'My dad's dad was not a polygamist' Romney lashes back at Montana Democrat over personal attacks

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney responded to personal attacks that questioned his family's history with polygamy yesterday that stemmed from aggressive comments by Montana Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer.

Schweitzer, who was viewed as a possible vice-presidential running mate for Obama four years ago, said that Romney avoids talking about his family history because 'then he'd have to talk about his family coming from a polygamy commune in Mexico.'

'My dad's dad was not a polygamist,' Romney said, in a rare interview in which he discussed his Mormon faith. 'My dad grew up in a family with a mom and a dad, a few brothers and one sister.'

Under fire for his faith: Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at the RNC State Chairman's National Meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday Father: Mitt touted his father George Romney's (seen here being sworn in as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development) stance against segregation and support of civil rights

In an interview with Fox News , Romney was asked why he refrains from discussing his family's history on the Mexican polygamy commune that his great-grandfather, Miles Romney, started.



'My dad had a very tough upbringing,' he responded. 'They lived in Mexico and lived a very nice life, from what I understand. And when he was 5 or 6, there was revolution in Mexico and they escaped.'



Romney said he hadn't read Schweitzer's full comment, but rejected the notion that his family's religious history or the immigration policy in the previous century were relevant topics to his campaign.



'I do think that the immigration policy that existed in 1905 in 1910 might not be highly relevant for the election in 2012,' he said.

Schweitzer's comments were quickly disavowed by an Obama spokeswoman but have raised concerns among Republicans that the Obama campaign and its allies will use Romney’s Mormon faith as a means of attacking his character.

They come amid an internal debate in the Romney campaign about whether the candidate should talk more about his faith as a way of establishing a deeper personal connection with voters.

Schweitzer told the Daily Beast that it was a ‘tall order to position Hispanics to vote for’ Romney and this was ‘kind of ironic given that his family came from a polygamy commune in Mexico, but then he’d have to talk about his family coming from a polygamy commune in Mexico’.

Inflammatory remarks: Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer said Romney's father was 'born into a polygamy commune in Mexico'

Upbringing: George Romney with his mother Anna Amelia as an infant in 1908

Women, he added, were ‘not great fans of polygamy, 86 per cent [are] not great fans of polygamy’. He added: ‘I am not alleging by any stretch that Romney is a polygamist and approves of [the] polygamy lifestyle, but his father was born into [a] polygamy commune in Mexico’.

During his 2008 speech at the Democratic convention in Denver, Schweitzer trumpeted his Catholic faith, saying: ‘Like Senator Obama, my family has roots in the Great Plains.



‘My grandparents were immigrants who came to Montana with nothing more than the clothes on their back, high hopes and faith in God.’



Romney's father George W. Romney, who went on to become head of the American Motor Company and governor of Michigan, was born in 1907 in a settlement in Mexico that had been founded in the 1880s by Mormons fleeing American anti-polygamy laws.

The last polygamist in Romney’s direct ancestry was his great-grandfather Miles Park Romney, who had three wives. Romney's paternal grandfather Gaskell was monogamous and the Mormon Church outlawed polygamy in 1890.

Five years ago, Romney, who has been married to his wife Ann for 42 years, said: ‘I have a great-great-grandfather. They were trying to build a generation out there in the desert and so he took additional as he was told to do. And I must admit, I can’t imagine anything more awful than polygamy.’ Ann, whose father was a Welsh atheist, converted to Mormonism before she married Mitt.



A senior Romney adviser said he expected Democrats to use the presumptive Republican nominee’s faith against him. ‘They'll take advantage of whatever they can.



‘Even if they never have to use the word Mormon, if there’s a chance it gives people a little bit of a doubt or erodes part of the Republican base, they’ll be happy to take it. But I don’t think they’ll be caught with their hands in the cookie jar talking about Mormonism.’



Already, there are indications that the Obama campaign is prepared to go after Romney’s religion in subtle ways. His advisers declared Mormonism ‘off limits’ after they were panned for portraying Romney as ‘weird’. But in recent days the word ‘secretive’ has been used about him repeatedly – a charge often laid at the door of the Mormon Church.



