Plentiful articles about a new book re: Tom Cruise and his Scientology ties are making waves, and I asked myself whether or not I could be persuaded to vote for a Scientologist. Truthfully, I can\u2019t think of a circumstance in which I could.<\/p>\n
Much hay can be made about the maniacal galactic emperor Xenu who flew millions of DC-10 airplanes through the vastness of space to strap aliens to Hawaiian volcanoes and blow them up with hydrogen bombs billions of years ago. This is what Scientology teaches, and, to me, it\u2019s just plain nuts. But plenty of people have taken Mormon doctrines and Scientologized them \u2013 or, more accurately, Battlestar Galacticized them \u2013 to sound just as nuts. Kolobians who live in glass galaxies shouldn\u2019t throw stones.<\/p>\n
Yet my opposition to a Scientologist for president is not based on the weirdness of their doctrine. I could imagine voting for a Hindu president, despite the fact that I find reincarnation to be ridiculous and think the only thing separating the silliness of the Hindu god Vishnu from the harebrained galactic emperor Xenu is a few thousand years of tradition. Antiquity has a way of making goofy ideas more plausible. The doctrines of traditional Christianity can be made to sound ludicrous, too, but, as the New York Times put it recently in a lucid discussion of Mormonism<\/a>, \u201cEvents in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time. Not so revelations received during the presidencies of James Monroe or Andrew Jackson.\u201d<\/p>\n Put simply, Scientologists tend to be jerks.<\/p>\n Hindus, on the other hand, are, from my limited experience, mainly decent people. I suppose Scientologists can be decent, too \u2013 I like John Travolta more than I like Tom Cruise, for instance \u2013 but the doctrines of the Church of Scientology tend to discourage decency and encourage jerkiness. Is it possible that a decent Scientologist would emerge that I could support? Well, I suppose, but his church affiliation would lead me to believe they\u2019re a jerk until proven otherwise.<\/p>\n I began thinking in these terms when I read a post at The Corner over on National Review\u2019s website.<\/a> It was written by a guy named Mike Potemra, who I\u2019d never heard of, but he makes a salient point:<\/p>\n In my decades’ worth of meeting people from many different religious backgrounds, I have found that in every faith tradition-Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, what have you-there is roughly the same proportion of nice people and jerks. To this rule there is one conspicuous exception: Mormons. I have yet to meet a single Mormon who has been a jerk-and I have met many LDS believers. As someone who grew up in Rudy Giuliani’s faith, and is now somewhere between Mike Huckabee’s and John McCain’s, I find Mitt Romney’s religious background a factor that makes me more, rather than less, likely to vote for him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That\u2019s where my pro-Romney bigotry comes into play. Having grown up as a Mormon, I know what kind of moral fiber is necessary to serve in the Church to the capacity that Mitt has served. He has been both a bishop and a stake president, two offices of high responsibility that require full-time, unpaid volunteer efforts at tremendous personal sacrifice. It\u2019s nearly impossible to be a bishop and a stake president and still be a jerk. (It can be done, though. But that\u2019s another story.)<\/p>\n So I began my consideration of Mitt thinking he is an inherently decent guy. That may be bias, but it\u2019s an informed bias \u2013 I know what it takes to do what Mitt has done, and it\u2019s impressive. In contrast, my rejection of Huckabee is based partially on his populist political principles and partly because the way he\u2019s played the religion card makes him a jerk. If Huckabee were a conservative and a God-fearing Christian without the slimy, dishonest tactics, I could vote for him without reservation.<\/p>\n I also should note that being a Mormon does not necessarily mean that I would vote for a person solely because we share the same faith. Mike Potemra claims never to met a Mormon jerk, which means he never met former presidential candidate Bo Gritz. (Thankfully, he\u2019s now a former Mormon, too, so that solves that.) Here in Utah, whenever a Mormon tries to use their religion as political leverage in local races, I get disgusted. The LDS Church goes out of its way to stay politically neutral, and those who use their church membership to enhance their secular status are reprehensible. (They\u2019re also, usually, not very good members of the church.)<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think theological purity is a prerequisite for the presidency. I think decency is. It\u2019s one of the reason I don\u2019t fear Barack Obama as much as I fear Hillary. They\u2019re both wild-eyed liberals, but he\u2019s a decent man, and she\u2019s thoroughly corrupt.<\/p>\n ______________<\/p>\n In other news, my twin boys today asked what the proper word was for the two round things that hang down by their penises. We told them it was \u201ctesticles.\u201d<\/p>\n My son Corbin said. \u201cOh. I thought they were beans.\u201d<\/p>\n To which my son Cornelius added, \u201cI call them garbanzos.\u201d Go Mitt!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In1997 and 1998, the Utah Jazz broke my heart when they couldn\u2019t close the deal against Michael Jordan and win the NBA Championship. Since then, I\u2019ve come to expect absolutely nothing from the Jazz, and they haven\u2019t disappointed me. I\u2019m trying to do the same thing re: New Hampshire today and let Mitt go, but ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.stallioncornell.com\/uploaded_images\/xenu2-793756.gif\")
<\/a>
So why is Hinduism not a dealbreaker and Scientology is? For me, it\u2019s not really about what Scientologists believe. It\u2019s about what Scientologists do<\/span>. Scientologists sue people a lot, often solely for purposes of harassment. They go out of their way to estrange people from friends and families who are \u201cdifficult.\u201d Their leaders build Hussein-ish palaces to themselves by means of applying crushing financial burdens to rank-and-file Scientologists.<\/p>\n
______________<\/p>\n