Mitt Romney talked about spirituality on "Meet the Press" Sunday, and rarely has the topic been so addressed by a candidate for the presidency.
"The great experiment of democracy, the experiment of America's freedom, has, as its basis, a sense of morality and a recognition that religious foundations are part of that morality," the former Massachusetts governor told Tim Russert.
The Republican presidential candidate's comments elicit a few observations and some very real questions.
If, as Romney suggests, America's freedom is based on morality, how could moral people have treated the Native American inhabitants that they found here with so little morality and with so much disdain and ill will. How could morality justify the slaughter that has been endured by tribe after tribe? How could a government of freedom, based on morality, take lands that were rightfully not theirs and cast aside the rightful owners giving them only empty promises?
In the interview, Romney defined America as the possessor of a unique moral code that gives Americans a higher level of right and wrong than the rest of the world. The question that Romney needs to answer is how is America different in taking Native lands than Castro was in taking the businesses and livelihoods of all of his Cuban countrymen or of Russia in socializing its people's assets?
Certainly the Creator did give all people rights, as Romney attested. It's just that the immigrants to this country took it upon themselves to take away what the Creator had given the Native inhabitants here.
Romney purported that "as children of God" we all have a duty to take care of one another. How then does he answer the continued injustice that is heaped upon Native Americans of this country? Where is the health care that we were promised more than a hundred years ago? Where is the education that we were to receive in compensation for the lands that were taken? Why are our people generally at the bottom of the economic pyramid? Where is our freedom, the freedom of job opportunity, which other Americans have? Freedom from discrimination does not exist for Native Americans in this land of freedom.
The founding of this nation and this government is not anchored in morality. It is anchored in the Papal Bulls that were political documents giving authority to Spain, France and England to take possession of all things on this continent, humans included, as items of possession for those countries.
Certainly there is no discrimination in the eyes of the Creator, as Romney maintained. That was left to the humans who came to this continent.