Ralph Reed: ‘There’s bigotry against Mormons. It’s on left.’
TAMPA — Ralph Reed, who has most definitely re-established himself as part of the GOP elite, dropped by earlier this week to talk about – among other things – religion and Mitt Romney.
The Republican presidential nominee will tonight take his Mormon faith front and center. Tonight’s invocation will be given by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
A longtime friend, who shared leadership roles in the Mormon church with Romney, will testify on his behalf.
Both Reed and I were struck by the fact that, for the first time in U.S. history, the presidential ticket of a major party will lack a Protestant. But Reed, who now heads up the Faith and Freedom Coalition, went deeper:
”What’s even more interesting is that you’re at a Republican convention that was founded specifically as a Northern, Protestant, anti-slavery party. Lincoln was critical to getting the Germans. That is why he got the nomination. A Republican couldn’t win without Pennsylvania in 1860.
“So if you look at it, this Northern Protestant party has become an evangelical party – but it’s an evangelical party where a Catholic cardinal [gave] the opening prayer, without a Protestant on the ticket, and a Mormon and a Catholic will probably get a larger raw number of evangelical votes than George W. Bush did in ’04.
“In fact, that’s not probable. That’s definite.”
Reed posited that most of the nation’s anti-Mormon prejudice doesn’t come from the right:
’What is more disturbing to me is that 41 percent of self-identified liberals in a recent Gallup poll said they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon. There is bigotry against Mormons. It’s on the left.”
Not that Southern Baptists have changed their mind, Reed said. But politically, they don’t matter as much:
”Remember, if you’ve got a grandma sitting in the third row of an independent Baptist , white sideboard church who can’t bring herself to vote for a Mormon because she believes it’s a heresy, she’s more than likely in north Georgia, upstate South Carolina or eastern Tennessee.
“And we don’t need her. But when you talk about the suburbs of Orlando, or the exurbs of Cincinnati, that’s not their deal. It’s not an issue.”
***
My AJC colleague Daniel Malloy was with the Georgia delegation when Attorney General Sam Olens took the stage:
The scene on the floor during early evening speeches is one of delegates milling about, conversing, taking photos, looking for someone famous and generally paying about half attention to what’s going on at the podium.
But Georgia’s delegates rose to their feet when one of the Peach State’s own, Attorney General Sam Olens, approached the podium with his Florida counterpart, Pam Bondi. Then, most of them sat back down. The joint speech wasn’t much of a rouser – it focused on their efforts to repeal Obamacare and other examples in their mind of federal overreach – but the Georgians lustily joined in a call-and-response portion of the speech and pronounced themselves pleased and proud afterward.
“I was excited that somebody from Georgia is on that stage,” said state party chair Sue Everhart. “I thought all his remarks were really good. I’ve known Sam Olens since the ‘90s when he ran the first time for [Cobb County] commissioner. He was a great commissioner and just like tonight he always rose to the top, like cream, and tonight he made a wonderful speech.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp said he did not consider the setting too overwhelming, as the Tampa Bay Times Forum was not much bigger than the arenas where Georgia state GOP conventions are held. But Kemp said speaking when the crowd isn’t hanging on your every word is a talent.
“One of the things you have to learn is just to be focused,” Kemp said. “It’s like that all the time. … You’re probably speaking more to the press than our audience to make sure that our message is out there and I think that’s what they were doing tonight.”
***
Also from the AJC’s Daniel Malloy:
Grovetown state Rep. Lee Anderson, the all-but-certain Republican challenger to U.S. Rep. John Barrow of Augusta, arrived Wednesday in Tampa and was a popular fellow on the convention floor – posing for photos with delegates and glad-handing with bigwigs like former Gov. Sonny Perdue.
According to Anderson, it was all about consolidating the state’s Republicans behind him in the state’s most watched fall congressional contest. Anderson leads a runoff with Augusta businessman Rick Allen, who has vowed a long-shot recount once the result is certified.
“We’re just seeing the Republican family,” Anderson said. “We’ve had the most important race [in] the state of Georgia and we need the family behind us, and that’s why we’re here. We’ve got great support from all over the state. I’m talking to all them, some great senators, we are putting a plan together to beat John Barrow and also send Obama home too.”
