"It answered a lot of questions for me. I was a pretty able person. I wasn’t looking for something like that."

"But I wanted to get rid of the barriers keeping me from what I wanted, to be an actress. It’s just part of my life."

Said Kirstie Alley, in 1992, when asked why she became a Scientologist, quoted in "Kirstie Alley, Emmy-Winning ‘Cheers’ Actress, Dies at 71 She also starred in the NBC sitcom 'Veronica’s Closet,' which aired from 1997 to 2000" (NYT).

She was born on January 12, 1951 — also the date of my birth. And Rush Limbaugh's.

ADDED: From Rolling Stone, "How Kirstie Alley Lost Herself in Scientology The late Cheers actress rose up the ranks to become a top Scientologist who lashed out at the controversial religion’s critics":

"Instagram will test hiding the number of likes and views that photos and videos receive — a central aspect of its platform — to rein in competitive tendencies and make the experience a little 'less pressurized.'"

"Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, said the change is designed to minimize the stress of posting online, where users can fixate on how many likes their videos draw. 'We want people to worry a little bit less about how many likes they’re getting on Instagram and spend a bit more time connecting with the people that they care about,' he said Tuesday during Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8.... Hiding the counts could potentially introduce new problems for users, such as diminishing the feeling of camaraderie from liking a popular post tied to a social cause or a massive in-joke.... Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said last week that if he could build his social network anew, he would rethink its emphasis on likes and retweets as markers of success. In a prototype of the Twitter app, dubbed twttr, the company is experimenting with removing like and retweet counts by default."

WaPo reports.

Meanwhile, "Facebook bans extremist leaders including Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous’/The bans are a sign that the social network is more aggressively enforcing its hate speech policies under pressure from civil rights groups" (WaPo). That article has this interesting correction: "Louis Farrakhan is an extremist leader who has espoused anti-Semitic views. An earlier version of this story and headline incorrectly included him in a list of far-right leaders."

That correction had me spending some time reading Farrakhan's Wikipedia page — because I realized I couldn't really place him squarely on the right or the left. I learned some interesting things about him: 1. He's very old (85), 2. He's "speculated that his father.... may have been Jewish," 3. He was good enough as a child at playing the violin to win an award on the Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour (in 1946), 4. He's wife's name, originally, was Betsy Ross, 5. In the 50s, he was a professional  calypso singer  known as "The Charmer" and, later, "Calypso Gene," 6. After he joined the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad required all members to "choose between music and the Nation of Islam," which he did, but only after doing one more music gig, at "a Jewish resort in the Catskills," 7. He originally supported Obama, but rejected him and called him "the first Jewish president" because of the  intervention in Libya ("We voted for our brother Barack, a beautiful human being with a sweet heart... Now he's an assassin"), 8. He embraces Dianetics and has said "All white people should flock to L. Ron Hubbard. You can still be a Christian; you just won't be a devil Christian. You can still be a Jew, but you won't be a satanic Jew," 9.  He said Hitler "wasn't great for me as a Black man but he was a great German and he rose Germany up from the ashes of her defeat by the united force of all of Europe and America after the First World War.... Now I'm not proud of Hitler's evil toward Jewish people, but that's a matter of record. He rose Germany up from nothing."

A video store full of nothing but VHS tapes of "Jerry Maguire."

It's an art exhibit by an art collective called Everything Is Terrible! The NYT reports:

The collective’s obsession with Jerry Maguire, which was released on VHS in 1997, the same year that DVD players began to arrive in American homes, is a product of the ubiquity of the VHS version of the film, as well as its status as a somewhat useless object.

The film “sort of called to us,” Mr. Maier said. “We kept seeing it over and over again.” (Wikipedia claims that itis [sic] the best-selling, non-Walt Disney VHS film ever. But according to a 1998 press release from Blockbuster, the film “Titanic” broke records in video home sales, surpassing several Disney filns [sic] as well as “Jerry Maguire.” )

Filns. It's some kind of commentary on where we are now, that on the day — yesterday — that was the 50th anniversary of the death of Walt Disney, there's no article about him in the NYT, just a mention of his name, lifted from Wikipedia, in an article about an art installation about a 20-year-old Tom Cruise movie, alongside the sad typo "filns."

