Mitt Romney’s Youthful Indiscretions

“I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once, as a wayward teenager, and never did it again.”
—Mitt Romney to People magazine

  • Pop Rocks.
  • Loosened tie while on Mission.
  • Tied family dog to car roof. (Adult indiscretion)

  • Chocolate milk.
  • Killed a fly in Reno just to watch it die.
  • Baptised dead fly.
  • Sniffed Elmer’s.
  • Looked at Sears catalog under the covers.
  • Signed Massachusetts healthcare law. (Adult indiscretion)
  • Altoids.
[via Political Wire]
20 Comments

Sniffed Elmer’s Sniffed Elmer.

Fixed.

the mormon kids used to ride their bicycles to the foothills of the smokies and visit me when i lived in seymour, tn. i guess the smokies were like home to them and considered a cush mission. every year or so a new pair would show up at the front door smiling and wanting to talk. i always invited them in and offered them what i had which was usually only canada dry ginger ale and zesta saltines. i felt sorry for them because of how their church tortured them. unfortunately they always wore out their welcome forcing me to lie about having to go somewhere. this got old after a few years, especially when word spread that i handed out free ginger ale and zesta saltines and didn’t call them cultists and heathens like many around here. so of course i developed a mormon infestation problem just for trying to be cool. they kept showing up and i couldn’t figure out how to shoo them away. i finally decided to hide the ginger ale and zesta saltines which i replaced with cans of bud heavy and bong hits. that worked like a charm, they never showed up again. mitt’s telling lies.

@jwmcsame: Whenever the locals would confuse me for a Mormon at the local bus station during my Peace Corps days, I’d point to the plastic bag full of beer and the cigarette in my hand and say the local equivalent of really?

@jwmcsame: BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, the mishies have a tough deal. The cultural pressure is hard to resist. Kids start saving for their missions when they are oh, about six or seven years old — birthday, Christmas, chore, and work money ALL go toward the mission after they tithe 10% on those pennies.

Yes, most CONUS missions are cushy, but not all. But they beat the hell out of contracting some funky parasitic disease somewhere and being denied medical attention. They get to call home maybe twice a year, can only use LDS email (assuming they’re somewhere with internet access let alone electricy or potable water), and if they do find someone that says, “Hey — wanna call your mom?” the mom might turn them in to the mission president. It’s truly fucked up. Then when you consider the baptism quotas, the companions narcing on each other for masturbation and all sorts of other prohibitions against very sane behavior, you get kids coming back with PTSD for fuck’s sake. And do not come back from a mission early. Your parents might as well honor kill you, and, in effect, they often do.

Mitt, on the other hand, is Mormon Royalty. His grandfather (pretty sure it was him, but not positive) was one of the people who was told to flee the US to keep polygamy alive, and we know about his dad. Getting into politics is a big deal despite the oath they used to take to destroy the US. Mitt’s family went to Mexico; many polygamists went to and are still in Canada practicing The Principle. (ETA: There is also very open polygamy in SLC, and the LDS church does know about it yet turns a blind eye. These are the rich polygamists. It’s the indigent ones that get turned in.)

I bet Mitt’s mission was in Europe. Those are the truly cushy callings.

‽ Interrobang win.

Chocolate milk.
This brings up a burning theological question for me: does the Mormon ban on caffeine consumption extend to chocolate? Because denying people chocolate is worse than forcing them to be celibate, IMHO.

Jeezus Christ, there’s another debate tonight?

Well, what the heck. Open thread for 7:45 ET. Only because I’m PT.

Libraries get donations of books that can only be described as weird arse shite. Last week something came across my desk in a box marked “Religious Materials”. I knew I was dealing with WAS when I saw the title: “PROCLAMATION Proclamation of Son Ahman, Even Jesus Christ, To All Peoples of the Earth, Even My Holy Will To Warn All of My Judgment Upon All Peoples.” Serious WAS. It came from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the people the mainstream Mormons would rather not talk about). Warren Jeffs is seriously pissed about being busted for pestroking 14 year old girls. To quote from the Revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ Given to President Warren S. Jeffs on October 5, 2011:
“…6. Let Arizona know that my judgment cometh; that earthquake and the sinking in the earth shall be on the capital city there; also volcano and earthquake take power in many habited and large populated places in Utah and Arizona…
.7 Idaho shall be as a melting fire of such powers to cleanse my land of all evil.
8. Let also Seattle know there cometh a shaking and tidal wave upon her….”
All because this country doesn’t recognize Celestial Plural Marriage.

