Republican primary: a cult classic

2-25-12
The Independent (UK)
Mormons posthumously baptise Anne Frank
Guy Adams
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mormons-posthumously-baptise-anne-frank-7440503.html
Anne Frank, the famous diarist and Holocaust victim, was put to death on account of her Jewish faith. But earlier this month, she was nonetheless secretly co-opted into the Mormon Church.
So claim researchers investigating the US-based Church’s practice of posthumously baptising dead people - sometimes without the knowledge and almost always against the will of surviving friends and family members.
Ms Frank was “christened” at a Mormon temple in the Dominican Republic, in apparent violation of a pact between the Church and Jewish leaders. A local child, acting as her spiritual proxy, is believed to have been dunked in a font during the ceremony.
Computer records of the event register Ms Frank under her full name, Annelies Marie Frank, and say that she lived from 1929 to 1945. The baptism was “completed” at a temple in Santo Domingo on 18 February.
In an apologetic statement, the Mormon Church’s PR department neither confirmed nor denied that the event had taken place, but declared itself “absolutely firm in its commitment to not accept the names of Holocaust victims for proxy baptism.”
“It is distressing when an individual wilfully violates the Church's policy,” the statement continued, "and something that should be understood to be an offering based on love and respect becomes a source of contention.”
It’s the second time in days that the Church has issued a similar mea culpa. Last week, it emerged that the parents of Simon Wiesenthal, a Nazi death camp survivor and Jewish rights advocate, had been recently baptised in Utah and Arizona.
Both affairs highlight a curious avenue of Mormon theology. Members of the Church believe that dead people who are posthumously inducted into their ranks will then, in the afterlife, be offered a chance to enter one of the higher tiers of heaven.
Over the years, they've duly held baptism ceremonies for around 650,000 Holocaust victims, along with countless late celebrities, including John Lennon, and Albert Einstein. Thanks to her prominence, Ms Frank is believed to have been baptised at least nine times.
The practice also sometimes extends to the political arena. It was recently reported that Barack Obama’s late mother, Stanley Ann Durham, had been the subject of a ceremony. And Mitt Romney, the US presidential candidate, is believed to have held one for his dead father-in-law Edward, a staunch atheist.
Unfortunately, other faiths view it as deeply offensive. So amid growing public disquiet, the Mormon Church announced in 2010 that its members would no longer be trying to recruit dead Holocaust victims.
Their apparent failure to keep that promise isn't just sparking stern criticism. It has also proven a boon to late-night comics. Stephen Colbert, the TV satirist, on Thursday announced that he intends to convert all dead Mormons to Judaism, by way of a ceremony involving a frankfurter and a cigar-cutter.
2-24-25-12
Counterpunch.com
Time on the cross with Rick Santorum
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/24/time-on-the-cross-with-rick-santorum/

Surely Rick Santorum is the most fanatical Christian to run for the Republican nomination in the modern era, maybe any era. Next to him Pat Robertson, billionaire founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, who ran for the nomination in 1988, has the tolerant, glassy-eyed bonhomie of the late Dean Martin.  Robertson has always been in show business. Four years ago we had Mike Huckabee, the evangelist and former governor of Arkansas, one of the boys, shacked up with Mrs Huckabee in his doublewide on the grounds of the Arkansas gubernatorial mansion. He has always been in show business too.
But with Santorum – a conservative Roman Catholic and member of Opus Dei – there’s a truly manic edge to his religious pronouncements and activities. It was Santorum and Mrs S, don’t forget, who took their still-born baby home from the hospital and laid it among their living tots, telling them, “he’s with the angels now,” an episode Mrs Santorum later recorded in a memoir.
Santorum doesn’t believe in the right to privacy. Not that Obama has any qualms about taps on your phone and powers of arbitrary arrest, but he probably doesn’t care too much about whatever human combos are being tried out in the bedroom.  Santorum frets 24/7 about beastliness and unnatural acts, and  yearns to restore full rights to snoops  to kick down the motel door, twitch aside the blankets and haul couples off for all manner of moral abominations.
Contraception in Santorum’s opinion is “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”. Pre-natal testing is also a no-no for Santorum, father of eight.
 
In 2003 Santorum said he favored having laws against polygamy, adultery, sodomy, and other actions “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family”. The possibility of bestiality in today’s licentious times bothers him a lot — “man on dog,” as he famously put it on a talk show.  Not for him the possibility of abortion in cases of rape: “I believe and I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you.”
Santorum was two when the Sixties began. But like so many cultural conservatives he believes to the bottom of his soul that  everything went to hell when the love generation came of age: “Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom.”
In 2008 he gave a speech in which he ventured that “Satan has his sights on the United States of America. Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that have so deeply rooted in the American tradition.”
Santorum traces Satan’s hoofprints back to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Just the other day he told an audience: “They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we do follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”
The whole diatribe is thrilling, but utterly ludicrous, not least because it was the revolution that promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which defined individual and collective rights for all men.
Why is a guy like this currently running neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination? The usual maps drawn by political experts stipulate that at some point in the prolonged nomination battle the candidate has to shed the gothick nuttiness and over-the-topness that got him traction in the early primaries and reach out to the independents without whose support no presidential bid can succeed.
There’s zero sign that Santorum is of any disposition to do this. So why does he turn out to be the last man standing in the path of the Mormon billionaire Mitt Romney in the battle for the nomination?
First and foremost, he’s not Mitt Romney.
Candidates, now long forgotten, like Herman Cain, or still vaguely remembered like the fading Newt Gingrich, fared well with this simple asset. Blue-collar Americans in the old industrial states don’t care for Romney, who began life as a rich kid and then became a lot richer by buying up businesses, putting them on a “sound footing” (fire half the work force), selling them and moving on.
So Santorum can work the blue-collar vote with a few populist rhetorical gestures.. He can also work the racist, anti-Obama vote by hinting that the president is driven by a non-Christian, environmentalist, New Age, putatively Satanist agenda. A few days ago Santorum declared that Obama’s actions are motivated by “some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible….The president has reached a new low in this country’s history of oppressing religious freedom that we have never seen before. If he doesn’t want to call his imposition of his values a theology that’s fine.”Then he added a day later by way of clarification that he understands Obama is a Christian, but that the president was misinterpreting God’s truth.
After the Florida primary everyone thought Santorum was toast and Romney coasting to the crown. Then Santorum won three fairly insignificant contests in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota. A billionaire, Foster Friess, gave his campaign a huge wad of money and he was on his way again.
Suddenly Romney was fighting for his life in Michigan (next Tuesday’s primary), where he was born and where his father was governor. Polls show Santorum ahead, both in Michigan and nationally, and also with a slightly better chance than Romney of beating Obama in November, though the president leads both of them by around four to six points.
The very latest poll, taken as Romney has desperately poured money into a fresh negative ad campaign against Santorum, shows the Mormon two points ahead in Michigan – no small achievement since Romney has denounced the bailout initiated by George Bush and ratified by Obama that saved GM and Chrysler, both companies now doing well and hiring thousands in a stricken state. In a lower key, Santorum also denounces the bailout, which shows just how insane these Republicans are.
On Wednesday night,  in a debate in Arizona, where he has a decent lead, Romney was pronounced the clear winner, not least because he had Ron Paul on Santorum’s other side,  thumping him for being a Washington insider and phony. It would be folly to predict what will happen next Tuesday night. If Santorum prospers, a huge disaster for the Republicans looms in November, far beyond even the Goldwater debacle of 1964.  Don’t believe the talk about a brokered convention and someone like Jeb Bush or Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey parachuted in by the Republican establishment.
These are cheering days for the Obama campaign.