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| Mitt Romney |
Liberal politicians and pundits, from Brian Schweitzer to Lawrence O'Donnell to Jon Stewart.
have begun bringing up -- and stumbling over -- the subject of Mitt
Romney's religion. The following is an excerpt from Alex Pareene's
e-book,"The Rude Guide to Mitt."It can be purchased at Amazon,Barnes & Noble, iTunes and the Sony Reader Store.
“The
precipitous mountain pass that led the [Mormon] pioneers down into the
Salt Lake Valley and still is the route of access from the east on
Interstate 80, was first explored by my great-grandfather, Parley P.
Pratt,” Mitt Romney cheerfully writes in “Turnaround,” the airport
bookstore leadership manual he wrote in 2004 while governor of
Massachusetts.
“He had worked a
road up along ‘Big Canyon Creek’ as an act of speculation when his crop
failed in the summer of 1849. He charged tolls to prospectors making
their way to California at the height of the Gold Rush and even had a
Pony Express station commissioned along his pass.”
Romney
doesn’t add — and why should he? — that Pratt was murdered in 1857, by
the husband of a woman he took as one of his “plural wives.” (His
ninth.) Pratt was in San Francisco proselytizing and promoting polygamy.
The woman converted and eloped with Pratt, then pretended to renounce
Mormonism in order to get her children from her parents, where her
estranged husband had sent them. The husband tracked Pratt from
California to Arkansas, and shot him dead when it became clear that he
could not have Pratt jailed. This incident contributed to the general
sense of apocalyptic paranoia among the Mormon community that led to the
Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormon settlers — acting, according
to some, on orders from Brigham Young — killed an entire wagon train of
families on their way to California. There were rumors, before the
Mormon militia attacked the wagon train, that Pratt’s killer was among
the mostly wealthy Arkansans in the train.
The Mormons attempted to
blame the murder of children and women on Indians, though Mark Twain and
others believed that the “Indians” were likely Mormons in war paint.
(Archaeological evidence — dug up, embarrassingly, during preparations
for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics — supports that theory.) READ MORE
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