Celibacy is not hereditary.

I put the temporary plate on Louise this morning. The personalized plate I ordered should arrive in a couple of weeks. The good news: even with a personalized plate I only paid $88 for two years of registration. And they didn't charge me tax on what I paid for the car.

The bad news: as mentioned in last night's post, she'd never heard of a Rambler. Which explains why, when I looked at both the new title and registration this morning I saw that they say "1966 Rambo."
Ah, c'mon. You work for the Motor Vehicles Department, for Pete's sake.
I think I have to go back for another 3-day stay to get it all changed.
I'm taking odds on the chances the personalized plate I ordered says what it's supposed to.

NBCnews.com and the DNC are officially dating. They haven't kissed yet but TMZ reports they were seen canoodling in a Charlotte nightclub after last night's session. And her website today is full of glowing reports on his virtues and charms.
USAToday.com appears to be the jilted girlfriend. That morning home page includes a headline in the top section, "Fact Checking the Dem's Convention Claims." It's a fairly long article but she's reportedly pretty bitter over getting dumped.

I have no idea what this means, but it's interesting...
Somebody sat down with the Democratic party's platform from four years ago and compared it to this year's. They noticed that all the references to "God" had been removed for this latest version. Apparently there were several. A CNN reporter covering the convention asked Robert Gibbs, the President's first press secretary, why that change was made. Three times he was asked, three times he gave non-answers.
God featured prominently in several of last night's speeches. For example, Michelle Obama said that a woman's health care decisions should be between "her family, her doctor, and her God."
Odd that God was taken out of one and touted in the other.

When JFK was running for his first term he was asked about his Roman Catholicism and how it would affect his presidency. That question was a show stopper at the time because we'd never had a Catholic president before and evangelicalism was at least suspicious of Catholics. This was before the kind of multiculturalism and pluralism that characterizes today's society, and the country held its collective breath the hear Kennedy's answer.

He quickly responded that his Roman Catholic faith was a personal matter and that it would have no bearing on his service as our president. He would be the president of all Americans and his religious  affiliation would remain a personal matter.

That virtually ended the discussion on the matter. He never brought it up after that (he hadn't brought it up until the reporter asked the question most Americans wondered about), and the press didn't bring it up again either. He went on to get elected, and I don't remember ever hearing about his Catholicism unless it was a picture of him going to mass or something similar. (Did he go to confession?)

Contrast that with last Thursday night at the RNC. Three speakers took a total of almost an hour to extol Romney's Mormon beliefs and practices. One of the speakers was the bishop who succeeded Romney in that position and whom Romney trained. In each case the speakers extolled the Mormon church and his commitment to it. That included the statement,
"Our nickname is Mormon, but we're the Church of Jesus Christ...of Latter Day Saints." That was an obvious attempt to mainstream Mormonism, to make it sound more like a denomination within Christianity than a sect outside it.

The reality is very different, as virtually all evangelical organizations have recognized. The doctrines that separate Mormonism from Christianity are significant and extensive. According to LDS theology humans are, like God, eternal, having existed without beginning before their birth on earth. Eternal life (different from immortality) is achieved through a series of good works that include keeping the commandments (as specified by the LDS) and various temple ceremonies. Do those things adequately and after physical death you're admitted to the highest level of heaven and become a God. Or, to quote official LDS doctrine,
"God once was a man like one of us...and once dwelled on the earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did in the flesh, and like us." - Joseph Smith
That is, as God was, we now are. As God is, we may one day become...if we tow the LDS line sufficiently.
It goes on from there and includes secret oaths involving the penalty of death, submission to the absolute authority of the church....

All of this would be irrelevant IF Romney and the RNC had left it his personal conviction. His religious views should be his business. But they chose to bring it into the discussion with three speakers on the final night of their convention.
That decision was not made without the sanction of the LDS hierarchy. A Mormon Bishop does not get up and speak before a national audience without the approval and blessing of his church's leaders, especially within that very authoritarian organization.

The RNC can't have it both ways. They can't say Romney's religion is a private matter and then put it front and center as a virtue that increases his qualifications for the Office of President. The fact they did the latter tells me they worried some Republicans are put off by Romney's Mormonism and needed assurance that his religion is really all OK, and just like ours. It also tells me they either don't understand the very significant differences between LDS doctrine and evangelical Christianity or their goals for November supersede all other concerns. (I suspect both are true.)

But wait, there's more.
Because those three speakers appeared with the requisite approval of the Mormon Church I can imply some things re. that side of the partnership, too. (That segment of Thursday night's session was indeed a partnership, each agreeing to help the other.)
The Mormon Church desires to be seen as mainstream. Their leaders know they are not; they know their own theology well enough to understand how very different it is from evangelical theology on many core doctrines. That's why they send missionaries to my door; they see me as needing conversion from the error of my faith if I'm going to attain eternal life in heaven. Yet they sought to assure America from the floor of the DNC that they're really just like me, something they try to do in all of their public formats, including the recent, "I'm a Mormon" ad campaign. They want to be seen as mainstream, not a scary sect, and they took advantage of the RNC to advance that perception despite knowing full well the reality.
That's called deception, and the candidate was a willing participant.

The LDS can't have it both ways, either. They can't tell me on the floor of the DNC that we're just different branches of the same tree and also try to get me away from my faith and into theirs lest I fail to achieve eternal life. And if it's duplicitous for them to play both sides against the middle what does it say about the candidate that he was a tacit participant?

OK, truth be told, what last Thursday night made clear about Mormonism came as no surprise to me. I was, however, surprised at the RNC. What I saw convinced me that Kennedy's wise position isn't the Republicans' course and that Romney hasn't the courage of his convictions or the wisdom to keep them separate from his presidential aspirations. And that is a problem.