Nancy L. Cohen’s book is available on Amazon here.

Nancy L. Cohen has written a post at AlterNet as well as a book, Delirium. In her post, she discusses a few good reasons why Willard M. Romney has avoided the topic of his Mormonism. I touched on that in a previous post, Brigham Young’s great-great-granddaughter on Mormonism, Mitt Romney, and “Lying for the Lord.”

And here in another post, Mormon Bishop Mitt Romney threatened to excommunicate young single mom if she didn’t give up baby. As Nancy says in her own post, “Somehow this tale didn’t make it into the Mormon Moment at the Republican National Convention.”

She takes it from there:

Romney is “a loving father, man of faith, and a caring and compassionate friend,” we learned in Tampa, in genuinely moving stories from Mormons Romney pastored. But there’s another side of Romney’s story that begs to be told. In the wake of Todd Akin’s rape comments and the GOP’s adoption of an extremist platform, voters deserve to hear about how Romney has imposed Mormonism’s retrograde doctrines about women, gays and sex on the people he has authority over. [...]

Chosen as a kind of enforcer-in-chief, Romney betrayed a zeal far beyond the call of duty. Bishop Romney tried to stop a mother of four whose health was seriously endangered by her pregnancy from having an abortion. The church allows abortion in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother, provided a male LDS authority gives permission to the pregnant woman. Romney’s superior had already told the woman to proceed for the sake of her health; Romney intervened. Romney refused to allow an infertile couple to take advantage of the LDS adoption service until the wife agreed to quit her job and be a stay-at-home mother. Other reliable reports of Mitt’s years as a Mormon clergyman have him excommunicating adulterers, calling homosexuals under his authority “perverse,” warning a middle-aged divorced woman that she was not allowed to have sex, and telling a leading Mormon feminist, “You’re not my kind of Mormon.”

Perhaps this is why Romney has been as cagey about his Mormonism as he is about his Cayman Islands tax shelters…. The issue is whether a President Romney would be able to separate his actions as president from Mormon doctrines about how to live on this planet.

Please go here for details. This is a must-read.