Richard Land, head of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention and a prominent evangelical figure who has met Romney privately said: ‘As far as I’m concerned, Mormonism isn’t a Christian faith. It’s a different religion. But I and most evangelicals wouldn’t have a problem voting for a Mormon against Barack Obama.’



'They'll take advantage of whatever they can': Romney advisers said the attack was expected. The candidate is pictured with Senator John McCain on Friday

He said that he believed personal faith should not be part of the election and doubted the Obama campaign would ‘comment on Romney’s religion frontally’ but expected Obama's media allies to do so eagerly.



‘They’re going to try to highlight all the more the exotic beliefs of Mormons and hope to scare off enough independents to help Romney win.’



Predicting ‘the ugliest campaign in my lifetime, and I was born in 1946’, he said the press would attempt to get swing voters to ask themselves: ‘He believes in that? Wow, do I really want a president who believes something like that?’



In the US media, jibes about Mormon polygamy and ‘magic underwear’ (observant Mormons like Romney wear what are known as temple undergarments beneath their cloths) are commonplace and acceptable whereas that mocking Jews or Muslims is considered beyond the pale.



Romney is a former Mormon bishop who hails from one of the most prominent families in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Mormons believes that early Christian leaders fell away from God's truth and that it took the discovery of the Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith, the self-proclaimed prophet who founded the church, to ‘restore’ true Christianity.



Smith is said to have discovered the sacred text in 1823. It had been engraved on golden plates buried in a hill near his home in New York that he had found after being guided there by an angle called Moroni.



Mormons do not smoke tobacco, swear or drink coffee, tea or alcohol. They conduct baptisms of the dead, usually of their ancestors but also, most controversially, Holocaust victims (a practice the church now outlaws).



They believe that Jesus appeared to the Americas after the resurrection and that there are three heavens. Blacks were not allowed to be ordained into the Mormon Church until 1978.



Nobama: Themed bottles of water are displayed by a vendor before Romney addressed the Republican National Committee State Chairman's National Meeting today

Romney and each of his five sons served for two years as Mormon missionaries. In Romney’s case, he was sent to France in the late 1960s. Romney later joked: ‘It’s quite an experience to go to Bordeaux and say, ‘Give up your wine! I’ve got a great religion for you!’’



A number of the tenets of Mormonism are regarded as bizarre by many Americans and one of the biggest challenges Romney faced in the primaries was that many evangelicals regarded Mormons as members of a non-Christian cult.



Romney lost primaries in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana – the bible belt of the Deep South – though all these states are virtually certain to back him in the general election.



Aware of the widespread suspicion of his religion, Romney has shied away from talking about it. He gave a speech in College Station, Texas in December 2007, billed as the equivalent to John F. Kennedy’s 1960 address to allay fear about his Catholicism, in which he insisted that ‘no authorities of my church’ would ‘ever exert influence on presidential decisions’. But even then he uttered the word Mormon only once.



During the Republican primary campaign, his advisers avoided almost any mention of his faith. In January, a senior campaign official said that he believed there was an anti-Mormon smear campaign afoot in South Carolina but he wanted no public mention of it for fear of aggravating the issue.



The downside of this approach was that Romney’s deep faith, the observant life he has led and the family he has built are central to understanding him. By barely referring to Mormonism – his core - it was easy to believe he had no core.

Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican strategist who was a top adviser to Romney in 2008, said that Romney’s faith could be turned into an advantage.



‘He's over the tough part on the Mormon issue. He cleared that hurdle in the primaries.’ Talking about his faith ‘helps people to understand that there’s a real core to Mitt Romney, that he believes there’s a right and there’s a wrong and he's lived his life the right way’.



He added: ‘The real window into Mitt Romney's heart is Ann Romney. The window into his soul may be his faith. Seeing who he is as a human being tells you how he's lived his life.’



The current Romney adviser agreed, saying the campaign could to ‘take this perceived weakness and turn it into a strength’ by emphasising the tens of millions of dollars he has donated to his church (all Mormons are required to tithe 10 percent of their income) and his pastoral care of church members.