It was a contrast with Barrow, who is distancing himself from the president and is not attending the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte next week. Anderson also voiced his support for vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan – Wednesday night’s speaker and a figure Democrats plan to wield against Republicans, particularly for his plan to eventually make Medicare into a voucher system. Ryan and Mitt Romney are striking back forcefully, accusing Obama of raiding Medicare in his health care law, and Ryan gave a well-received speech Wednesday night.
On the Ryan Medicare plan, Anderson said: “We have to look at all the proposals but what they are looking at will be a large amount of our change in our medical area, and I support it.”
On Ryan’s budget as a whole, he said: “You know, we can’t change it overnight. And it’s going to hurt. … But we’re going to bounce back and we’re going to be stronger than ever.”
Anderson, who has sometimes struggled in debate and forum settings, declined to debate Allen during the runoff. Asked whether he would debate Barrow, he replied: “We’ll be looking at situations where maybe we could possibly have some debates, yeah.”
- By Jim Galloway, Political Insider
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237 comments Add your comment
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:00 pm
@liberlefty
jobs are created each month but more are lost which = a net loss. Hence, the unemployment # above 8% for the longest period in US history.
Which btw is oposite of Romney, his record = a net gain
Don Abernethy
August 30th, 2012
12:00 pm
The little old lady in the Baptist church in Georgia is not worried about being politically correct as is Ralph Reed. She knows this world is not her home and she is concerned about following God’s Word that will give eternal life and she knows the Book of the Mormans is NOT God’s Word.Conservative Christians are being forced to vote for Romney because there is no other choice. But Christians have been forced to live under non Christian governments before so this will be nothing new.
zem
August 30th, 2012
12:00 pm
I agree with DJ Sniper @ 11:13 am.
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:02 pm
I am tea party and am not bothered by Mitt’s religion.
Will Jones - Atlanta Jeffersonian Exegesis
August 30th, 2012
12:04 pm
“Tea Party” is a Roman Catholic Koch brothers Roman Catholic front organization.
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:04 pm
USA = FREEDOM OF RELIGION
remember?
Retired Soldier
August 30th, 2012
12:05 pm
Debby-
Well stated.
DJ Sniper
August 30th, 2012
12:08 pm
Don Abernathy, America has never been a Christian government, so you’re wrong on that one.
TD, you do realize that Ryan’s speech was littered with lies and factual inacuracies. Hell, even a Fox News contributor said as much. When someone from Fox says you’re lying, something must be wrong.
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:09 pm
I have never belonged to a church and do not know of the peope you mention.
to me: tea party has more to do with econmics and fiscal sanity than religion. It’s those that are tired of the gov’t taking half their income and blowing it, while also borrowing a trillion from China each year, and then tell the public they need more money through higher taxes (i.e. fairness). I think they have proven they are not prudent with what they take now, so the answer is to give them more money and borrow more from China??
I guess I am the radical then…
cc
August 30th, 2012
12:09 pm
liberalefty @ 11:49:
You obviously misunderstood what I said. I’m not gone but WE are done . . .
Will Jones - Atlanta Jeffersonian Exegesis
August 30th, 2012
12:09 pm
The “tea party” now is a Roman Catholic front, just as the GOP was in 1860, to divide and conquer the U.S. after their created war and assassination by Roman Catholics of Abraham Lincoln six days after his orders to Grant at Appomattox were to let the anti-Roman Catholic South up easy.
cc
August 30th, 2012
12:12 pm
shav @ 12:09 pm:
Good post and accurately stated.
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:13 pm
@cc
youre still here? thought u was gone..lol…
Mild Mannered Moderate
August 30th, 2012
12:14 pm
Will Jones….that sounds…fascinating….would you mind writing a bit explaining how you learned this?
Cc – excellent. See l! You just walked away from the discussion instead of letting it devolve into a shouting match where both sides proved they were the same. If you just state what you believe, don’t lie, and then go away then no one can be mean! Why can’t everyone have the courage to do that?
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:14 pm
here comes MITT THE MESSIAH and his boy wonder sidekick EDDIE MUNSTER to save AMERICA from the blacks,liberals,gays,hispanics and liberals….
larry joe dupree
August 30th, 2012
12:16 pm
i want my country from the socialist, ethopian bed wetter.
