CONSEJO DEMANDS ROMNEY REPUDIATE "BLATANTLY RACIST" SCRIPTURE

EAST LOS ANGELES, Calif., Aug. 20, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Consejo de Latinos Unidos, a national not-for-profit organization and public charity which educates and assists Latinos and others, demanded that Mitt Romney repudiate "blatantly racist" scripture.

"Unlike the Jeremiah Wright affair, there is no division between church and candidate since Mitt Romney was a bishop in his church that espouses racist and derogatory scripture of Blacks and Latinos," stated Lourdes Galvez-Galvan, Deputy Director of the Consejo de Latinos Unidos. "Instead of sound bites, Governor Romney must rise to the occasion and denounce, abandon, and repudiate this scripture of hate."

Galvez-Galvan took particular offense to a passage from 2 Nephi 5:21 that states unbelievers, called Lamanites, were cursed and had their skin turned from white to black: "[T]he Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them."

"As Bishop Mitt Romney knows, his faith believes Lamanites resided in the Americas," said Galvez-Galvan. "In other words, the indigenous people of the Americas or the ancestors of Latinos are unbelievers or as another passage of Romney's religious scripture describes a 'dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.'"

Until 1978, blacks were banned from entering the priesthood until the governing body of Romney's church had a heavenly revelation changing the practice. Galvez-Galvan called on Romney to distance himself from the hateful, anti-Latino scripture immediately. "We understand institutions change, but the scriptures and teachings have not. This would be like rejecting slavery but still teaching people that blacks count as 3/5 of any other person," she noted.

The Consejo, which has published ten investigative reports in the past decade on hospital price gouging, religious fraud, police abuse, and pharmaceutical deception, has helped spur three U.S. Congressional hearings and over a dozen local and state probes, including two Civil Rights inquiries.

In 2006, the Consejo helped expose fraudulent religious operations that sold tourism packages to Cuba under bogus religious entities. Earlier this year, the Consejo shut down a state-sanctioned facility in the Los Angeles area accused of negligence where one of its employees was sent to prison for sexual assaulting several mentally disabled adult children of working-poor Latino families.

SOURCE Consejo de Latinos Unidos