Earlier this week, Gawker's John Cook wondered whether Mitt Romney's father-in-law had been converted to Mormonism — posthumously. Wrote Cook:
Edward Davies, Ann Romney's Welsh father, was an engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur who worked on designs for the Gemini space program and helped outfit aircraft carriers. He eventually became the mayor of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He was also a resolute atheist who insisted that his family be raised without participating in an organized religion. "He would say: 'I'm a scientist, show me the proof'," a former co-worker told the Telegraph. Davies thought of religion as "drudgery and hogwash," according to Boston Globe, and his son Roderick told the paper that Davies "considered people who were religious to be weak in the knees."
So it must have broken his heart when, after his only daughter began dating Mormon scion Mitt Romney, she converted to his religion with the help of Mitt's father.
The conversions didn't stop there. Mitt and his father, George, convinced Anne's younger brother to join the church, and then dispatched missionaries to convert her elder brother, who was then attending school in England. The mission was successful. And after Edward died in 1992, his wife — Anne Romney's mother — decided she, too, would become a Latter-Day Saint.
And so Cook asked:
Mormons, of course, are known for their habit of posthumously converting dead souls. They also believe that families are reunited in eternity after death. So the incentive for Ann Romney to convert Edward Davies in death so that they may one day frolic together in the interplanetary afterlife was presumably fairly powerful. Did she posthumously baptize him, despite his belief while he lived that such a baptism and the beliefs that undergird it are pure "hogwash"?
Cook contacted the Romney campaign and the Latter-Day Saints for info. Neither organization would comment, so Cook requested that any Mormon Gawker readers who might have access to the church's baptismal records please contact him. As it turns out:
Edward Davies, Mitt Romney's militantly atheist father-in-law, was indeed posthumously converted to Mormonism by his family.
… Davies was baptized as a Mormon at a "special family meeting" 14 months after his death: "All ordinances except sealing to spouse performed in Salt Lake Temple on 19 Nov 1993 in special family meeting."
That's Mitt Romney. Republican on Earth, totalitarian in eternity.
