BUMP.
From Jake Tapper:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints confirmed Tuesday afternoon that someone improperly, posthumously baptized the late mother of President Obama into the Mormon faith.The Mormons, however, did have a comment:
Last June 4 -- the day after then-Sen. Obama secured enough delegates to win the Democratic presidential nominee -- someone had the president's mother Stanley Ann Dunham, who died in 1995 of cancer, baptized.
On June 11, she received the sacrament.
The White House had no comment.
The baptism and sacrament, which appear on FamilySearch.org, the LDS Church's genealogical site, were first reported by John Aravosis at the liberal Americablog.
Mormon Church spokeswoman Kim Farah said that "the offering of baptism to our deceased ancestors is a sacred practice to us and it is counter to Church policy for a Church member to submit names for baptism for persons to whom they are not related. The Church is looking into the circumstances of how this happened and does not yet have all the facts. However, this is a serious matter and we are treating it as such."Yeah, I'm sure no one at Mormon headquarters noticed that the woman's husband was named Barack Hussein Obama. She just "happened" to be baptized 13 years after her death, five months before the presidential election. All a big unfortunate coincidence.
Yeah. Um, what to say? That they even have a practice that allows posthumous baptism is disturbing enough. Counter to church policy? Really? Was it counter to church policy when the Mormons kept baptizing Holocaust victims even though they were repeatedly -- for years -- asked to stop. Sounds like lying for the Lord.
To be fair, last year, the Mormons were way too busy trying to pass the anti-gay Prop. 8 in California to worry about anything as mundane as baptizing the dead mother of the Democratic nominee for president (or anyone else's dead relatives.)
And, any comment from the Catholic Church leaders, who cozy up to the Mormons to get money for anti-gay efforts, on how they feel about dead Catholics being baptized?
This is really sick and very twisted.
