By Rob Janicki
The Washington Post appears to have had a moment of temporary insanity as evidenced by its report from Carrollton, Arkansas, on Mitt Romney's Mormon faith. The article centers around an incident involving some Arkansans over 150 years ago.
I can see and hear it now in the editor's morning meeting trying to work up this article. "How can we really screw Romney today? Oh, yeah! We can tie him to that massacre in Utah 154 years ago." Sounds like a plan to me, albeit an insane one.
[...] On Sept. 11, 1857, a wagon train from this part of Arkansas met with a gruesome fate in Utah, where most of the travelers were slaughtered by a Mormon militia in an episode known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Hundreds of the victims’ descendants still populate these hills and commemorate the killings, which they have come to call “the first 9/11.”
It is impossible to know how Romney’s faith will play out in the November election. Polls point to a persistent skepticism about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and not just among evangelical Christians. Thirty-five percent of Americans in a Bloomberg News poll in March said they had an unfavorable view of the church, while 29 percent had a favorable view.
Still, Romney’s candidacy has prompted some soul-searching in this area, where a historical group estimates that more than half the residents can trace their ancestry back to the wagon train. [...]
It must have been a really, really slow day in Carrollton for this historical retrospective to see the light of day tied to Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith. I would have settled for a report on local fishing as more meaningful, not to mention useful.
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