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In an address at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library on December 6, 2007, Republican presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney insisted that he, like John F. Kennedy before him, does not "define my candidacy by my religion." Commentators labeled the speech, entitled "Faith in America," Romney's "Kennedy moment."

But when Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, appeared before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association during the 1960 presidential campaign, the thrust of his speech was an assurance that his faith would not intrude on matters of policy. Although Romney, a Mormon, asserted that "no authorities of my churchƒ will ever exert influence on presidential decisions," he segued into a paean to "our religious heritage," revealing an intent contrary to Kennedy's.

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omney assured his listeners that because belief in God has always been central to the American way of life, religion would occupy a place of honor during his presidency. Kennedy was addressing an audience concerned with preserving the U.S. Constitution's wall of separation between church and state. Romney's speech was pitched to evangelicals worried about, in his words, "a new religion in America -- the religion of secularism" and "the elimination of religion from the public square." Kennedy promised to keep religion out of the White House; Romney promised to welcome it in.

When Romney told his Texas audience, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind," he was seeking to reassure Protestant skeptics that the Mormon church, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (LDS), is simply another form of Christianity. He mentioned "my Mormon faith" only once, and said almost nothing about Mormon doctrine -- not a word about pre-existence, posthumous baptism, sacred garments, blood atonement, Nephites, Lamanites, the coming apocalypse, the Millennial reign of Christ in Missouri, the transformation of men into gods, or any of the other practices and beliefs unique to the LDS Church. Because evangelical Christians -- whose votes are now indispensable to any serious Republican candidate -- regard the LDS Church as heretical and possibly Satanic, Romney chose his words with care.

"Romney was just being a politician," says Olin Thomas, executive director of Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons. "He was trying to reassure people without reminding them that yeah, he's really a Mormon."

Thomas's organization, founded in 1977 in response to Mormon efforts to stamp out homosexuality (see box), offers support for GLBT present and former LDS members grappling with the innate homophobia of a religion that gives special primacy to heterosexual marriage and reproduction.

LDS Church doctrine condemns gay and lesbian sex, masturbation, and other forms of non-reproductive sexual activity. Mormons believe the human body serves two purposes: facilitation of the spirit's necessary passage through earthly existence, and procreation. The latter is the exclusive province of a man and woman sealed in marriage "for time and eternity." Mormon marriage continues in the afterlife. At the Second Coming of Christ, Mormon couples will be resurrected together.

The family is the basic building block of Mormon society, and the bedrock of the 12-million-member Church's pyramidal structure -- congregations called wards, aggregates of wards called stakes, and upward to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the First Presidency. The LDS Church urges weekly Family Home Evenings that combine togetherness with indoctrination. Abortion is forbidden; a teeming household is the ideal. The belief that each birth liberates a soul from the spirit world has helped nudge Mormon-dominated Utah toward the highest birth rate in the nation. The Family: A Proclamation to the World, issued by the First Presidency in 1995, calls the traditional family "central to the Creator's plan for the eternal destiny of His children."

Mitt Romney's wife, five strapping sons, and eight grandchildren seem to indicate a firm commitment to that plan. Romney nevertheless reached out to gay activists when, in the course of his failed bid for the U.S. Senate in 1994, he sold himself to the Log Cabin Club as a more vigorous defender of gay rights than Ted Kennedy, his opponent. But when, in 2004, during his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts, Romney found himself presiding over the first state to legalize gay marriage -- an embarrassing position for a Mormon bishop and honors graduate of Brigham Young University (BYU) -- his condemnation of same-sex unions came swiftly. His subsequent efforts to have same-sex marriage banned by constitutional amendment are more consistent with LDS teachings than his previous then-politically-convenient state- ments about discrimination -- statements from which he now seeks to distance himself.

"Much of the discrimination that occurs here in Utah is silent," notes gay ex-Mormon Duane Jennings, who cochairs a chapter of Affirmation in the Mormon bastion Salt Lake City. "It takes the form of ignoring gay people, pushing them into the margins, passing them over for promotions, that sort of thing."

Mormons seldom have much to say about homosexuality for non-Mormon consumption; their history of anti-gay witch hunts and electroshock therapy is not readily acknowledged. Pressed on the subject of gay rights by talk show host Larry King in a 2004 interview, Church President Gordon B. Hinckley would only say, "The fact is, they have a problem."

Christ's American itinerary

Joseph Smith, the founding prophet, had nothing to say about homosexuality at all. Smith created the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints in Palmyra, New York, in the 1820s, a time of rampant religious conversion and sectarian ferment. Smith claimed that in 1823, the angel Moroni appeared to him and led him to the burial site of golden plates inscribed with the Book of Mormon. The plates had been hidden by the Nephites, one of two warring strains of a lost tribe of Israel that arrived in the New World in 589 B.C.E. Moroni, a former mortal, was the son of Mormon, the 4th century C.E. prophet who recorded the sacred text. With the aid of Urim and Thummim, seeing stones embedded in an ancient breastplate, Smith was able to translate the ancient Hebrew script into English. The process took seven years, at which point, according to Smith, the plates were returned to Moroni.

The Book of Mormon was first published in 1830. Mark Twain famously called it "chloroform in print"; the volume has more recently been dubbed "the Monty Python version of the Bible." It is not, however, a replacement for the Bible, but a supplement to the Old and New Testaments.

