Mormons believe that only those who accept baptism into Christ's one true church (i.e. the Mormon Church) can enter heaven (or, as they call it, the Celestial Kingdom). Kind of a bum deal for all those who died before Joseph Smith restored Christ's one true church. So, to give those who died their chance to not only live with God but to become a God themselves, Mormons generously try to gather names of dead people and baptism them in their behalf. Mormons believe that the dead people, who by this time are living in the Spirit World, can then make the choice to accept or reject this baptism.

Because they see necro-baptizing as simply providing someone with a choice, akin to offering a gift that the recipient is free to reject, Mormons by and large fail to see how people could take offense to the necro-baptizing of their deceased relatives.

In the mid 1990s, there was outrage on the part of Jewish descendants of deceased Holocaust victims who had been necro-baptized by the Mormon Church without their family's approval. After much negative PR and pressure, the Mormon Church entered into an agreement, the gist of which involved being more sensitive about this issue. As part of the increased sensitivity, official Church policy now states that Church members should submit the names of their own relatives, and that permission of the closest living relative must be obtained for any baptism that is to be performed for deceased individuals born within the last 95 years.

This begs the question: As the closest living relative, did President Obama give his permission for the baptism of his mother into the Mormon Church?

Here's what he's said in the past about his mother's relationship with spirituality and religion. From Dreams of My Father: "My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess... In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship... she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism." From The Audacity of Hope: "I was not raised in a religious household... My mother's own experiences... only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones... And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known." And finally, from a speech in 2007: "My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution."

Somehow, I doubt President Obama gave his permission. And somehow I doubt that his mother's now a Mormon. But somehow I don't doubt that the Mormons will keep on trying to convert everyone in the world, be they alive or be they dead.