Bigotry alive and well in America

When Mitt Romney announced today that he was suspending his presidential campaign, I could only shake my head in shame and disgust, because I know the real reason why.
The former Massachusetts governor has too much dignity and grace to publicly admit the truth behind his decision to no longer seek the republican nomination for president. It’s not because our nation is at war, as he suggested in his announcement earlier today.
No.
The real reason—the one Mitt Romney doesn’t want to admit in public, and the one nobody else wants to admit to themselves—is because Mitt Romney is a Mormon and most of the country is not.
Bottom line.
I am not a Mormon. But I am ashamed of other conservatives in my party who did not and would not cast a vote for Mitt Romney simply because of his religion.
While I can say with a clear conscience that my decision to support another candidate had nothing to do with Mitt’s faith, I admit that I wrote him off at the very beginning of the race, because he is a practicing Mormon. I just assumed that he would never get the party nomination, much less be elected president, because of his religion. I figured that there were just too many negative stereotypes about Mormons out there to keep Romney from succeeding.
The scary thing is that I was right on all counts.
Mitt Romney did not finish the race because he knew that, as a Mormon, he would ultimately fail to win the support of conservatives. He knew that even if he was to somehow win the party nomination, there would be even more animosity toward his religion coming from the political left, and he would end up spending the vast majority of his time defending his faith from a corner in the ring.
Mitt Romney understood and finally came to grips with the reality that Americans, both liberals and conservatives, are not ready for a Mormon president.
For a nation that has made so many strides toward racial and gender equality in recent decades, we still have a long way to go before achieving religious equality.
This is not to be confused with religious freedom, which every American enjoys courtesy of the Bill of Rights. Equality is not granted by the Constitution, but rather through the charity of men’s hearts.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this when he fought for civil rights in the 1960s. He realized that although his people had the right to vote and the freedom to pursue opportunity, these liberties were not the same as equality. The latter is dependent upon how one is treated; not how one is regarded by the law. As a result, he fought hard to see to it that his people would eventually bear the dignity and respect of equality.
Unfortunately, the United States has not extended the same courtesy to religion as it has race, ethnicity and even gender.
It is not up to the government to bring about equitable change for religious minorities. That responsibility is ours alone to bear. Only when we can reconcile the hatred that exists within ourselves for those who are different from us can we hope to give a man like Mitt Romney a fighting chance.