Here's a little video conveying the off-handed art of Everything Is Terrible! Of course, it's terrible. They'd be lying if it were not terrible. Everything is terrible:


JERRY MAGUIRE VIDEO STORE! from Everything Is Terrible! on Vimeo.

The highlight of the video comes at 9 seconds, when the walking pile of "Jerry Maguire" videotapes passes by the Scientology building. The NYT article does not mention Scientology or allude to Tom Cruise's religious nonconformism, which may have been a reason for making him the butt of an art joke:

The Jerry Maguire Video Store at iam8bit Gallery will be a perfect re-creation of a video rental store circa 1996, but instead of carrying thousands of porn quadrilogies and action movie knockoffs, this store will carry only Jerry Maguire on VHS. Seeing thousands of Jerrys finally reunited will forever destroy the viewers’ previous perception of culture, waste, and existence as a whole. The Jerrys are a beautiful thing.

And this is only the beginning. At the Jerry Maguire Video Store, EIT! will be unveiling plans for the enormous, permanent pyramid in the desert where all the world’s Jerrys will live until the end of time....

See the satire of religion?

Disney's deathiversary did get the briefest notation in the NYT, which publishes the AP column "Today in History."

In 1966, movie producer Walt Disney died in Los Angeles at age 65.

Here's the obit the NYT published at the bottom of its front page 50 years ago:



Do you know that the mouse head weighs 8 ounces?

"They weren’t thinking about me, just about my mother. They just ripped me out and tossed me aside," said Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra was a gigantic baby, the year was 1915, the setting was the family's kitchen, and the midwife had to call for the doctor, who arrived, with forceps, to save the mother. 

The doctor cut the cord and laid the boy - huge and blue, bleeding from his wounds, and apparently dead - by the kitchen sink, then quickly shifted his efforts to ­saving the nearly unconscious mother’s life.

The women all leant in, shouting advice in ­Italian. At the back of the scrum, one of them looked at the seemingly lifeless baby, picked up it up and, just in case, ran ice cold water from the sink over it and slapped its back. It snuffled and began to howl....

In a nightclub with a lover named Peggy Connelly, he flinched when, in the dark, she caressed his left cheek and her fingertips touched his ear. Though she had barely noticed the deformity, he told her how sensitive he was about it....

Connelly recalled: ‘There was no ­outburst of emotion, just a ­lingering bitterness about what he felt had been a stupid neglect of his infant self to concentrate on his mother, otherwise his torn ear might have been tended to in time.’

As for the mother, Dolly Sinatra:

After Frank was born, there were no more babies, possibly because the birth rendered Dolly unable to have any, but more likely because she ­simply decided — and she was one of life’s deciders — she didn’t want to go through that again.

But she compensated for her trauma in the strangest of ways. She chose to become a midwife and an abortionist, for which ­illegal activity she got the ­nickname ­Hatpin Dolly and a ­criminal record.

The link goes to an excerpt from the book "Frank: The Making Of A Legend" by James Kaplan. I ran across that this morning because last night we were watching the new HBO documentary "Sinatra: All or Nothing at All," which isn't based on Kaplan's book, but goes through the same story of the birth and contains that brief, startling fact: Sinatra's mother was an abortionist.

We were watching the Sinatra documentary because we'd gotten tired of that other, much more noticed HBO documentary "Going Clear," which is based on the Lawrence Wright book "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief." I'm sure the book is much more worth your time. The movie is just too dumb for my taste. In the part I put up with, there were too many boring people on camera stating that they were indeed taken in. But why? Some of the clips of L. Ron Hubbard were interesting. He was brilliant/crazy/devious. He's a good character. The rest of the cast... well, one wonders what they would have done with their lives if they hadn't entered the "prison of belief" in Scientology.

I was surprised to see that both documentaries were made by the same guy, Alex Gibney. If he could have been allowed to stay with the interesting character in "Going Clear," I might have liked it as much as "Sinatra: All or Nothing at All." But left to delve into the mystery of ordinary people getting and staying inside of religious belief, he had little insight. At least not in the part I put up with.

Maybe I'll finish it at some point... or, more likely, switch to Wright's book or just Wright's New Yorker article, "The Apostate, Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology." I could get interested in Scientology's complicated legal problems, but I don't want to hear long accounts of dumb people getting trapped in "the Prison of Belief." Why are other people's beliefs a "prison"? If some beliefs are prisons, what beliefs are not prisons? Now, if the point is, the organization threatens and bullies anyone who tries to leave, then it's not belief that is the prison.

