Mormon? Or, More man?

I'll just say it: If you're a Mormon and you're voting for Romney just because he's a Mormon, you're dumb. If you're not voting for Romney just because he's a Mormon, you're dumb. A person's religion should rarely, if ever, be the basis for voting them into a political office (unless they say something crazy like "the future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam," but that would be just INSANE!).

I have a lot of Mormon friends who are not voting for Romney, and I don't mean that in the "I'm-not-racist-many-of-my-friends-are-black" sort of way. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 5 years--I was a freakazoid outcast at church, politically speaking. But I have a lot of friends from there whom I respect and love, and they are no Romney supporter by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm okay with that.

So here's my beef:

Any LDS person will tell you that the mainstream media's attempt to really understand and positively expose Mormonism generally miss the mark. Inaccuracies overfloweth the cup of misunderstanding, but I think that, as a collective community, we've come to accept that that will happen, and we try our best to personally represent what the church really is about. It's getting more personal now, as the media is using the Mormon card as a basis for an argument that Romney should not be president because of the "wacky" beliefs that he holds. Whatever, I expected that. But I'm seeing a very disturbing trend among many of my Obama supporting Mormon friends--the relaying of articles, blogs, and videos through the channels of Facebook that are not accurately representative of the fundamental Church doctrines, but are expressly intended to make Romney look bad through the lenses of his beliefs, which we share.

I don't care which candidate you support, but I wish we could unite to keep our religious values strong. Remember, you're voting for a secular leader, not a Bishop. Instead of passing along some garbage that demeans our community in the hopes that it will convince others to sway to your political leaning, let's work together to keep the below-the-belt religion fight a non-factor. May I remind you that "We believe . . . that Christ will reign personally upon the earth." At which point, our worldly political parties will no longer exist and we will have One leader (yes, anti-religionists, similar to a Dictatorship, only sans corruption).