Mormon baptism of the dead IS desecration of the dead
And I offer the following argument.
We all would agree that it would be desecration if it actually involved the bodies, right?
And yet, what I hear most often as the reason that this is no big deal is that "the dead are dead and so it doesn't affect them. It's just a mumbo jumbo spell."
But, in the same way, digging up a body and using the skull as a drinking mug doesn't "affect" the dead person either. Same argument. They're dead, right?
So, in essence, the reason that we speak of "desecrating the dead" is NOT because of its effect on the dead but because of its effect on the LIVING.
This post-mortem baptizing is an affront to the living. It is spitting on everything that that person believed in when they were alive. And the dead no longer has the ability to change their lives, so what the have left as their beliefs and their legacy is all that ever will have done and all they ever ever will do. They die, hopefully, as the person they were in the way they wanted to and THAT is how their loved ones remember them.
To even CLAIM to CHANGE someone's dead loved one, yes even to claim it, is a gross offense to the living loved ones and those who hold that memory dear.
This should be an issue on the campaign trail and someone should FORCE Mitt to answer what he thinks of this practice.
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I imagine most US jurisdictions have some kind of law equivalent to the provision in the Criminal Code of Canada against offering indignities to a dead body. And the same sort of requirement that the representative of the deceased make appropriate arrangements for disposal of the body.
We just don't like it. We don't even mandate post mortem organ donation.
Now, granted, generally nobody can sue for defamation of a dead person, say. Our laws/norms tend to relate to the body itself. But there are long-standing customs, expressed in sayings like "do not speak ill of the dead", that do reflect our feeling that deceased members of our groups still have a sort of honorary membership.
Basically, we don't like the idea of our own bodies or memories being mistreated, so we don't like to see it being done to others'.
I'm a genealogy hound. I've run across evidence of ancestors of mine being posthumously baptised by proxy by some Mormon. (There are websites where people post family trees, and those associated with the giant Mormon/Ancestry.com octopus include a space to record each person's status in that regard that someone not in the know might not notice.) I think it's disgusting.
I would call it disrespect rather than desecration. It is simply disrespectful to the person who was, and yes, we do still "respect" deceased persons, to impose a choice on them that they never made.
I'm a lucky atheist, myself. Some years ago, my former church (the United Church of Canada, pretty much the most progressive Christian church on the planet) obtained an undertaking from the Mormons that they would not do posthumous proxy baptisms of people baptised in the UCC. I was baptised as an infant, of course, so I'm shielded from Mormon intervention. 
... Of course, after reading a bit here about how they are not honouring their undertaking in respect of Jews, maybe I should not be so sanguine ...
All in all, though, yes: these posthumous proxy baptisms are every bit as disrespectful as desecrating graves, and yes, we human beings and our groups quite reasonably frown on the latter kind of disrespect and so quite reasonably frown on the former as well.
I think of my grandfather, who died some 35 years ago. He was the absolutely nicest, kindest person you could meet in your lifetime. Not a mean bone in his body; a hard childhood, a union man through the Depression and all his life, the kindly and comical school crossing guard after he retired, not well-treated by a couple in his immediate family as an old man -- and a lifelong member of the UCC and soloist in his local church's choir. What was once called a good Christian gentleman, and what you might call a mensch.
That was who he was. His grandchildren in my own family are all atheists. (The other three sets are all very ordinary, although some of one set are quite rabid Baptists, which is more unusual in Canada.) When my mum organised his funeral, held at his home church to accommodate all the people who came and to acknowledge who he was, she arranged for it to be co-officiated by the minister there (who was new and did not know my grandfather well), the Roman Catholic nun who had ministered to him and sung hymns with him for two years in the nursing home after his strokes, and the Mennonite music director who had also spent a lot of time with him there.
That was who my grandfather was, and also, that was his community. It would have been wrong of my family to disregard that when we held the event to honour his memory, just because we think it's all nonsense. (And on the other hand, it was wrong of my cousin to have a bunch of hymn singing at the much smaller memorial gathering we had for my grandmother, who didn't believe and had requested that there be no funeral.)
Being the supremely tolerant person he was, if my grandfather had known that someday, some Mormon would give him a posthumous proxy baptism, he probably would have tried to understand their point of view and shrugged it off. But still. It's the intent. Which is disrespectful.
I still love talking about my grandfather, so thanks too.
