Last night on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams featured a portion of an interview with Abby Huntsman, daughter of former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, about her decision to leave the Mormon church because of her romance and later marriage to a non-Mormon. It’s at minute 12 in the video above. Huntsman related a painful interview with a Mormon bishop who counseled her to stop dating the man.
“He basically said, you will not have the blessings, your children will not have the blessings, if you marry this man… I know that I’m one of many many women that go through experiences like that. And I walked out that door and I couldn’t go back.”
Williams nodded with deep sympathy as Abby Huntsman recounted this story. His decision to excerpt this exchange on the Nightly News (from a Rock Center piece about Mormonism) can only reflect outrage. Andrea Mitchell also covered the story.
This story is in the news justly because Mitt Romney, a Mormon, aspires to the highest office and journalists should be exploring what it means to be Mormon.
I of course think of the Jewish angle. In 2000, I got impatient with all the journalists asking whether Joe Lieberman would work on Saturdays if he were elected vice president — of course he would work on the Sabbath in a crisis; that’s a no brainer, I said– and said that the real issue was whether he tells his children not to marry non-Jews. I pointed to numerous bars on intermarriage inside the Jewish faith, spoke of the pain that these policies had caused many non-Jews and Jews who met and fell in love, and said that while we must tolerate such bars in many segments of our society, because people are tribal, we had a right to ask whether a president or vice president stood by such exclusivities. That was the season when Republican presidential candidates had visited Bob Jones University, which maintained a bar on interracial dating; and it was a big story.
Well twelve years have passed and a bar on intermarriage is denounced on national television. Social attitudes are changing rapidly and dramatically in our post-racial age. We have a black president who is the product of an “interracial” marriage. We just watched an Olympics that was remarkable for the number of “interracial” athletes who were not described as interracial for the simple reason that traditional ideas of race are disappearing and to invoke those ideas would be embarrassing and racist, and who knows what the hell they mean anyway.
Brian Williams’s clucking over Abby Huntsman’s disgraceful treatment by an elder is a sign of this new consciousness, a spirit of inclusion and universalism. American Zionism, which holds that there is a “demographic” threat to Jews and there are “too many Arabs” in Israel, cannot survive this new consciousness, let alone continue to describe itself as “liberal.” It’s an anachronism, as Tony Judt explained in the New York Review of Books 9 years ago. And traditional Jewish attitudes towards intermarriage can’t survive either, especially at a time when we have achieved such privilege– a privilege that many have sought to share.
Similar to the contradiction on how U.S. Jewish orgs are liberal on illegal immigration here, but intolerant of illegals in Israel, just give it little to no coverage. Hit up the person covering it with terms like “self-hater” and hope to shame them into silence.
Problem solved.
Bingo.
So, the Mormons have their own version of “the Silent Holocaust”? Google it for a look at a Jewish anti-assimilation movement. And, on a related note: Gee, some naive folks still think shunning is left to cult religions, or at least to groups like the Anabaptist-originated Hutterites or Scientologists (who additionally, have a more aggressive, proactive notion called “fair game,” which applies to dissenters in or outside that “church.”).
Mitt Romney married a (former) non-Mormon, but only after she had converted.
According to a survey, the intermarriage rate for US Jews is about 50%. See the article by Lenni Brenner on CounterPunch on the demographics of American Jews.
Not to disagree with Phil’s point about the hypocrisy of the media, but there’s also an important distinction between the Mormon and Jewish takes on intermarriage. The Mormon requirement is that both partners practice the same faith, but the Jewish requirement is that both partners share Jewish bloodlines. One can choose to marry a rabid atheist, but so long as his “peoplehood” is Jewish the community will typically not raise a fuss.
It’s the difference between an open and closed (i.e. inherited) religion.
Nonsense. A Jew can marry a convert to Judaism and 99.9% of Jews wouldn’t say anything about it.
As a Nevada Ned pointed out 50% of US Jews intermarry, so at least those 50% don’t seem to feel its a “closed” – by bloodlines or by faith.
As for Jews who do take their faith seriously – believe me, most Haredi or Orthodox Jews would be aghast if their child married a Reform Jew, and many liberal Jews would be aghast of their child married a Haredi or Orthodox Jew. (I personally know people in both categories.)
“A Jew can marry a convert to Judaism and 99.9% of Jews wouldn’t say anything about it.”
True, but as we know conversion in Judaism has a problematic status. I’m merely pointing out that in the case of the atheist with a Jewish mother, the question of conversion wouldn’t come up.
“As for Jews who do take their faith seriously …”
I’m perfectly willing to accept all kinds of individual instances, but I disagree with you that most people who choose to self-identify as Jews would proclaim someone dead to the community who chose the atheist with a Jewish mother. What percentage of those who choose to self-identify as Jews would you say take their faith seriously in this sense, and what percentage are secular?
“…just watched an Olympics that was remarkable for the number of “interracial” athletes who were not described as interracial for the simple reason that traditional ideas of race are disappearing…”
Just when were the Olympics when it was noticed if athletes were ‘interracial’? I’ve been watching them since at least 1972 — and I don’t recall any such references.
