The Mormon Church officially got a draft deferment for Mitt Romney so he wouldn't have to go to Viet Nam.
Romney got his draft deferment by serving as a mormon missionary in...
France.
Nobody has to make stuff up where republican presidential candidate are concerned. Well except for their campaign managers.
So Mitt Romney got a deferment because he was carrying the word to french chefs.
George Bush got out of going to Viet Nam because his daddy got him in the National Guard and he quit going when they told him he had to take a drug test to keep flying planes.
Dick Cheney got deferment after deferment, mainly because he was just too damned evil to be allowed anywhere near a war zone:
"...we learn that Cheney was at the heart of the soul-deadening practice of torture to extract information from our enemies."
"Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former
officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden "torture" and
permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning."....Washington Post
No way the United States of America is going to torture people, nope, nope, nope...We're sticking to...
"cruel and inhuman methods of questioning."
Antonin Scalia, Justice of the Supreme Court of the good old USA, told people that "torture works. Jack Bauer saved everybody in Los Angeles by torturing."
Oh great...We have a Supreme Court Justice who can't tell the difference between real life and a fictional TV program. Next thing you know, republicans will run a candidate who is totally unqualified to be president but it'll be ok because he's played one on TV...Oh, wait!...
Nevermind.
Makes you proud to be an American.
Peace,
Steve
The article on Mormon-missionary draft deferments omitted a relevant fact: the 1-each-6-months agreement with the government included the provision that we would receive *no* deferments after returning from our missions.
ReplyDeleteAs I understood it, the increasing draft quotas — the draft got to #200 my year — brought scrutiny to our missionary deferments which resulted in the Church and the US government making this deal. I believe, however, this occured around 1970, after Mr. Romney’s mission to France– or maybe that’s just when I became aware of it because I started to consider a mission then.
I had a student’s (2-S) deferment before receiving my minister’s (4-D) deferment for my mission in Argentina 1971-3 but when I left, I would not have been able to renew my student’s deferment afterwards. Back then, we pretty much assumed that a nominal 2-year mission actually would be a 4-year commitment, the last two in military service. I had friends that served these 2+2 missions and some of them continued to teach and baptize informally in the military.
For my part, halfway through my mission in 1972, I received notice that I had been reclassified as 1-H, “not currently classified.” I knew several other missionaries who received similar unrequested reclasifications to 1-H that summer. I soon realized that Mr. Nixon was running for re-election that year — I still wonder whether there was some connection.
I’ve wondered since whether this was illegal discrimination by the government because I don’t believe ministers of other religions lost their ability to claim student deferments when they left their active ministeries. My mission clearly was ecclesiastical and not a draft dodge: I spent about 65 hours per week in active missionary service and I taught more than 20 people who joined the Church.
My main point is that rather than being a way to avoid the draft, an LDS mission increased one’s likelihood of being drafted by sacrificing other ways to be draft-deferred.
FYI, I differed from Mr. Romney in *not* longing to be in Viet Nam!