Speaking at an event honoring the author in 2005, Ryan said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” Ryan would also use that occasion to call Social Security a “collectivist system” that fails to allow the laborer in America to become a capitalist.
Adding spice to what is sure to be a liberal onslaught on the issue of Ryan’s philosophical underpinnings is the fact that, earlier this year, Ryan was forced to flip-flop on his commitment to the Rand view of what America should look like when the Catholic Church took issue with the impact Ryan’s budgetary plans would have on the poor.
This past April, despite Ryan’s long held practice of giving away Ayn Rand’s books as Christmas presents and strongly suggested that incoming staffers in his employ read “Atlas Shrugged” and despite his remarks in 2005, Ryan announced:
I reject her philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas, who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.
Governor Romney’s decision to put Ryan on the ticket reveals his campaign’s deep concern that the election may be slipping away. Polls this week show Romney losing ground to President Obama, placing his campaign in a position where they had to do something and do it quickly.
Not unlike the dynamic that ensued following the choice of Sarah Palin, the anointing of Paul Ryan likely means that that Governor Romney will be forced to take a step back in prominence as Congressman Ryan—a rock star in his party—steps up to take on the substantive issues that will now become the focus of the battle.
And we all know how that worked out.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, The Policy Page, Forbes, August 11, 2012
“Romney Proves Me Wrong”: Instead Of A Boring White Guy, He Chose A Far-Right White Guy
So here’s what I wrote last Monday: “It is still probably going to be Rob Portman.” Here’s what I wrote about Ryan:
Hey, Paul Ryan! People love that Paul Ryan! The only downside, with Paul Ryan, is everything he believes. The Obama administration cackles with glee imagining the opportunity to explain the contents of the Ryan budget to moderate voters. Ayn Rand starts showing up in Democratic attack ads if Paul Ryan is the running mate.
And then I concluded with, “please enjoy watching every pundit who confidently made a bullshit prediction pretend it never happened.”
I was wrong! (Though I think I’m right about the cackling, still.) I thought Romney was too smart and too risk-averse to go with an even slightly polarizing figure, but Romney made the “surprise” pick. Though, let’s be honest, Ryan is still a boring white guy, he’s just a boring white guy with excitingly far-right economic and budget policy preferences.
What I also couldn’t have predicted is that Romney would make his decision a Friday night news dump, leaking it too late for the evening news and announcing it on a Saturday morning when no one is paying attention to politics. He probably did this because he hates the press and he wanted to ruin everyone’s weekend. He seems to have given advance notice, though, to a few commentators, including his biggest media booster, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. Rubin, as we all remember, is unable to, say, correct malicious mistakes in her posts while she is observing the Sabbath, but she was able, thank god, to write and schedule a post on the Ryan pick that went up at nearly 2 a.m.. She thinks the Ryan pick is a brilliant, canny decision, obviously. And it totally is, as long as no one successfully explains to voters what Ryan actually believes.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, August 11, 2012
“Let The Policy Back-Tracking Begin”: Paul Ryan Says Romneycare Is an Unsustainable “Fatal Conceit”
As I noted earlier, Mitt Romney’s new vice presidential pick is “not a fan,” to use Paul Ryan’s words, of the former Massachusetts governor’s signature legislative accomplishment.
Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski dug up last week a 2010 Ryan appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal where he blasted the Massachusetts healthcare overhaul, which Romney oversaw as governor, as “a fatal conceit.”
Asked if he thought Romneycare (upon which Obamacare was based) works, Ryan responded:
Not well, no. Actually, I’m not a fan of the system. … I’ve got some relatives up there in Massachusetts. My uncle’s a cardiologist in Boston and I’ve talked to a lot of healthcare folks up there. What’s happening now is because costs are getting out of control, premiums are increasing in Massachusetts and now you have a bureaucracy that is having to put all these cost controls and now rationing on the system. So people in Massachusetts are saying ‘yes we have virtually universal healthcare’—I think it’s 96 or 98 percent insured. But they see the system bursting by the seams. They see premium increases, rationing and benefit cuts, and so they’re frustrated with this system. … They see how this idea of having the government be the sole, you know, single regulator of health insurance, defining what kind of health insurance you can have, and then an individual mandate—it is fatal conceit. These kinds of systems, as we’re now seeing in Massachusetts are unsustainable.
Of course it’s standard operating procedure that vice presidential picks have policy differences with the top of the ticket. See George H.W. Bush and “voodoo economics,” for example. But this disagreement is more pronounced because to date Romney has run a campaign light on policy details (the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein memorably described Romney’s agenda as being less actual policy proposals and “more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. … But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.”) In a stroke Mitt Romney made Paul Ryan the functional policy director of his campaign, making sharp policy disagreements like this one more than ordinarily salient. By the same token, it will be interesting to watch the conservative reaction as Ryan is forced to correct himself on this and any other areas of disagreement with the top of the ticket. Given the extent to which his nomination is meant to pacify a querulous base a muzzled or repentant Ryan could prove problematic.
(On the other hand, Romneycare’s broad unpopularity with his party—see the uproar this week when a Romney spokeswoman spoke positively of it—has left him largely quiet on the law’s virtues so maybe “fatal conceit” will become the campaign’s official policy position on the law.)
One other point worth mentioning on Ryan and healthcare costs: It’s interesting that he criticized cost controls since they are notably absent from his Medicare overhaul scheme. While his plan would lower spending it does so not by controlling costs but by shifting the cost from the government to senior citizens. What it does do, however, is keep the Obamacare Medicare cuts … which Romney grimly denounced in introducing Ryan. I guess that’s another area where we can look forward to a little policy back-tracking.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 11, 2012
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