PHIL- “Social attitudes are changing rapidly and dramatically in our post-racial age.”
For some reason you continue to push the myth that we live in a “post-racial” America. As such, you are misrepresenting a serious ongoing problem for US minorities. While formal barriers to Jewish advancement have been eliminated, this has had negligible impact on Blacks, Latinos, and other underprivileged minorities whose social position, as a group, has changed little in regards to education, income or acceptance, individual success stories notwithstanding. I eagerly await your observations on our ‘post-racial’ prison population. Perhaps you need to begin reading the “Black Agenda Report,” briefly quoted below.
“We at Black Agenda Report spend more time denouncing Democrats because they act like and enable Republicans. We don’t spend as much time denouncing the party of white supremacy because Republicans rarely bother to pretend to be anything else. African Americans haven’t voted Republican in 50 years. But we’re more unemployed than we’ve been in seventy years, and more imprisoned than we’ve ever been.”
link to blackagendareport.com
Phil
Doesn’t it strike you as a contradiction to call Obama the product of an interracial marriage and then in the next breath describe him as our “black president?” No one would call Obama our white president, which they could do with equal logic. So why is Obama our black president. I think you had it right the first time. He’s our interracial president.
Most American ‘Blacks’ fairly obviously have at least some White blood in them.
In ordinary usage, ‘Black’ describes anybody who has noticeably Black features or coloration. On the other hand, to be ‘White,’ you’ve got to be all White — or so close that you appear to be.
This isn’t to make any kind of judgement about the ethics of the definitions. It’s just to note that this is in fact what the definitions are — and it would be both silly and pointless to start insisting that the two-thirds or so of our ‘Black’ population that is technically interracial henceforth be described as ‘interracial.’
@ Colin Wright
Maybe it’s time to change? The historical/emotional reason hybrids are called “black” or “African-American” is the old one drop rule. The irony is that was a white designation, which the blacks adhere to, and liberal whites do too as part of being PC. Jewish geography, as well as anti-semitic geography do the same with that sort of hybrid, the former, to take credit for good tribal achievements, the latter to point to anti-social tribal achievements. For example, Einstein and Madoff.
Citizen says: ‘@ Colin Wright Maybe it’s time to change? ‘
Well, my objections to that are two-fold — three-fold, actually.
First, these hygenic improvements usually have the effect of simply stripping information from the language. For example, ‘Ms’ may somehow put women on an equal footing as men — but simply by virtue of substituting a title that tells us that much less about the person we’re dealing with. It’s not positive or negative to be married — it’s just a piece of information, and now we don’t have it.
Similarly with ‘interracial’ rather than ‘Black.’ ‘Interracial WHAT? Half Polynesian and half-Portuguese? Half English and half American Indian? The term conveys very little. At least ‘Black’ tells us the person is partially or wholly of African negro descent.
Secondly, any hope of thus avoiding pejorative connotations is pretty unfounded. See for example ‘gay,’ a term for homosexual introduced to provide a non-pejorative name for those who had once been referred to as ‘pansies,’ etc.
Well, hit any junior high school playground. ‘Gay’ is as pejorative as ‘pansy’ ever was. And so all we’ve accomplished is to lend an unintended meaning to a lot of old film and book titles.
One can even lose both ways. Take ‘lame.’ Well, that got replaced with the somewhat less specific but presumably once polite ‘crippled,’ which got replaced with the still less specific but newly polite ‘handicapped,’ which finally got replaced with the utterly meaningless ‘special.’ And guess what? ‘Special’ in that sense is now pejorative as well. You’ve gotten nowhere.
Finally, I don’t particularly like these efforts to bowdlerize our language. I don’t need to deal with somebody objecting to ‘Hispanic’ for some arcane ideological reason they’ve dreamed up. A word’s a word, and as long as it’s not explicitly derogatory, I’d prefer if people don’t attempt to circumscribe my right to use it.
Yep. So does that give new meaning to usage of the phrase “special relationship”? Joke, sort of. Euphemisms grow like topsy. If in doubt, always stick the label “American” in there somewhere among the other tags you are pushing.
People do like to make each other miserable, don’t they.
I can’t see anything to object to in the Mormon bar to intermarriage — if you don’t like it, stop being a Mormon. Surely a voluntary association can demand that those who wish to remain members abide by its rules — and almost by definition, if someone is to be considered old enough to choose who they will marry, they must be old enough to make remaining in the church — or leaving it — an authentic choice.
At the risk of rekindling something, there was the circumcision thing. Well, I came down on the side of the pro-circumcisionists (I guess they would be). However, the anti-circumcisionists did have a valid point — a new-born baby is hardly in a position to express his opinion about it.
That argument doesn’t hold here. Anyone old enough to decide to marry is also old enough to leave the church if they want to — even if we don’t like the guy who’s running for president.
You want to expand this discussion to Islam attitude towards intermarriage
in the USA ?