Author: Ophelia Benson

Mitt Romney – not surprisingly – says lots and lots of irritating things in that collection of platitudes and errors he offered up in Texas yesterday – at the George Bush I ‘library.’ It would be silly and otiose to analyze them in much detail – it’s not as if there’s any reason to expect the speech to be sensible or well-argued or grown-up or coherent. But there are some remarks that are so outrageous I just…

When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God.

It would be nice if it became his highest promise to his fellow-citizens instead.

I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.

‘Tolerance’ of course is only relevant when we’re talking about opinion. It’s silly to talk about tolerance when you actually want to get at the truth of something – tolerance comes in handy when the subject is a human invented story that people want to believe is literally true but realize they can’t actually demonstrate is literally true. It becomes a matter of ‘I’ll tolerate your myth if you’ll tolerate my myth and that way neither of us will have to confront the likelihood that both myths are just myths and not literally true.’ The last sentence is a terrific summing-up of that – religious tolerance is deep because it will tolerate anything – which doesn’t mean actually believing the anything is true. Except of course one’s own anything. Which is true. But the others aren’t. But it doesn’t do to say so when running for President. Twirl, repeat, twirl.

Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government…[W]e can be deeply thankful that we live in a land where reason and religion are friends and allies in the cause of liberty…Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion – rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.

Well here’s one American who doesn’t ‘acknowledge’ that liberty is a gift of God, and I’m reliably informed that there are others. And as for reason and religion being friends and allies – well the whole speech demonstrates why they’re not: it’s nonsense throughout, and blithely ignores (when it should ‘acknowledge’) its own nonsenicality.

So how does this work?

There are also those who think that Romney’s disowning of past Mormon polygamy is too opportunistic, since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does still offer the consolation prize of multiple wives in heaven (just like the sick dream of Mohamed Atta).

Who are all those women? Where do they come from? Are there lots of extra women in heaven who never spent any time as mortals down here? If so mightn’t they be just a little creepy? Do men really want bizarro ‘wives’ who have no idea what life is like on an actual earthy planet? What would they be like to talk to? Of course the idea is that they’re a consolation prize because they provide sexual variety – but the word is ‘wives,’ not concubines or mistresses or sexual partners, so one has to assume they’ll be underfoot all the time. And then if there are all these extra women in heaven, one has to wonder if men would really regard it as a consolation prize to be vastly outnumbered. Especially by a lot of weird clueless from-another-planet women who don’t know from Seinfeld or Dr Strangelove or Jon Stewart or The Onion or The Office.

And that’s before we even get to the question of what the consolation prize for women is. Having lots of female roommates? But how does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints know that all women want lots of female roommates? Or are women who don’t want that allowed to make their own arrangements, while the complement of multiple wives for each man is made up from the magical warehouse-full of heaven-born women? But if that’s the case why not just issue each man a set of really high-quality inflatable dolls, so as to avoid the creepiness problem and the outnumbered problem?

I wonder if the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has really thought things through.

Sometimes the disgust surges like bile.

Amid continued protests, the pressure on the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin is continuing to mount, as a prominent Muslim cleric today called for her to apologise for her “anti-Islamic” writings.

He didn’t call for her to, he ordered her to, in no uncertain terms.

[T]he offer to remove the paragraphs from new printings of the bestseller was not enough for Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the chief cleric of New Delhi’s Jama Masjid mosque, who suggested earlier today that Indian Muslims should “not tolerate the infamous authoress Taslima Nasrin on the Indian soil” unless she offered a written apology for what he called her “anti-Islamic publications”.

“The apology must bear her assurance that in future she will desist from repeating such venomous writing that may have any inkling of blasphemy,” he said in a statement. “India is a democratic nation and the constitution here neither does permit any citizen nor allow any foreign national to be irreverent to the tenets of any religion,” the cleric continued. “The entire responsibility of the consequences shall rest upon the government of India,” Bukhari warned.

That’s good, isn’t it – India is a democratic nation and thus it follows as the night the day that it forbids citizens and foreigners alike to be irreverent to the tenets of any religion. India is a democratic nation and therefore it has no truck with any pesky notions about people’s freedom to say what they think. But in case his audience doesn’t get the message, he finishes up with a nice flourish of threats. What a despicable man.