As if it matters at all, the Clinton campaign has created a new support group in Utah: Mormons for Hillary. The initial group is comprised of over 100 Latter-day Saints who say they are voting for Hillary – 120 founding members to be exact.
At the forefront of this new group are self-identified Republicans, such as attorney David Irvine. I say “self-identified” because typically Republicans, such as Irvine, are rarely viewed by others as Republican – mostly they are called RINOs, Republican in name only. But even that doesn’t matter.
Mormons for Hillary has as much chance in Utah as Mormons for Hard Liquor. Former Salt Lake City mayor and Mormon hater, Rocky Anderson, has a better chance at gaining the Mormon vote in Utah than Hillary Clinton does. We’d be more inclined to elect Salt Lake City’s current lesbian mayor for President than we would Hillary Clinton. Now, having said that, I’m not saying Hillary won’t get more votes than otherwise if Donald Trump was not her opponent. She’ll get votes. She might even get a few Mormon votes, at least 120.
Hillary has a few problems with the Latter-day Saint vote. First, she is corrupt. Second, every thought and action in her political soul is ultimately anti-Mormon. Not overtly, just substantively. She supports same-sex marriage, abortion, feminism, social justice, political correctness, Planned Parenthood and, though her ghost writers seem to suggest she understands the historic plight of Mormons, her views on religious freedom come close the LDS view only with respect to worshipping inside a building and not getting killed for it. But, when it comes to religion in the public square, she orders it to the back of the bus in favor of special rights for gays.
Perhaps her biggest “Mormon problem” – if Trump has a Mormon problem, surely Hillary does too – is her “It Takes a Village” worldview. At first glance, Latter-day Saints might find that term appealing. After all, we know that raising children is a tough job and we’re very grateful for the many angels outside our immediate families who mentor and often rescue our own kids. But that’s not what Hillary is talking about. She’s talking about a “village” that transcends conservative order and civil society.
Of course, she has her defenders. Supporters say she sees reality. Today, two-thirds of moms with children under six years old work outside of the home. In that context, of course it takes a village to raise a child. But that reality, even if needing addressing, begs other realities that belie Hillary’s simple-minded context.
Robert Putnam is the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard. He served as Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and has consulted Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama. Putnam also is an award-winning writer. His latest book is titled, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.
Putnam is no ideologue, one way or another. But I think it is fair to say that he leans more toward Hillary Clinton’s worldview than, say, Ronald Reagan’s worldview. In his new book, Our Kids, Putnam describes the separation of classes (not race or politics) that is destroying America. As he breaks down the factors as to why today’s generations lack the equal opportunity afforded the Baby Boomers (regardless of race), he points to reasons that would make Hillary squirm – reasons all faithful Latter-day Saints already know. He writes of family breakdown,
In the 1970s…the family structure suddenly collapsed…Premarital sex lost its stigma almost overnight; shotgun marriages [responding to unwed pregnancies] sharply diminished, and then virtually disappeared; divorce became epidemic; and the number of kids living in single-parent families began a long, steady ascent. Those who have studied this change in family structure don’t agree on exactly what caused it, but most agree that these factors contributed:
· Sex and marriage were delinked with the advent of the birth control pill.
· The feminist revolution transformed gender and marital norms.
· Millions of women, in part freed from patriarchal norms, in part driven by economic necessity, and in part responding to new opportunities, headed off to work.
· The end of the long postwar boom began to reduce economic security for young working-class men.
· An individualist swing of the cultural pendulum produced more emphasis on “self-fulfillment.”
That’s the world of Hillary Clinton. The new Mormons for Hillary movement is ridiculous. Trump is a horrendous disaster. But Hillary is equally as bad.
I’m Paul Mero. Thanks for listening.