ADDED: Lawrence Wright goes on the podcast "Here's the Thing with Alec Baldwin" which I was in the middle of listening to when I tried to watch HBO's "Going Clear." This morning, having given up on "Going Clear," I went back to the podcast and was surprised to get to hear Alec Baldwin complain that what the movie was missing was just about exactly what I'd thought. Go to 23:32. Baldwin had seen the movie, and he said: "There wasn't any sense, to me, of: What are the people who are in Scientology, who remain in Scientology, who are dedicated to this, what do they perceive they're getting out of it?... What does it do for them? Why are they there?" Baldwin suggests "maybe it's in the book," and Wright is able to give some answers — but these are answers that make me want to ask whether the motivations are different from what brings people into other religions.

By the way, at the "Here's the Thing" site, the title of Wright's book is misstated as "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Unbelief." That's a good (if unwitting) response to my statement (above) it's not belief that is the prison.

"Things I Learned in My Twenty-Four Hour Althouse Comment Withdrawal."

From betamax3000 (at 12 midnight):

• the Shakes -- they Get Real Bad;

• Twenty-Four Hours is A Long Period of Time When You Deny Yourself;

• the Baby Spiders are Real;

• I Love the Commenters: Read All the Posts, All Day, Tongue Bound, and Realized in Retrospect that -- Perhaps -- I Occasionally Suck Too Much Oxygen From the Room;

• Still Don't Quite Get Central Time;

• the Scientology "No Fear' Paradigm Crosses Neuropaths with Cruel Neutrality: when I get it Down to Four Paragraphs I Will Thrust it Sideways Into a Thread about Gabe Kaplan;

• it -- Technically -- is Not a Burning Sensation.

I do not discount the role of  El Pollo Raylan's summoning: "Beta come back!" — which took us to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.

Lem sighed relief:

I think I can say tonight that we are in Betamax debt. From now on it will be possible to risk loosing wifi knowing that it is a survivable non-event thanks to the courage and determination of one man. and his name is Betamax.

And:

Still Don't Quite Get Central Time;

Its like Althouse politics, I think.

That's exactly right. And then betamax3000 said:

At the Metaphorical Althouse Denny's I want More hash Browns and Non-Dairy Creamer: I am building a Mountain.

And I say: This means something. This is important.



Loose the WiFi!

"To the rebels, the artists, the free thinkers and the innovators. Who care less about labels and more about truth."

"Dare to think for yourself. To look for yourself. To make up your own mind.  Because in the eternal debate for answers, the one thing that's true is what's true for you."

"Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief."

A new book, given an excellent review in WaPo, here:

“Going Clear” starts with exactly the right questions: “What is it that makes the religion alluring? What do its adherents get out of it? How can seemingly rational people subscribe to beliefs that others find incomprehensible?” And in his early chapters, [Lawrence] Wright implicitly draws parallels between this religion and those with which readers may be more familiar.

Scientology is, in its components, a stew of traditional religious concepts. There’s immortality, transcendence, salvation and ethics. There are rituals as well as ritual punishments. There’s a founder, or a prophet, mediating capital-T truth for the people and transcribing it in books and pamphlets that serve as scripture. All this is wrapped up in a package that, while not recognizably Christian, or Buddhist, or Freudian, or Jungian, or occult, has elements of all.

Wright knows that crazy-seeming religious beliefs and practices are not, in themselves, sinister or evil....

Screw-up at The Atlantic leads to inane corporate memo.

Perhaps you noticed the screw-up: The Atlantic ran an article promoting Scientology — "David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone Year" — with a little "sponsored content" notation. Jumped on, they took it down and apologized. Now we get this inane corporate memo from the company's president M. Scott Havens:

We ran a “native advertising” campaign for a new advertiser that, while properly labeled as Sponsor Content, was in my opinion inconsistent with the strategy and philosophy for which this program is intended. In this case, we did not adequately work with the advertiser to create a content program that was in line with our brand. 

They meant to be more devious. Nice philosophy!

In addition, because we had not fully thought through the issues around commenting on Sponsor Content, we made some mistakes trying to moderate the commenting thread. The general media climate also played a role here.

