<div class="header">
<div class="left">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif" alt="The New York Times" align="left" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0"></a>
<li class="reprints"> <form name="cccform" action="https://s100.copyright.com/CommonApp/LoadingApplication.jsp" target="_Icon">
</form><br clear="all"></li></div></div><br><hr align="left" size="1">
<div class="timestamp">March 17, 2012</div>
<h1>Is Elvis a Mormon?</h1>
<span><h6 class="byline">By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Maureen Dowd" class="meta-per">MAUREEN DOWD</a></h6>
</span>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
TRUST Mitt Romney to be on top of the latest trend of the superrich: the trophy basement. </p>
<p>
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported on the new fashion to look
low-key on the outside while digging deep for opulence — carving out
subterranean spaces for Turkish baths, Italianate spas, movie theaters,
skateboarding ramps, squash courts, discos and golf-simulation centers.
</p>
<p>
The Journal reported that Romney has filed an application to replace his
single-story 3,000-square-foot beach house in La Jolla, Calif., with a
7,400-square-foot home featuring an additional 3,600 square feet of
finished underground space. </p>
<p>
It’s a metaphor alert, reinforcing the two image problems Romney has:
that he’s an out-of-touch plutocrat and that his true nature is buried
where we can’t see it. </p>
<p>
His two-year missionary stint in France taught Mitt to steel himself
against rejection. Still, he must feel awful heading into Illinois
(where Joseph Smith, the Mormon Church founder, was running for
president when he was killed by a mob), spending so much money to buy so
little affection. </p>
<p>
There’s a certain pathos to Romney. His manner is so inauthentic, you
can’t find him anywhere. Is he the guy he was on Wednesday or the guy he
was on Thursday? </p>
<p>
He has the same problem that diminished the equally animatronic Al Gore.
Gore kept mum on the one thing that made him come alive, the
environment, fearing he’d be cast, as W. liked to say, as “a green,
green lima bean.” </p>
<p>
Romney also feels he must hide an essential part of who he is: a pillar
of the Mormon Church. He fears he would turn off voters by talking too
much about a faith that many evangelicals dismiss as a cult and not a
true Christian religion. </p>
<p>
Rick Santorum is drawn to the extreme and ascetic Opus Dei and sometimes
sounds more Catholic than the pope — like his promise on his Web site
to banish hard-core porn if he’s elected president. Yet he has
successfully crowded Romney with a fraction of his money by wearing his
religion and his immigrant, blue-collar roots on his sleeve. </p>
<p>
Mitt works overtime pretending he’s a Nascar, cheesy-grits guy and masking his pride in his bank account and faith. </p>
<p>
When he talked about his beliefs in his last presidential run, it
sometimes provoked confusion, like this explanation to an Iowa radio
host about the second coming of Christ: that Jesus would first appear in
Jerusalem and then, “over the thousand years that follow, the
millennium, he will reign from two places, the law will come from
Missouri, and the other will be from Jerusalem.” </p>
<p>
Just as Romney did not step up immediately after Rush Limbaugh called
Sandra Fluke “a slut,” he has yet to step up as the cases have mounted
of Jews posthumously and coercively baptized by Mormons, including
hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims; the parents of the death
camp survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal; and Daniel Pearl, the
Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
(His widow, Mariane, told CNN she was “shocked.”) </p>
<p>
Believing that only Mormons can get into the highest level of heaven,
the Celestial Kingdom, and that others will be limited to the
Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms, they have baptized anyone and
everyone, including Anne Frank, Gandhi, Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie
Chaplin and Elvis. </p>
<p>
Asked by Newsweek in 2007 if he had done baptisms for the dead, which
involve white garb and immersion in water, a startled Romney replied, “I
have in my life, but I haven’t recently.” </p>
<p>
Mormon feminists got upset this winter when they found that young women
in some temples had not been allowed to do proxy baptisms while they
were menstruating. </p>
<p>
Church leaders have lately stepped up efforts to stop such baptisms,
reminding church members that their “pre-eminent obligation” is not to
celebrities and Holocaust victims but to their own ancestors. (Ann
Romney’s Welsh dad, who disdained organized religion, was baptized.)
</p>
<p>
Matthew Bowman, who wrote “The Mormon People,” says Mormons “have a hard
time understanding why people from other religions find this so
offensive. Mormons don’t think of these people as being made Mormon
unless their spirit accepts the Gospel. They just think they’ve given
them an opportunity. Mormonism is wildly optimistic.” </p>
<p>
Mormons had designated Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and
Holocaust survivor, as “ready” for a posthumous proxy burial, even
though he is very much alive at 83 and still teaching at Boston
University and in Florida. </p>
<p>
Wiesel calls “the whole process very strange,” and faults Romney, a
Mormon stake president: “After all, Romney is not simply a Mormon. He’s
been a bishop of the Mormon Church. He could have called and told me he
wanted me to know that he spoke to the elders and told them to stop it.
Silence doesn’t help truth.” </p>
<p>
He added: “They have baptized over 600,000 Holocaust victims. There is
nothing positive in what they are doing. It’s an insult. You cannot ask
the dead their opinion. </p>
<p>
“Poor Anne Frank. As if she didn’t suffer enough.” </p>
<div class="articleCorrection">
</div>
</div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>