Adventures at Midlife

Now that the initial news over Mitt Romney throwing in the towel has been absorbed by the media far and wide, a lot of news copy and bloggage is picking over the relationship between his candidacy and his faith. Libby Copeland of the Washington Post in “Did Mormons Get a Bounce from Mitt?” thinks Romney may have been a little too perfect for the American public:

Romney seemed so Mormon, so squeaky clean, so Pollyanna-ish, even. (Remember when he went to Michigan and said he could bring those lost jobs back?) Romney’s seeming normalcy isn’t the norm anymore. Maybe we understand better those who’ve strayed or failed and recovered — or, for that matter, those who aren’t fabulously successful and can’t put tens of millions into their own campaigns. Maybe we relate to the family lives of other candidates, candidates who have been divorced, who have blended families, whose children don’t all campaign with them (and may not even like them). Sure, they’re messier, but messy is authentic.

Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune today concentrated on the “weirdness factor” that dogged Mitt and the Mormons during the last several months:

…Romney’s failed campaign revealed what many Americans really think about Mormons. It forced Latter-day Saints to acknowledge that they don’t just belong to another American denomination.

“We have to live with the fact that a lot of people think our beliefs are strange,” said LDS historian Richard Bushman, the professor emeritus at Columbia University who helped explain Mormonism to a skeptical public. “Mormons have never had so much exposure as we have in the last year, so much genuine curiosity on the part of high-level media. I don’t think we’ll ever be the same.”

If it has been tough for many Latter-day Saints to see themselves as others do, it has been equally hard to face the country’s continued bigotry, said others.

And it may not bode well for the future, says Stack. “The anti-Mormon whispering campaigns in the Bible Belt may also have permanently derailed the growing political alliance between Mormons and evangelicals,” she predicts. Read the rest of this entry »

I once heard Oprah Winfrey tell the story of seeing the Supremes for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show on CBS. This was in the Sixties when about the only black people on television seemed to be athletes, dancers and Diahann Carroll on the carefully scripted “Julia.” As soon as they spotted Diana Ross, Oprah and her friends and family all immediately called each other and said — well, I’m not going to say what they said, because it sounds racist coming from anyone but her. Suffice it to say it was a big deal then to see black people on national television.

Things have changed, and isn’t it wonderful? (Two words: Denzel Washington.) Black people are a major part of every level of the entertainment industry, and have made great strides everywhere else. Okay, I’m not naive. I know things aren’t perfect, and that there are still acres of acrimony and discrimination, but things are better. (Two words: Condoleeza Rice. Or Colin Powell. Or Barack Obama.) I remember as a child seeing pictures of segregated water fountains and benches in the South, and I realize much of this change has happened during my lifetime. I was utterly thrilled several years ago when I got to shake hands with Rosa Parks. I felt like I was touching history.

Mormons are a lot like Oprah was. Mormons on television! Donny and Marie! Gladys Knight! Ken Jennings! The Mormon Tabernacle Choir! Larry King’s wife, Shawn! Harry Reid! Carmen Rasmussen! Glenn Beck! Larry King and Mike Wallace interviewing President Gordon B. Hinckley! We were accepted, we were loved, we were admired. We were finally breaking into the mainstream.

Or so we thought. Two words: Mitt Romney. As the Deseret News posted, an op-ed piece by Barry Cleveland in the Carni (Ill.) Times that was picked by a variety of blogs pretty well sums it up: Read the rest of this entry »