I am announcing the creation of a new award, which I will call the Golden Ass, to be presented to those who resort to anti-Mormon bigotry in their campaign against Mitt Romney. Today’s Golden Ass is Lawrence O’Donnell, an asinus aureus if ever there was one, an ass of exceptional asininity.
O’Donnell denounced Romney as a guy who belongs to a church that
was created by a guy in upstate New York in 1830 when he got caught having sex with the maid and explained to his wife that God told him to do it. Forty-eight wives later, Joseph Smith’s lifestyle was completely sanctified in the religion he invented to go with it, which Mitt Romney says he believes.
Thanks for the Muppet News Flash, Larry. The exact nature of Smith’s polygamy is contested (his only children were from his first wife, leading some to believe that his polygamy was of a non-sexual nature), but, yes, he was a polygamist. So was Solomon. So was Abraham. And, oddly enough, Lawrence O’Donnell plays a polygamist’s attorney on television — there’s nothing quite so satisfying as profiting from the prurient interest in a subject you denounce. Charlemagne was a polygamist. We can do this all day: Muhammad married a nine-year-old girl; Mohandas Gandhi married a 14-year-old girl in an arranged marriage and was kind of a weirdo. Wikipedia informs us that Lawrence O’Donnell has half as many ex-wives as Newt Gingrich.
Mormons gave up polygamy a long time ago. It’s not the 19th century any more.
But anti-Mormonism is this season’s fashionable bigotry.