Romney: Releasing tax returns would violate my religious privacy

Posted at 11:26 AM ET, 08/24/2012
TheWashingtonPost

A number of people are pointing to Mitt Romney’s latest excuse for not releasing his tax returns, which is that it would violate his religious privacy:

“Our church doesn’t publish how much people have given,” Romney tells Parade magazine in an edition due out Sunday. “This is done entirely privately. One of the downsides of releasing one’s financial information is that this is now all public, but we had never intended our contributions to be known. It’s a very personal thing between ourselves and our commitment to our God and to our church.”

There are a number of problems with this explanation. For instance, as Steve Benen notes, we already know how much he’s given to the Mormon church in at least one year, the one for which he did make his returns available. Alex Seitz Wald, meanwhile, points out that this didn’t stop Romney’s father from releasing a dozen years of tax returns, which detailed how much he’d given to the church.

I’d add one more point here: One of those calling on Romney to release his returns happens to be ... a very prominent Mormon. As you may recall, Jon Huntsman Sr., a longtime Romney backer and fundraiser, has publicly told Romney that he needs to release his returns in order to be “square with the American people.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/romney-releasing-tax-returns-would-violate-my-religious-privacy/2012/08/24/333ec2d0-edfc-11e1-afd8-097e90f99d05_blog.html

Imbecile.