@Mistress Cynica: I’m not sure about the Mormons, but I know that chocolate doesn’t actually include caffiene per se, it contains theobromine (which is related).

@Jesuswalksinidaho:
Not surprising considering Jeffs and folks like Jeffs are big control freaks and Jeffs epic mental breakdown in jail.

@Jesuswalksinidaho: Let also Seattle know there cometh a shaking and tidal wave upon her….” Fuckin’ hell yeah.

/me driving back from hitting the music and movie store this morning jamming to Badmotorfinger, which I picked up for $5.99: “Why is this hurting my ears?”

Maybe because it’s real fucking loud, Louder Than Love.

@IanJ: Great. Now I have to spend the rest of the day trying to make “Theobros with Ho’s” work.

@Mistress Cynica: Whilst doing my research last night — looking for unusual taboos to riff on — I turned up discussion of a 1920s Coke Summit between the Mormon-in-Chief and America’s Favorite Soft Drink Manufacturer.

Coke won.

@IanJ: A lot of stuff in the Word of Wisdom doesn’t make sense, and the interpretation of it is even weirder. Caffeine in cola is A OK, probably because LD$, Inc. holds stock in Coca Cola. The current prophet has a thing for Pepsi.

@ManchuCandidate: Yeah. That’s rough. After they get rejected a number of times, they just kinda hang out if the pair is cool and won’t report each other. It’s a lot harder to do that if you’re living in a rain forest. The best part, the kids live on ~$150/month if they’re lucky. They tend to lose a good 50+ pounds by the time they come home, and “portly” missionaries are forced to lose weight at the MTC before they go out to preach wherever.

They usually go when they’re 19 years old — if they are in college, they take two years off. The bonus is that young women want to marry RMs (returned missionaries), because of status and it’s easier to get to the CK (highest level of heaven) that way.

“Attractive” female missionaries usually work in SLC at Temple Square. Otherwise, there’s no bonus to women who serve a mission.

They are taught to peddle “milk before meat” and all sorts of ways to get those batisms. The church is shrinking despite its claims of being the fastest growing church, and most of the converts go inactive after a year.

“Growth” tends to come from people living in deplorable conditions in LDCs, but these converts don’t tend to stay once the missionaries leave. Here’s something fucked up — look at how they funded the São Paulo temple. Fucking Faust. http://ifightthedj.blogspot.com/2010/01/joseph-smith-was-gold-digging-con-man.html

@nojo: “Theobros with Ho’s”. Theobros before HoHos?

@JNOV will never finish this fucking sweater!: According to my ridiculously brief research, the original ban was against “hot drinks” — coffee and tea — which was later determined to indicate caffeine. That provided the wiggle room to call a truce with Coke.

@Jesuswalksinidaho: You know what was a turning point in the public opinion of polygamy? When the media showed pictures of fathers being rounded up and jailed leaving their families behind. http://www.azcentral.com/i/sized/3/8/E/e298/j350/PHP48A643E498E83.jpg http://mormonthink.com/img/poly1.jpg Non-Mormons were just like, leave this folks alone.

These weren’t the compound polygs that are in the news today; these were the polygs that still live in mainstream communites in the Morridor and blend in well. (There are compound polygs in UT, and most Utahns know a polyg family in their neighborhood.) Sister wives (barf — some are sisters and cousins and nieces) tend to live in different homes, and men make the rounds much like Smith did, although I don’t think they send members on missions and marry their wives while the men are away as Smith did.

OT/ Does IE have a spell check? Fucking no Firefox having library.

@nojo: Yeah, that’s what some say. And even though there is iced coffee, etc., it’s still verboten. No one really knows WTF the WoW is about. There are also prohibitions against eating meat in certain seasons and all that.

The truce with Coke is really a business decision cloaked in tenets. The COB will not disclose any records, be they financial or how they determine membership numbers. They will tell the whole world that you didn’t pay your tithing.

@Mistress Cynica: Haha! There is really no ban on celibacy despite assertations that the kids are virgins when they marry. It’s actually a good thing if teens confess to any type of str8 sexual activity, because they can be guilted into getting married sooner and giving more spirit children Earthly bodies. Many women who were directed by their doctors to not have children continue to do so if the still small voice (read: religious and societal pressure) tells them to. There are too many motherless kids out there because a family decided against medical advice to have just one more kid.

ETA: Rape, on the other hand , is always the woman’s fault. Always.

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