Congratulations! You Are Now A Mormon!

As if the GOP edifice doesn't have enough cracks in it right now! This business of proxy baptisms wasn't enough to stop me from submitting the first volume of my family genealogy to the LDS Family History Library in Salt Lake City in 1993 (since it's probably the best family history library in the world), but it was enough to make me stop sending the revised version in 2001. It's all hocus-pocus baloney, of course, but as time goes by the smoke and mirrors and incantations, or whatever they do, make me more and more uncomfortable:

Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who has devoted his life to combating intolerance, says Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney "should speak to his own church and say they should stop" performing posthumous proxy baptisms on Jews.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner spoke to The Huffington Post Tuesday soon after HuffPost reported that according to a formerly-Mormon researcher, Helen Radkey, some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had submitted Wiesel's name to a restricted genealogy website as "ready" for posthumous proxy baptism. Radkey found that the name of Wiesel had been submitted to the database for the deceased, from which a separate process for proxy baptism could be initiated. Radkey also said that the names of Wiesel's deceased father and maternal grandfather had been submitted to the site.

..."I think it's scandalous. Not only objectionable, it's scandalous," Wiesel said of the baptisms.

Negotiations between Mormon and Jewish leaders led to an agreement in 1995 for the church to stop the posthumous baptism of all Jews, except in the case of direct ancestors of Mormons, but Radkey says she found that some Mormons had failed to adhere to the agreement. Wiesel was among a group of Jewish leaders who campaigned against the practice and prompted a 2010 pact by which the Mormon Church promised to at least prevent proxy baptism requests for Holocaust victims. Wiesel said that proxy baptisms have been performed on behalf of 650,000 Holocaust dead.

...Wiesel said that the situation has gotten so out of hand that the most prominent Mormon in the country should speak out about it.