Tuesday, November 6, 2012

A Close Call with an Insidious Cult

The votes are in and reason has prevailed! Thank you, America! I do not have to move to Canada (yet).

However, I am keeping this blog because we need to remember how close to disaster we came. While Obama's electoral college landslide is encouraging, the fact is that he only won the popular vote by a narrow margin. And that means that a dangerously large number of Americans were seduced by the Romney campaign's deception.

History professors tell us not to forget the past, lest we be doomed to repeat it. Whether we realized it or not, we witnessed history being made by the Romney campaign. The Republican candidate made history with a radical new strategy described by one of his staffers like this: "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse says Romney broke new ground when he "placed a big and historic bet on the proposition that facts can be ignored, more or less, with impunity." Dr. Kruse puts the Romney campaign's whoppers in perspective: Romney's untruths were not only more numerous, but more blatantly false than those of any campaign in U.S. history. In fact, Dr. Kruse describes the Romney campaign's "fundamental disdain for facts" as "something wholly new."

I have already described how Romney's Mormon background has taught him that lying is justified whenever there might be a benefit to his Mormon Church. (See "The Ends Justify the Means and Other Mormon Doctrine.") I have also described the blood oath that he made to do all within his power to build up the Mormon Church. I have described how the Mormon Church fulfills every defining characteristic of a cult, and how cults hurt people. And yet, almost 50% of American voters trusted Romney enough to give him a bully pulpit for social policy and access to nuclear launch codes.

Please, learn what a cult is, how it controls its members, and how it uses its members to manipulate others in society. Education is the only way we will prevent similar religious radicals from obtaining high office in the future. Ignorance is no excuse.

Learn about the Mormon cult today, or risk being assimilated by it tomorrow.