Romney's Roadside Tears

On Meet The Press this past Sunday, Tim Russert asked Mitt Romney about the Mormon Church's decision to overturn its institutional racism in 1978 by allowing blacks to fully participate in church rites. Here's the exchange:


Mormons were indeed late to the game in terms of racial equality, and there's no doubt that the Romney family must have felt a pull between their personal feelings toward segregation, and their allegiance to the church's official policy regarding blacks. In the late 1970's, a church that summarily barred African Americans the right to attain such posts was an embarrassment, to say the least. And so, better late than never, an interventionist God handed down more revelations, and the Mormon laws were changed.

Singular issues are often not enough to cause a follower of a faith to turn away from the church. Witness Rudy Giuliani, Catholicism and abortion. Indeed, if anything, it would seem an exception for a person to, without exception, believe each and every edict his or her religion would offer up. Romney himself has declared that he "can't imagine anything more awful" than the once divinely-sanctioned-and-later-overturned Mormon edict of polygamy. Strange that he can't bring himself to directly label the church's racism as an awful chapter in its history as well.

So how did Mormons get the idea to exclude blacks from their ministry in the first place? Though clearly critical of Mormonism, the following cartoon (made by skeptical Christians) may prove illuminating on the question of the origins of racial intolerance in the Church of LDS.



A response to the claim Mormonism's racist past has a doctrinal basis can be read here.