I'd hold the Mormons more to blame for [California's Proposition 8, the bigoted anti-gay measure that succeeded in this year's round of elections but has yet to survive court challenges and has already provoked a powerful counter-movement] than the GOP. In a way, the Mormons are bigger and scarier than the GOP, since their ambitions are not just worldly, they are theological and planetary in scope. Unlike the situation during the 19th-century scaremongering about Catholics being more loyal to the pope than they were to the country, the Mormons have shown that they are more loyal to their leaders than they are to the country. Utah was rejected for membership in the union many times due to the Mormons--Congress had the right idea.
I really was talking about the GOP's crazy-ideological effort to scuttle the auto bailout and risk millions more job losses in a moment of major recession verging on total collapse just to stick it to organized labor in the post that has generated this comment, just as I said I was. When at the end of that post I mentioned the trainwreck of California politics in the face of a crazy-ideological marginal-minority GOP, I was referencing the current California budget crisis and the ongoing insanity of anti-tax radicalism at the cost of a complete dismantlement of working governance from people who somehow think they believe "there's no such thing as a free lunch" even as they scream and whine for a functional society while refusing to pay for it.
Anyway, I did want to disagree with the comment's contention that Mormons are either bigger or scarier than the GOP. If that were true, Romney would have gotten the GOP Presidential Nomination, surely? Nevertheless, I think the GOP is quite as theological on its own terms as the Mormons are, and of course many Republicans are also Mormons, and so on.
All this does provide me a welcome excuse to point out, however, that the "movement conservative" phase of the GOP (originating in the Nixon/Reagan constellation of the politics of resentment, frowney-faced and smiley-faced varieties, respectively -- and then stink-flowering in Gingrich's Contract on America, only to culminate for all us lucky people in the Killer Clown College of Bush II) do have the larger structural problem of representing an effectively pathological chimerical marriage of two fundamentalisms in one: a quasi-Randroidal market fundamentalism and a mostly-Christianist theocratic fundamentalism, united in racist-inflected patriarchal rage and panic at the prospect of democratic equity and multicultural diversity. This shared taste for destruction and control and hysterical fear of difference and change isn't actually enough to make an alliance between these two fundamentalisms make a whole hell of a lot of sense in the longer term, however. Hence, La Palin as GOP salvation fantasy du jour.
Moving right along here, I certainly don't think that being Mormon should be seen as disqualifying a person for democratic citizenship, of all things, any more than any other practice of faith or atypical lifeway should do. It's true that I'm not a religious person myself, but I am an aesthete and something of a pervert and these facts give me some insight and some appreciation of what it means to devote yourself to a path of private perfection at odds with the majority or with what presently passes for commonsense.
Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them. Except to the extent that they are working to strip others of a say and a stake in the public decisions that affect them (as some Mormons among others tried to do when they supported Prop 8), people of faith should certainly have such a say and a stake themselves, however weird their beliefs look to me or to anybody else (I for one find middle-class suburban heterosexual parenting practices, in general, completely bizarre), and I'm quite willing to fight for that as ferociously as I fight for my own.
By the way, as far as I'm concerned, Mormonism isn't that different from Singularitarianism, Transhumanism, Raelianism, or Scientology -- except that it has a jump on them, I guess, and has more financial resources and members in consequence, and has flourished long enough to have grown a bit more resilient and supple and savvy and commonsensical in the vicissitudes of historical struggle. But to this crusty atheist I must admit they all look a bit like silly UFO/Robot Cults to me. I guess I should have thrown in the Freemasons there, too, come to think of it.
Still, I don't see Mormonism as any more essentially incapable of grasping and approving the force of secularization -- that is to say the institutionalization of the private/public or church/state split which enables functional democratic politics in a shared world of ineradicably diverse stakeholders -- than, say, Catholicism or Quakerism or Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, so, you know, let a bazillion freaks and flowers bloom if you ask me, Mormons, hippies, geeks, puritans, whatever.
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