No further explanation of what that "general media climate" is supposed to be. But one thing is clear: Any blame should be general:

One important note for everyone: casting blame on any group or any individual is both unfair and simply not what we do at The Atlantic. And we most certainly should not speak to the press or use social media to attack our organization or our colleagues. We are a team that rises and falls together.

Something makes me think intra-Scientology memos look like that. Well, clearly, The Atlantic is deeply into the media game of profiting from propaganda. It's great that they slipped up so obviously. Be on guard, though, because they are bent on getting it right, which is to say, doing it so you don't notice.

Speaking of movies that are hurting the feelings of religionists...

The Weinstein Co. is taking precautions over the release of its movie "The Master" (in which Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a character based on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard).

100 years ago today: "Arthur Eldred, a 17-year-old Boy Scout from Long Island, became the first person to earn the Eagle Scout rank."

"Eldred's initial accomplishment was to complete the requirements for the rank of Eagle Scout only six months after that supreme award in American scouting was announced in April 1912." 

The leaders of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), assuming it would take several years for any boy to earn the required 21 merit badges, hadn't yet devised a final review system for Eagle candidates; they hadn't even settled on a design for the medal....

Out of the more than 115 million boys who have passed through the Boy Scouts of America in the last 102 years, approximately two million have become Eagle Scouts, a 2% rate that has climbed to about 4% of all scouts in recent years....

Many went on to notable careers and distinguished service to the country. The list of famous Eagles over the last century includes movie and television stars, six Medal of Honor recipients, Nobel Prize winners, novelists, a number of astronauts (including most Shuttle astronauts), Tuskegee airmen and Japanese-American internees, congressmen, senators and governors, an endless number of corporate CEOs and university presidents, a U.S. president (Gerald Ford), and the first man to walk on the moon (Neil Armstrong). But there are other, perhaps less obvious, Eagles as well: sexologist Alfred Kinsley, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and Washington's disgraced ex-mayor Marion Barry....

Today at the Orpheum.

The State Street landmark has gone dark.


One of 2 building permit signs in the window says: "Remove all components of Stage Door theater." The Stage Door theater is the claustrophobic place around in the back where I've seen quite a few movies over the years, not the original, ornate theater that rarely showed things I wanted to see (or that I wanted to see but couldn't see under better conditions). But somehow I can only remember one movie I ever saw at the Stage Door theater: "Sling Blade."



The old marquee gives shade to the dobro-and-harmonica player. "Marquee" is a funny word. It originally meant "A tent large enough to hold many people (now usually one used for social or commercial functions)." The OED has that going back to 1690. The meaning we know — which is "chiefly U.S." — is "A canopy projecting over the main entrance to a building; spec. such a canopy at a theatre, cinema, etc., on which details of the entertainment or performers are displayed." That only goes back to 1926. For some reason, one of the examples given in the OED, from 1993, is:

Daily Tel. 15 July 21/3 At the Hubbard Dianetics Foundation there's an electric marquee that goes through this routine: Low Self Esteem? Failed Marriage? Tired Of Losing? Relationship Difficulties? Come In Now!

The marquee at the Orpheum today is pushing nothing. Which is always a good show.

"Along with her new Catholic school, the 6-year-old daughter of Katie and ex-husband Tom Cruise will have a uniform..."

"... when she's in school, and 'normal kid' clothes when she's out and about."

This is the 6-year-old "fashionista" with $3.2 million worth of designer clothes and custom-made shoes.

Previously, the child was home-schooled within a Scientology milieu.

"Nothing of importance happened today."

Wrote King George III in his diary, July 4, 1776. Not. He didn't even keep a diary.

From a list of "10 Things You Didn't Know About the Fourth of July."

Happy 4th!

Also, a Meadhouse dialogue:

MEADE (singing): We carried you in our arms...

ME: Why are you singing "Tears of Rage"?

MEADE (talk singing): ... on Independence Day...

ME: Oh....

And here I was thinking he was reading about the Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise divorce, within which there's the topic of Suri getting carried everywhere. I'd just read: "Kids as young as five can be sent to the military like Sea Org. I’m guessing she can’t bring her child-heels or get carried everywhere, which is something Katie would not approve of."

Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun
Would treat a father so
To wait upon him hand and foot
And always tell him, “No?”

