“I am very proud of my faith, and it is the faith of my fathers. I certainly believe that it is a faith – well, it’s true: I love my faith, and I am not going to distance myself in any way from my faith, but you can see what I believe and what my family believed by looking at our lives. My Dad marched with Martin Luther King. My Mom was a tireless crusader for civil rights. You may recall that my Dad walked out of the Republican Convention in 1964 in San Francisco in part because Barry Goldwater, in his speech, gave my Dad the impression that he was someone who was going to be weak on civil rights. So my Dad’s reputation, my Mom’s, and my own, has always been one of reaching out to people and not discriminating based upon race or anything else. And so, those are my fundamental core beliefs, and, so, I was anxious to see a change in my church. I can remember when I heard about the change being made. I was driving home from, I think it was law school, and I was driving home, going through the Fresh Pond Rotary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I heard it on the radio; I pulled over, and literally wept. Even to this day, it’s emotional. And so it’s very deep and fundamental in my life in my most core beliefs that all people are children of God. My faith has always told me that. My faith has also always told me that, in the eyes of God, every individual was merited the fullest degree of happiness in the hereafter. And I had no question in my mind that African-Americans and blacks generally would have every right and every benefit in the hereafter that anyone else had, that God is no respecter of person.”

 

–Mitt Romney (who graduated from Law School three years before he could have heard about his Church granting men of African descent the priesthood) on Meet the Press

I looked through the peephole to find the Latter Day Saints had returned for a third time. It was time to put on pants! I offered two visitors a seat on my couch before making a point of cracking a Red Bull and drinking it in front of them. As I felt the Italian Man’s FireWater coursing through me, our conversations began again.

 

The two Elders sat, prayed to their Space Werewolf, and we commenced explorations of the rather exotic Mormon anthropological views together. On a previous visit, Elder Craig – who would return – regurgitated his alternate history of North America. His was a history with which I was made familiar only on an episode of South Park. I could not fathom that someone could actually believe these crazy things, and hearing them in person was truly, truly stunning.

 

According to my visitors, sometime after finishing his Palestinian gig, Jesus, the brutally murdered carpenter, relocated to the Americas. Already inhabiting that land were Jews who had moved from Israel by boats. Despite their point of origin relative to the equator, these Jews were Caucasoid. (Ashkenazim?) The Elders were unable to elaborate on this point. When I ask Elder Craig for outside evidence, he stated that all I could do is read the Book of Mormon and pray to ask “God” if it is true. To these bold men, there is no apparent contradiction in praying to “God” to find out if He is Himself real.

It is important to note that the general excuses people cut for racists, including their age or being from a different time, do not really work here. These men were in their early twenties at the oldest and held Latter Day Saints badges. They represent very real modern Church teaching. And their story is a strange one.

 

Following Jesus’ American visitation, those who rejected his message were cursed by the “Heavenly Father” and given darker skin, while those who accepted Christ maintained lighter skin. After a time, the darker skinned Americans killed all of the lighter-skinned ones, whose last living children had maintained the history of the lighter-skinned Americans revealed in upstate New York to Joseph Smith. In short, Mormons believe that eumelanin prevalence suggests ultimate cosmic disfavor.

This belief, I would learn through extensive inquiry of my couch visitors, also extends to sub-Saharan Africans, whose skin color the Mormons said was first visited upon Cain, the Bible’s premier murderer, before being offered to the Canaanites.

 

Essentially, the Mormons reason that since the infamous ark-riding Noah was spotted drunk and naked by his son Ham, the descendants of Ham’s son, Canaan, would be Negroid and “the lowest of slaves to his brothers.”

Spellbinding logic, isn’t it? I tried to hide my disgust with their fairy tales long enough to bait the Elders into mocking modern sufferers of African famine, to see if they would extend their fore-bearers’ cruel and cynical vision of intergalactic caste into modern indifference toward starving infants. When asked if God was cursing modern sufferers, my two visitors looked away and withheld judgment. Then I began silently cursing myself for exhibiting physical disgust with their psychopathic eumelanin complexes. Falling short under duress such as that makes one admire even more the stoic pleasantry that Alfred Kinsey showed to his perverse interviewees.

 

Throughout November and December, LDS Elders continued to show up to my door attempting to explain to me how God has a material body on another planet in another coexisting galaxy, how he is Caucasoid, and how, apparently, he loves me very, very much.

 

As a whole, these views have to be teased out of them over a long period of time. I, for one, cannot wait until these men begin their door-to-door invitational of southern housing projects, wherein they will begin spreading the good news of how pale Europeans forefathers, much like Mitt Romney’s own, happened to receive thousands of years of social dominance due to a Caucasian reality dictator’s disfavor with a single Peeping Tom. It might go something like this:

Elder Gould: Greetings, my brother in Christ! We brought you watermelon! May we sit down?

 

Some Guy: Take a seat. Uhm, no to the watermelon, but thanks. I just finished a night janitorial shift and I just ate breakfast.

 

Elder Gould: OK, that’s nice.

 

Some Guy: Hey, do you remember how last time you said that a bunch of Hebrews came to North America from Israel on boats?

 

Elder Gould: Yes!

 

Some Guy: Er, right. Do you suppose it’s possible that the people in America were related to persons who crossed the Bering Strait, say a few thousand years ago?

 

Elder Gould: No, that’s impossible, despite how the populations of pre-Columbian peoples possess to this day Mongoloid epicanthic folds. We do not care.

 

Some Guy: I was reading in your book how there were horses in North America. That’s weird; the other day on PBS, I heard a documentarian say that less than 10,000 years ago, the horses here were wiped out and that modern horses were brought here by the Spanish. What’s up with that?

 

Elder Gould: Look, that’s not what is important today. We are here to talk about some questions about slavery that you had.

 

Some Guy: Thanks. I had a lot of questions about that since my ethnic relatives were slaves in this country not emancipated until the mid-19th century and have been facing documented voter disenfranchisement as recently as 2000. It is good to see you performing outreach to my community. Truly, it will only be the Mormons who will allow African-Americans to reconnect with our pasts. So, does this book say anything about where did my ancestors come from?

 

Elder Gould: Well, it’s funny you should ask . . .