The Softer and Gentler Mitt Romney? Testimony from the Mormon Community

And, again, not unrelated to the excerpts I have just posted from Joanna Brooks's The Book of Mormon Girl and Margaret Farley's Just Love: Geoffrey Dunn's article at Huffington Post yesterday reporting on what various Mormon women for whom Mitt Romney has been a pastoral leader have to say about him and his pastoral leadership is must-read testimony.  Dunn discusses the case of Carrel Hilton Sheldon, a Mormon woman in Massachusetts whose doctor informed her in 1983 that her life was at stake if she continued her pregnancy.  She was 8 weeks pregnant at the time.

Margaret Farley's Just Love: Radical Effect of Women's New Self-Understandings on Sexual Ethics

And, as a counterpoint to the excerpt I have just posted from Joanna Brooks's The Book of Mormon Girl, the following passage from Margaret Farley's Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (NY: Continuum, 2006) leapt out at me as I read it yesterday:

Joanna Brooks Documents LDS Church's Savage Repression of Feminists, Scholars, and Gays in 1990s: Mormon-Catholic Parallels

In her book entitled The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of an American Faith (NY: Free Press, 2012), Joanna Brooks documents what happened in the 1980s and 1990s when she and other Mormon scholars (and Mormon feminists, and Mormons organizing to make the LDS church a welcoming place for LGBT persons) began to retrieve the strong feminist strands of Mormon history and thought that the church's all-male leaders had obliterated throughout the 20th century:

Margaret Farley's Just Love: New Knowledge about Human Biology and Sexual Ethics, News Flash for Todd Akin

Margaret Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (NY: Continuum, 2006):

U.S. Catholic Theologians Defend Catholic Social Teaching v. Paul Ryan

Meanwhile, as the bishops fulminate and brandish their big sticks (and as their leader His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan seeks yet again to pull a veil over Paul Ryan's Randian philosophy and its blunt contradiction of Catholic social teaching), some members of the people of God continue to struggle to keep the fullness of Catholic social teaching in the forefront of public and Catholic awareness during the current election cycle.  A group of some 120 American Catholic theologians has just issued a statement entitled "On All of Our Shoulders: A Catholic Call to Protect the Endangered Common Good."

Catholic Bishops and Politics: Recent Discussion

National Catholic Reporter's latest editorial succinctly argues that the bishops' ability to fulminate persuasively on matters political has been more than a little undermined by their behavior during the abuse crisis:

Chris Kluwe Tackles More Bigots: Benedict's and Nienstedt's Millstone

Chris Kluwe gets right down to brass tacks with Archbishop Nienstedt and Pope Benedict: