TuesdayâÂ?Â?s Roundup: Death and taxes edition

Will Fidel Castro go to Hell? Or just something like it? Will Mitt Romney live in the Golden Temple? Will Chris Christie be the next Mitt Romney? Can we speak well of Joe Paterno?

Will Fidel Castro go to Hell?

The chief rivals at last night’s Republican presidential debate in South Florida (FYI, that’s really close to Cuba where Fidel still lives) definitely want something bad to happen to the old communist dictator when he croaks.

Actually, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich mostly wanted to outdo each other. But they seemed oddly reticent about the specifics when asked by moderator Brian Williams of NBC how they would greet news of Castro’s death:


“Well first of all,” Romney said, “you thank heavens that Fidel Castro has returned to his maker and will be sent to another land.”

“Another land”? Gingrich upped the ante, sort of:

“I don't think Fidel is going to meet his maker. I think he's going to another place.”

“Another place”? Gingrich is rarely that allusive when it comes to criticizing Barack Obama, e.g.

Nicholas Hahn parses Gingrich’s lack of Catholic due process for the dead, and also Mormon beliefs about Hell, in an effort to clarify.

More clarifying: Romney released his tax return, hundreds of pages of it. For those of us who can’t handle more than the 1040 EZ, here’s the skinny: $21.7 million in 2010 earnings, mainly from investments, a slightly less than 14 percent tax rate, with $3 million to Uncle Sam and almost that much to charity, at least half of which went to the LDS church.

Yes, Romney has lots of chalets and villas, too. But he does not live in the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the holiest site of Sikhism, despite a Jay Leno skit indicating that it was a Romney summer home. Sikhs are not amused.

Newt isn’t doing quite as well as Mitt, but he can’t complain: Gingrich got $5 million via a Super PAC donation from the wife of Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has himself already given Newt lotsa campaign cash.

New Jersey’s  governor and Republican darling Chris Christie has nominated an openly gay black man to the state Supreme Court. Christie is apparently positioning himself to be the Mitt Romney of 2016, because, well, you see how well that’s working for the Mitt Romney of 2012.

Washington State is poised to become the seventh state (plus D.C.) to allow same-sex marriage, thanks to the support of a Democratic state senator, Mary Margaret Haugen, whose statement about reconciling her beliefs and her vote is gaining much notice:


“I have very strong Christian beliefs, and personally I have always said when I accepted the Lord, I became more tolerant of others. I stopped judging people and try to live by the Golden Rule. This is part of my decision.”

A Rick Santorum supporter at a Florida rally asked the candidate about how to get rid of Obama, in part because she said the president is “an avowed Muslim.” Santorum seemed okay with that line of inquiry.

Actual Muslims are upset over an anti-Muslim training film that was shown to at least 1,400 New York City police officers rather than the handful of cops that the NYPD swore were the only ones to see it.

I wish I could flip that to an Oscars reference, but I’ll leave it to Jack “Red Carpet” Jenkins to find the religion in this year’s nominations. I couldn't.

Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, has resigned and is seeking a buyer for the paper as he continued to catch hell for speculating that Israel would consider assassinating President Obama.

“Do not speak well of the dead,” as they say. Sort of. SNAP, the leading advocacy group for victims of clergy sexual abuse, asks that people not praise the late Penn State coaching legend, Joe Paterno, because of his failure to pursue child abuser allegations against Jerry Sandusky.

President Obama apparently didn’t get the memo.

Obama continues to spark debate, to put it mildly, for not expanding the religious exemption on mandated contraception coverage.


A Washington Post editorial criticizing the administration sums up the negative reaction:

“The administration’s feint at a compromise — giving such employers another year to figure out how to comply with the requirement — is unproductive can-kicking that fails to address the fundamental problem of requiring religiously affiliated entities to spend their own money in a way that contradicts the tenets of their faith.”

Catholic Healthcare West, one of the nation’s largest hospital systems, is cutting its formal church ties and changing its name in part to avoid the growing number of conflicts with church and state.

And a new study explains why we resist or try to accommodate perceived restrictions on our freedom.

And megapastor Mark Driscoll is tired of the criticism of the sex book he wrote with his wife, but says it’s not unexpected: “In our book, we blow up some common misconceptions about sex (like that the Bible prohibits stripteases or oral sex).”

Got to admit, the man can turn a phrase.

— David Gibson, slowly getting used to our new website

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