That's what Bob asked, mysteriously. Who is this daughter who always says "no," but waits upon him hand and foot? She sounds pretty devoted. The opposite of a daughter who says "yes," but does nothing. I'm assuming the official Bob Dylan website erroneously placed the question mark inside the quotation mark.

Perhaps the song really is about Independence Day, and the daughter is the United States, carried in the arms of England....

What we learn about Scientology from the Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise divorce.

Holmes seeks sole custody of the couple's 6-year-old child Suri, who has supposedly been raised under principles of Scientology:

Suri is apparently treated as an adult, free to make decisions on her clothes, make-up and diet.

Scientology expert Rick Ross explained to the Daily Mail's Alison Boshoff last year: 'Scientologists treat kids as if they are individuals capable of making their own decisions.'

Indeed, Tom echoed this approach in an interview in 2010.

'I say to Suri, "I really want you to eat this protein if you’re going to have that sugar,"' he said.

'She looks at me and she goes: "Dad, I don’t think you should try to force me to do something I don’t want to do."'...

Just last week, an evening of pizza and ice-cream with her mother ended in tears when Katie took her daughter's cone away.

If we assume, for the purposes of discussion, that Cruise follows a religion-based approach to child rearing, involving maximum autonomy, and Holmes now objects to that and wants to raise the child according to more conventional decision-making and discipline by the parent, how much of a factor should that play in determining custody? Should Cruise's ideas about child-rearing have more weight or less weight because they are premised on religion?

Scientology, the fraud.

In France.

Jett Travolta and the fear of giving your child necessary drugs.

This is terribly sad:

Jett was found on the bathroom floor of the family's posh condo at the Grand Bahama Resort on Friday. Authorities believe he died of a head injury after suffering a seizure and falling....

"Each seizure was like a death," McDermott told celebrity Web site TMZ.com. Jett lost consciousness and went into convulsions about four days a week when he was unmedicated, he said.

Jett took Depakote, an anti-seizure and mood-stabilizing medication, for several years until it apparently lost its effectiveness. The Travoltas had also become concerned about the drug's possible side effects, which include liver damage, McDermott said, and took him off Depakote some time ago.

It is very difficult to dose your child on a drug that has warnings of serious side-effects, but you have to be rational about weighing the likelihood of the side-effect and the benefit of the drug. It's too late to say that to the Travoltas, but maybe some other parents who are drug-phobic will come to their senses. But the drug had "apparently lost its effectiveness." I'm not sure what that means. Did they not want to increase the dosage to keep up with the child's increasing weight? Was there really no effective drug for his condition?

I feel sorry that the Travoltas must now put up with everyone — including, now, me — analyzing the extent of their responsibility for their son's demise. They are suffering unimaginable pain. And yet, I think it is still important to talk about the decisions parents make for children. Perhaps many children who need seizure medication will receive it as the result of Jett's death.

Then there is the issue of autism... and Scientology:

There has long been speculation that Jett suffered from autism, but the Travoltas have maintained his health problems were a result of Kawasaki disease, a rare inflammatory ailment affecting the blood vessels that most often occurs in early childhood.

Advocates for autistic kids, including other Hollywood stars, have accused Travolta, a Scientologist, of denying his son's condition because it would have required Jett to see a psychiatrist, which his religion forbids.

But Scientology doesn't forbid anti-seizure medication, does it? I must say I don't even know the details about what Scientologists think about treating autism. It's one thing to tell people with mundane emotional problems that they should turn to religion instead of psychiatry. That might be pretty good advice, common to many religions. But it's quite another thing to tell people to avoid medical treatment for specific conditions of the brain.

I don't like to see a rush to blame religion over Jett's death. Parents can be afraid of drugs or in denial about autism without religion playing any part. Did the Travoltas ever talk about religion in connection with their treatment of their son? I don't know. From what I've seen, it looks like an excessive fear of drug side effects. Those side effects aren't the result of religious ideation. They are real, but they were, it seems, given excessive weight.

Isaac Hayes has died.

RIP.

Who's the black private dick
That's a sex machine to all the chicks?
(Shaft!)
You're damn right

Bio.

We all loved him as Chef on "South Park." Here are tons of Chef clips.



Sad!

ADDED: Here's the old post about Hayes quitting "South Park" because it disrespected Scientology.