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:16 pm
regardless, all the people I know that go to church are more well to do people than the anit religious anarchist athiest, so I guess it just doesn’t bother me that there seems to be a religious undertone to us radicals in the tea party. Fearing God, traditional marriage, children after marriage, self determination, don’t count as negatives in my book… (sigh; being radical isnt easy
Will Jones - Atlanta Jeffersonian Exegesis
August 30th, 2012
12:17 pm
The “tea party” is about forcing victims of rape to bear the fruit of their rapists’ abomination against G-d, the key issue to enslave women by the Babylonian “cult of male prostitutes” Jehoshaphat ejected from Jerusalem to become allied with the assassins and tyrants of the Latins and Etruscans on Vatican Hill as the Roman Empire/ Roman Catholic Church: “the real Anti-Christ,” “an engine for enslaving mankind,” as America’s Author, Founder and Prophet, Thomas Jefferson, put it correctly.
Shine
August 30th, 2012
12:17 pm
Ralph Reed….the right hand of satan. How anyone can take this phony serious is beyond me. He belongs in the kook party.
Sam
August 30th, 2012
12:17 pm
shav your book only contains pictures.
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:17 pm
@larry
and what do u want your country from the socialist ethiopian mean?..lol
Mild Mannered Moderate
August 30th, 2012
12:18 pm
Don’t forget your belief that lack of religion in all things is fascism.
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:20 pm
not me
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:21 pm
@shav
religion equals racism…the more religious this country was {back in the 40’s and 50’s} the more racist it was..conservative christians like the tea party enforced JIM CROW laws with the help of racisT christian leasders like BILLY GRAHAM
Will Jones - Atlanta Jeffersonian Exegesis
August 30th, 2012
12:21 pm
@MMM – Mr. Jefferson was fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. A prophet of the Deity, it’s all in his letters.
We came to America to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy of the New Israel. Rome and their moneyman Rothschild, followed us over and have usurped us, putting the “mezizah” accursed Khazarite Talmudists and pedophile-accursed papists among us as their Fifth Column.
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:22 pm
so if at all the radical tea party rallies people would have deficated on police cars and littered the place with filth and left it a nasty stinking mess while begging for free entitlements, we could’ve gotten everyone’s respect like Occupy Wall Street?
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:22 pm
RELIGION EQUALS RACISM…CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS BOMB BLACK CHURCHES IN THE NAME OF GOD
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:23 pm
OH, ok, yeah, I was not around in the 40’s and 50’s and I only learned of the tea party movement since 2008…
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:25 pm
… oops, I left out “destroy personal and public property” from post at 12:22
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:25 pm
racist CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVES IN MURFREESBORO tried for years to stop law abiding AMERICAN MUSLIMS from building a mosque…more examples of their phony christian love
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:26 pm
I KNOW IM A FOOL SO IF YOU AGREE WITH ME WHAT DOES THAT MAKE YOU?
DJ Sniper
August 30th, 2012
12:26 pm
Religion and politics have no business mixing.
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:28 pm
why would a woman vote gop when they think she hasnt got sense enough to control her reproductive rights…they want the government to tell the woman whtether or not she can have an abortion…obviously they think women dont have any sense
Will Jones - Atlanta Jeffersonian Exegesis
August 30th, 2012
12:28 pm
“Occupy” is “controlled opposition” by the ruling fascist plutocracy. It it were legitimate they would simply focus on bringing to justice the Rockefeller-Bush Roman Catholic CIA/FBI which we know assassinated John Kennedy and Dr. King to send us to Vietnam as papal catspaw and to restore Rome’s bankers to their illegal money franchise JFK’s EO1,110 had ended; and which also committed 9/11 using the same JFK-assassinating CIA teamed with the Khazarite Talmudic Zionists of Mossad, whose platoon of operatives was arrested near the World Trade Center carrying explosives and quickly deported.
Rome’s satanic, psychopathic Fifth Column’s fascist plutocracy should then be fully expropriated and constitutional money restored.
oldfart
August 30th, 2012
12:29 pm
I think it is appropriate that Ralph Reed’s Damascus Road epiphany occurred in a pub named Bullfeathers.
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:29 pm
conservative christians used to use terrorism to convey their message of “love” through the kkk…now its the gop
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:31 pm
probably bc they fear Sharia Law, which is the ultimate goal of Islam to implement around the globe.
“Stoning women for not being fullly covered in public”, yeah, sign me up!!!
Will Jones - Atlanta Jeffersonian Exegesis
August 30th, 2012
12:31 pm
Sectarian factionalism is treason.
American Exceptionalism is individual sovereignty based on obedience to The Creed’s three mottoes: the first credal civil religion in the history of the world…the reason slavery, with us since the Dawn of Time, ended within a generation of the Founders’ passing, and would have ended instantaneously had Mr. Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration not been edited.
