There’s been a fair bit of discussion recently about presumed presidential aspirant (and current Massachusetts governor) Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and how that might play with voters.

Romney faces two distinct, but not unrelated problems. Evangelical Protestants who make up an influential portion of the GOP base tend to see Mormons, despite their their social conservatism, as a dangerous cult. Meanwhile, moderate Republicans, independents, and swing voters, whom any candidate would need to woo to win the general election, tend to see Mormonism as, er, well, a dangerous (or at least bizarre) cult (and are less warm to Mormons’ social conservatism).

Some of the writers linked above think that voter uneasiness with electing a Mormon amounts to a de facto religious test, but that’s surely nonsense. Voters are free to vote or not vote for a candidate for any reason they like. However, are there good reasons not to vote for someone simply because he or she is a Mormon? I’ve known a few Mormons and nothing about them makes me fear the idea of a Mormon in office any more than, say, your average Southern Baptist or Unitarian. I mean, yeah, Mormons hold some unorthodox beliefs, many of which I find pretty wacky. But then, I find some Methodist beliefs pretty wacky too* and I voted for George Bush. (Of course, we see how that turned out…) If anything, someone who comes from a minority religion may well turn out to be more sensitive to church and state issues, and more aware of the fact that most of his fellow citizens don’t share his views.

I suppose one argument might be this: Anyone who believes things that are so transparently weird (and therefore presumably false) has, at best, a tenuous grasp on reality and therefore shouldn’t be elected to public office. But “weird” is decidedly in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? It’s pretty weird to believe that a crucified itinerant rabbi is in fact the Second Person of a Three-personed God who is nevertheless not three gods but one. On the other hand, there are some religions whose intrinsic weirdness and manifest falsity would probably prevent me from voting for them. One of the commenters at The American Scene mentions how he would never vote for a Scientologist, which I would tend to agree with.

What say you, readers? Are there good reasons not to vote for someone sheerly on account of his or her religion?
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*Just ribbin’ ya, Methodist readers!