AND: The "Shaft" music in its original context, the opening sequence of the movie:



MORE: From the WaPo obit:

In the early 1970s, Hayes laid the groundwork for disco, for what became known as urban-contemporary music and for romantic crooners like Barry White. And he was rapping before there was rap....

"Hot Buttered Soul" was groundbreaking in several ways: He sang in a "cool" style unlike the usual histrionics of big-time soul singers. He prefaced the song with "raps," and the numbers ran longer than three minutes with lush arrangements.

"Jocks would play it at night," Hayes recalled in a 1999 Associated Press interview. "They could go to the bathroom, they could get a sandwich, or whatever."

I love that quote. Jocks would play it at night. They could go to the bathroom, they could get a sandwich, or whatever.

8 rules for writing a short story.

Found in this Wikipedia article about Kurt Vonnegut, whom I was thinking about because my commenter Bissage linked to a book of his here and because — also this morning — I was in a long IM conversation that ended up — though it started being about the New Hampshire primary — being about the number 57, Tom Cruise and Scientology, whether humans are the most rational or the most irrational animals, why we love our ideas so much, religion, and "Cat's Cradle."

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I like the way somebody put in Wikipedia links for "sadist," "pneumonia," and "cockroaches." It seems to mean something. Perhaps you could write a short story in which it does and which follows the 8 rules.

ADDED: Here's a nice NPR interview with Vonnegut in which he talks about these rules, some other things about writing and reading (it's meditation), and laughs about the time Nazis wanted very much to surrender to him.

"We welcome our nation's symphony of faith."

Mitt Romney gives his religion talk, emphasizing the value of diversity and the general good of religion and putting the discussion of particular religious doctrines off limits.

I think this was all fairly well put, though there is some unfortunate exclusion of people who have no religion:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

If he means that to be free we must as a nation accept freedom and diversity of religion, that is fine. But if he means that one must be religious in order to be free, he is quite wrong.

He strongly states that a candidate for office should not have to explain or defend the doctrines of his religion, and he equates such a requirement with violating the constitutional proscription of religious tests. But are we really forbidden to take into account that we think a candidate's religion is too bizarre or too evil for a competent, reliable person to align with? What if the candidate were a Satanist or a Scientologist? Would we just put that to the side lest we violate the ban on religious tests?

It's not as though there is a statute disqualifying a member of a particular sect — which would clearly violate the ban on religious tests. To consider the candidate's religion is to look at the whole person and to try to make a judgment about whether he'd make a good President. Isn't it similar to looking at a candidate's personal life and judging him? Romney wants us to think about his seemingly — presumably — admirable family, even though having a solid family life is not a requirement for the presidency. It says something about his judgment and emotional stability.

But the fact is, we don't think much about the beliefs of the traditional mainstream religions, and there is an issue here as to whether Mormonism will receive the same treatment and not be classified with religions like Satanism and Scientology that the great majority of voters would see as a huge and probably insuperable barrier. Romney expects us to recognize Mormonism as one of the mainstream religions that provide a foundation in life for intelligent, responsible individuals who are worthy of our trust. I think we should do that, but we should also see that he is declining to participate in the debate about why we should. In so declining, he showed good judgment. There is absolutely no reason why he should engage in the obvious problem that I am raising in this paragraph. He'd be an inept candidate if he did.

When Germans think they're being anti-Nazi by singling out one religion to discriminate against.

How bizarre. Tom Cruise is filming a movie called "Valkyrie" -- the story of the man who nearly assassinated Hitler -- in Germany. But some Germans are upset about it, because they don't like Cruise's religion, Scientology.

The German press has given blanket coverage to the film but some officials have baulked at the choice of Cruise to play the Nazi officer Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who was executed by firing squad after the failed bomb attack of July 20, 1944.

They cite the actor's ties to the Church of Scientology, which is viewed here as a commercial outfit that exploits vulnerable people, as making him unfit to play a German martyr.

"Stauffenberg stood for the most noble motives a person can have," Frank Henkel, the general secretary of the Berlin chapter of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, told rolling news channel NTV.

"I consider Tom Cruise as a self-proclaimed ambassador of Scientology inappropriate for the role."

The remarks came after sharp criticism from a number of politicians and even Stauffenberg's eldest son Berthold, 72, who has told the press that Cruise "should keep his hands off my father."

So, in your mind, the adherents of one religion are ignoble? What an absurd attitude to take exactly at the point when you're contemplating your Nazi history.