The book tells the story of the followers of Lehi, Israelites who set sail from the shores of the Red Sea and made their way to North America, where a schism occurred. Lehi's sons Nephi and Laman became rival patriarchs. The dark-skinned Lamanites, purported ancestors of present-day Native Americans, eventually overwhelmed and massacred the fair-skinned Nephites in a fierce battle that took place in 385 C.E. in what is now the western part of New York state. Despite the lack of even the flimsiest archaeological evidence, the historical truth of the Book of Mormon has widespread acceptance among members of the LDS Church.

Moving from New York to Ohio, Missouri, and finally Illinois, Smith managed to convince thousands of followers that the Book of Mormon and other writings were products of divine revelation. Along the way, the homespun prophet instituted practices that enraged many Gentiles (his standard term for non-Mormons) and inspired others to convert.

According to the official LDS Doctrine and Covenants, Section 132 (published in 1843), Smith instituted polygamy in 1842, following a vision in which Christ sanctioned "plural marriage" in imitation of the polygamous arrangements of Old Testament patriarchs. By the time of his assassination in 1844, Smith had taken an undetermined number of wives. His successor, Utah pioneer Brigham Young, had at least 26 wives and perhaps as many as 51. Most Mormon practitioners of plural marriage took its Old Testament resonance seriously, but to anti-Mormon Gentiles, it amounted to institutionalized lechery. Such unions did, at any rate, accelerate the creation of fresh supplies of Mormons.

Polygamy interfered with Utah's prospects for statehood, and was finally disavowed in 1890. The Church's ban on multiple wives was reinforced in 1904, and again in 1910, though many Mormons who had already entered into plural marriage continued their cohabitation. Among mainstream Mormons, such marriages now constitute grounds for excommunication, but splinter groups often identified as "Mormon fundamentalists" (see The Guide, February 2007) continue to justify polygamous households with Biblical rationales.

Much of the appeal of Mormonism from its inception was the way it slipped Old World Judeo-Christian lore into New World contexts. The Book of Mormon and other prophetic writings of Joseph Smith and his successors -- especially the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price (1851)„not only brought lsraelites to the New World and restored Old Testament forms of marriage, they placed the Garden of Eden in Missouri, gave the resurrected Christ an American itinerary, and offered the promise of a North American Second Coming. They nurtured the nativist belief that the United States occupied sacred ground and had a divinely ordered destiny. According to Brigham Young, Smith predicted that a "time will come when the destiny of the nation will hang upon a single thread. At that critical juncture, the [LDS] people will step forth and save it from the threatened destruction." This so-called "White Horse prophecy" is controversial among Mormon scholars, but does seem authentically indicative of Joseph Smith's vision.

The missionary position

Mormons believe we are in the Latter Days of a world on the brink of apocalyptic events heralding the Second Coming of Christ. (See "The End is Near.") Although Mormons do not share the Endtime vision of fundamentalist Christians awaiting the Rapture, they believe in a version of Armageddon, the final battle that will engulf the world. Despite a slight softening of anti-gay rhetoric in the 2007 pamphlet God Loveth His Children, the LDS Church's latest publication on gay issues, many Mormons still consider gay visibility symptomatic of the wickedness expected to pervade the world before Christ returns.

The 53,000 Mormon missionaries who now serve in 162 countries are the foot soldiers of the Church, confronting wickedness in strange lands -- and once, memorably, at the Guide office in Boston, where a pair of proper young men dropped in to proselytize and were asked about masturbation, prompting red-faced denials that such a sin would ever be indulged.

The required two-year missionary stint is a serious formative experience that sometimes results in unintended discoveries. In 2004, student photographer Don Farmer caused an uproar when a pride art exhibit at Salt Lake Community College included three photos from a series depicting a pair of Mormon missionaries kissing, snuggling, and undressing each other. The pictures, which struck a nerve, were finally stolen.

"When they're at their sexual peak," a Salt Lake City lesbian once told this writer, "young Mormon men are sent out in pairs to do missionary work in strange places where they're one another's chief emotional support. The result is, whenever there's an LDS General Conference in Salt Lake, the gay bars are filled."

A Church elder at 18, Mitt Romney fulfilled his missionary duties in France before attending BYU. The enormously wealthy management consultant, son of the late Michigan governor and sometime General Motors chief executive George Romney, is now applying his missionary skills to well-funded forays into presidential primaries.

Romney isn't the first LDS presidential candidate. The first Mormon to launch a presidential campaign was Joseph Smith himself, in 1843. Mitt's father attempted a run in 1968, and lost the Republican nomination to Richard Nixon, who appointed him Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for the duration of his first term. Senator Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah) made a short-lived presidential bid in 2000, losing the nomination to George W. Bush. Despite his defeat in the January 3 Iowa caucuses by evangelical favorite Mike Huckabee (a fundamentalist who is apparently not required to give a church-and-state speech of his own) Mitt Romney remains the first Mormon to have a serious shot at the White House -- a point underscored by his win in the Michigan primary on January 15.

"Romney is supported heavily by the LDS Church," notes David Melson, a gay practicing Mormon. "If he's elected, the Church's political stances will certainly enter into policy. But if we want a Mormon in the White House, I think we could do better. Romney flip-flopped all over the place on gay issues when he was governor of Massachusetts."

"Romney couldn't establish a theocracy if he wanted to," adds Affirmation's Olin Thomas. "But I think Mormons are likelier than Catholics to view the pronouncements of Church authorities with reverence, and to obey them. It's a serious concern."