MITT ROMNEY'S FAITH FAILS TO BE COLOR BLIND

Whenever a proselytizing Mormon knocks on my Harlem door, I chase him
away as brusquely as I would chase away a Klansman, or an evangelical
Christian Republican, and for much the same reason.

I have zero tolerance for racial intolerance.

Mormon Mitt Romney took pains to assure evangelical Republicans
Thursday that they would have nothing to fear should he be elected
president. Their 10-percent block of the Iowa caucus was very much on
the mind of the presidential candidate trained during his missionary
days in the low art of pandering for an advantage.

"I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the
office and the sovereign authority of the law," the former
Massachusetts governor promised the undecided at the George H.W. Bush
Library in Texas. "A president must serve only the common cause of
the people of the United States."

The supposed evangelical Christian occupying the White House
unfortunately made no such promise six years ago. And the nation is
thus paying the price at home and abroad. The Bush policies can be
understood only when we consider that, at bottom, the president is a
recovering alcoholic working out his salvation through Bible-thumping
and the evangelical fulfillment of prophecy. The problem with such a
fanatic as president is that we the people cannot cross-examine the
real architect of his irrational vision.

Religious devotion, as President John F. Kennedy verified, remains a
proper line of inquiry about separation of state from church.

I rather suspect, however, that white evangelicals have little to
fear from Romney. It is not so clear for the rest of us, especially
those the Mormons libel as bearing "the curse of Cain," who killed
his Biblical brother Abel. I refer, of course, to Brigham Young's
interpreted Mormon doctrine that "the Lord" cursed Cain's descendants
with "a flat nose and dark skin." Many old-line church apostles still
consider blacks as inferiors.

Such segregation differs from other religions mainly in that the
Mormon nonsense is homegrown, allegedly "revealed" in upstate New
York and transported to Utah. Not until 1978 did the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints allow black men to enter the priesthood.
This revised "revelation" from the heavens came amid growing protests
from African-Americans as college sports teams refused to compete
against Brigham Young and other church colleges.

What exactly is the shelf life of God-inspired bigotry? Mitt Romney
grew into adulthood under a Mormon doctrine instructing members that
Negroes could not enter heaven or the priesthood because they were
cursed by God, and inferior. Laying aside the Mormon hocus-pocus,
Romney is no different in such racial conditioning than his
comparable, evangelical white Christian, to say nothing of the secular crowd.

Such racial policy and practice, for example, are daily being
executed by Long Island cops, prosecutors and judges in their legal
capacity. A Newsday story reported that though illegal drug use among
blacks is about the same rate as among whites in Nassau and Suffolk
counties, the criminal justice system, so called, incarcerates them
at an astounding rate 36 times higher than that of white drug users!

Such racial disparity would have shamed the judicial system of
Pretoria in the bad old days of apartheid. Yet, some 97 percent of
the largest 198 counties in the United States send African-American
drug users to prison at a wildly disparate rate, according to a
recent report by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based
think tank. The sweeping study surveyed incarceration records for 2002.

Nationally, blacks and whites used, possessed and sold illegal drugs
at about the same rate, but African-Americans ended up in prison at a
rate nearly 10 times greater than their white compatriots! The devil
is in the local details where cops arrest and judges make sentencing
decisions. Probation officers, the study found, tended to attribute
white drug crimes to "external forces," while labeling the abuse of
black addicts as "personal failures," recalling the "curse" described
in that blood libel by the Mormons.

The challenge for the media with President Bush - as with candidate
Romney and the others - is not to reveal promises he's willing to
make, but rather to disclose those tragic flaws so deeply buried in denial.