G-d is not mocked.
Death for Treason
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:33 pm
@shave
nope its because theyre a bunch of bigoted rednecks who hate anybody whose not white and racist like they are….good try though
td
August 30th, 2012
12:34 pm
DJ Sniper
August 30th, 2012
12:08 pm
“TD, you do realize that Ryan’s speech was littered with lies and factual inacuracies.”
Are you talking about these facts:
1: Almost $6 trillion more in debt since Obama took office. Fact
2: Obama promised Wis GM workers that if they elected him then their plant would be open for another 100 years? Fact
3: Obama took $716 billion from the old on Medicare to give to Obamacare to the lazy parasites of society? Fact
4: 1/2 of all college grads since Obama came to office have not been able to find jobs in their fields of study? Fact
Are those the facts you are talking about? How about these that were not mentioned:
1: Gas prices $1:87 per gallon the day Obama took office and $3.99 per gallon today.
2: $1 million less Americans working today then the day Obama took office.
3: Food Stamps up to highest levels ever since Obama took office.
zeke
August 30th, 2012
12:34 pm
tea party and republicans are right to be skeptical of govt and its spending. however, it will take spending cuts and revenues to close the gap sooner. think ryan has budget deficits until 2040 or s
trickle down is a bs theory. tea partiers being fooled by the oligarchs who if they get even more tax breaks will buy even more pols. the oligarch want total power, money and politics and using tpers to reach their ends. surely there are many tpers out there whose ancestors worked in towns and mills where basically everything was company store…….it ain’t all that it is cracked up to be.
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:35 pm
why do liberals hate christians so much but bend over backwards to accomodate Muslims and not to “offend” them…?
shav
August 30th, 2012
12:37 pm
I get trickle down economics – its when your neighbor does good, its good for you, and the more billionaires you have, the more milliionires you have, all the way down the line to hundred thousand aires to regular old thousandars… the better others do, the better it is for everyone else behind them.
what is the alternative or the opposite? trickle up poverty?
Carol
August 30th, 2012
12:37 pm
What a difference 4 years make. When Romney ran in 2008 all you heard was how they didn’t believe people (Republicans) would accept a Mormon as their nominee. Maybe they didn’t mean it, but they kept saying it. After all, Dems wouldn’t have that choice until he was actually nominated by the Repubs. So all of this falls on them.
Ann Romney was right, it is their time. Because right now is the only time in history that they would even consider Romney. Huckabee proved that with his speech last night. With the anybody but Obama sentiment, the Repubs are willing to hold their collective noses and vote for the man with the strange religion. For them it is a win/win. 1. If he wins they have beat Obama. 2. If he loses he probably won’t ever run again, but they he can’t say the party wasn’t 100% behind him. This is his 2nd shot at the gold.
td
August 30th, 2012
12:38 pm
zeke
August 30th, 2012
12:34 pm
tea party and republicans are right to be skeptical of govt and its spending. however, it will take spending cuts and revenues to close the gap sooner
NJ balanced budget without revenue increases
Ohio balanced budget without revenue increases
Wis balanced budget without revenue increases
NM balanced budget without revenue increases
Why is it that 4 states have been able to balance their budgets without tax increases but the US government can not? All four of the above states elected conservative governors in 2010.
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:41 pm
@td
if you dont have a job dont blame OBAMA its your fault…and i thought you were a PRODUCER instead of an unemployed stooge of the vgop…lol
zeke
August 30th, 2012
12:41 pm
shav i doubt you know much about anything….trying reading matt taibbi’s rolling stone articles on bain…its free but requires a little investment of time
Will Jones - Atlanta Jeffersonian Exegesis
August 30th, 2012
12:42 pm
Fascist plutocracy and their unconstitutional, patently corrupt Rothschild/Rockefeller money scam, the Fed, must be seized by the sovereign People and their principals, along with Rockefeller-papal stooges, 9/11-committing Bush and Cheney, must be tried and fried.
Carol
August 30th, 2012
12:43 pm
shav
so you never answered – you are saying Obama the better job creator? really?
+++++++
Isn’t your side’s mantra that government doesn’t create jobs?
liberalefty
August 30th, 2012
12:43 pm
@shav
i dont are about the muslims invisible god anymore than i care about the christian invisible god…its just that i’m not afraid of muslims because theyve never lynched blacks like christian conservatives have