Why even listen to #MittRomney on foreign policy? His entire FP experience is 2 yrs trying to brow-beat Frenchmen into joining his cult
If you have lived, as I have, as a non-Mormon in a place whose population is 70 percent LDS, you would understand the real dangers in mixing too much church with state. I was born and raised in Utah, and my entire family still lives there. Every time I go back, from the minute I wade past the missionaries in the Salt Lake City airport to my first watered-down beer, I am struck by the fact that, while inmates may be able to duck Chuck Colson, the average Utah citizen has no hope of escaping the Mormons.
Joseph Smith: Nineteenth Century Con Man?
It was an axiom of faith among church opponents that Mormon leaders created Mormonism solely "for the purpose of picking the pockets of the community." ... Anti-Mormons charged Joseph Smith, in particular, with an insatiable lust for money, and they occasionally reported his candid "admission" of the fact.,,, One need not be a republican ideologue to disapprove of swindling, but the common non-Mormon perception of Joseph Smith wallowing in his ill-gotten gain revealed a republican repugnance to the idea of decadent luxury.... When anti-Mormon writers moved their discussion away from the hierarchy to a more general treatment of the church as a whole... Smith did not so much corrupt the virtue of once good citizens as merely assemble those who had no civic virtue to begin with.
"Scorin' with Orrin": How the gentleman from Utah made it easier for kids to buy steroids, speed, and Spanish fly.
"[Hatch] is directly implicated in this affair," said Prince Alexandre de Merode, chairman of the IOC medical commission.
The IOC criticism was particularly biting given that Hatch's home state [hosted] the,...winter games in 2002, and that one of the games' major sponsors is, in fact, a supplement company. Utah had already produced a major Olympics bribery scandal; all it needed was a reputation as the world's steroid capital just as the IOC was arriving with its drug-test lab.
Hatch considers his 1994 law, DSHEA, a triumph on behalf of consumer health freedom. But a close look suggests that if anything, DSHEA (or the Hatch Act, as body builders call it) has left Americans "free" to serve as guinea pigs for a multibillion-dollar industry, much of which is built on a foundation of fraudulent claims, pyramid schemes, and lousy manufacturing practices.
Since DSHEA became law, substances as varied as paint stripper, bat shit, toad venom, and lamb placenta have all been imported from overseas, bottled up---often by people with no scientific or health backgrounds---and marketed as dietary supplements to unsuspecting American consumers.
Many supplements have been tainted with salmonella, arsenic, lead, pesticides, unapproved foreign prescription drugs, as well as garden-variety carcinogens.
And despite their New-Age health aura, a significant portion of these "natural supplements" are stimulants, depressants, and other mood-enhancers that some medical experts believe would be classified as drugs if they were synthetic. A surprising number of these products are addictive.
Thanks to Hatch, the U.S. now has standards as low as those in many Third World countries for the sale of many products with serious, pharmacological effects. The results have been deadly.
The more I learn about Mormonism the more strangely fascinating it is and the crazier it sounds.
Mormons seems to have a peculiar--and prejudiced--fascination with tales of a large, ominous, ape-like, black-skinned "Bigfoot" (who, they swear, is actually Cain), condemned by the Mormon God to wander the Earth where he ends up scaring the faithful into invoking the Mormon priesthood in order to drive big, bad Bigfoot away.
BYU Prof: Mormon Racism Was Justified
Professor Bott is no outlier. Especially among older Mormons, racist rationale for the priesthood ban—linking it to Old Testament pretexts, or to moral infirmity in a pre-earthly life by the souls of Africans and African-Americans, and other racist apologetic mental gymnastics exemplified in Bott’s statement to the Post—persist and circulate, generally unquestioned and unchallenged.
For its part, the LDS Church has never authoritatively addressed racist theologies developed in defense of the ban in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, it has attempted to step quietly beyond its racist past, as it has with many other thorny and troubling historical matters.
On Sept. 11, 1857, a wagon train from this part of Arkansas met with a gruesome fate in Utah, where most of the travelers were slaughtered by a Mormon militia in an episode known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Hundreds of the victims’ descendants still populate these hills and commemorate the killings, which they have come to call “the first 9/11.”
"slow, psychiatric and spiritual suicide"
"Most of our churches don't view them as Christians. We don't regard the LDS church as a Christian church. When you include someone in a group -- that's kind of like saying they're fundamentally the same as most people in the group. We don't feel that's accurate with LDS."
