Simple Utah Mormon Politics

A recent scandal in the Pennsylvania school system has brought to light just how very misunderstood the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution is. I think that when the school district loses its court case, it will have been a net positive for American religious debate and for society in general. The city of Abington, Pennsylvania is rallying around a 10-year old boy who was not allowed to dress up as Jesus for Halloween. Apparently the average American citizen is less cowed by cowing institutions such as the ACLU than are school districts. Good! Donna Brewer says that her son was allowed to wear a costume depicting himself as Jesus , even under the district's very own policy. This story is very illustrative of how much people misinterpret not only what the Constitution of the United States says, but also the Supreme Court's interpretation of it. It is clearly within the 10-year-old Brewer's right to wear the costume , complete with a paper-wreath symbo...

Behind all the glitz, glamor, and posturing is a very inconvenient truth for environmental evangelist Al Gore. He is not making a contribution to the control of global warming--at all. At least some of the stars and starlets were smart enough to show up in energy-conscious vehicles to the Academy Awards the other night. But not Al Gore. He showed up in a limo. Standing under the klieg lights to accept his award for best documentarian , Mr. Gore was all smiles. He probably didn't notice that the electricity used to power all the lights in the convention hall could have powered a small city. But I don't think that is his quest. It appears to me that his quest is to make all the rest of us conform to his idea of environmental consciousness. I know I'm putting a lot of undue pressure on him, but he's putting a lot of undue pressure on me, too. What about the time he got a speeding ticket in his rental boat (car) ? Wasting gas and wasting gas. Interestingly, a recent s...

You can't smell it. It builds up in your home and in the surrounding environment over a period of time, and you scarcely know its there until it's devastating effects are manifest. I think everyone should be required to have an RG detector in their homes. Much more deadly than carbon monoxide, Reckless Government gets into every facet of our lives until it's nearly impossible to get rid of. Certain laws certainly make a lot of people feel good. But think about what it takes to enforce them? Legislators go to Salt Lake or Washington with the premise that the more legislation they pass, they better they are as legislators. We have so many laws that it is impossible to know whether we are breaking most of them, and nearly as impossible to enforce them. I think we would be better off hiring legislators who tried to take more laws off they books than they passed. Even city government gets into the law-enactment frenzy. By requiring every home to have a carbon monoxide det...

No matter what world view we possess, no matter what we think is true, it requires faith to fill in the gaps. Religious people don't know everything about God, but neither do atheists know everything about science. I think we'd all be better off, if we accepted that faith is required, and stop trying to force one side or the other out of the public debate. Religious people will be better off to learn science, and atheists will be benefited from studying religion. When I was a young child, I would sit on my living room couch and look at the coat closet in our entryway, sometimes for almost an hour. My recurring thought was to try to imagine what it would be like if there were nothing (for me 'nothing' had the color of 'black', for some reason) and it would freak me out to no end to try to comprehend it. Alternatively, I would try to imagine how it all got here, and that would freak me out, too. Because of my mental limitations, it became comfortable (and logi...

It's easy to ignore cries of sexism when it doesn't happen to someone you know. But when it does, the reality of it takes on a whole new perspective. When I was a kid, I noticed that most moms brought the babies to church and most dads brought their scriptures. Men usually spoke up in Sunday School, and women seemed pretty quiet. I'm not sure why the women didn't bring their scriptures very often, but I thought it was weird. Everybody should understand the gospel, I thought. I'm glad to see that that dynamic is changing. I thought the stereotype of women not needing to learn anything was slaughtered fairly expertly in the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast , where Belle's penchant for reading was frowned upon by the townsfolk, male and female alike, but where it ultimately became obvious that Belle was the one who had the right worldview. A couple weeks back, the LDS ward that we were supposed to be competing against in Young Men's basketball did not fie...

I should have seen this one coming. I can at least say I'm not surprised. When someone says, "they're gonna do it anyway, so we better educate them and offer them condoms", it's only a matter of time before they say "they're gonna do it anyway, so lets inoculate them." About two years ago, two pharmaceutical companies began competing to create a vaccine for the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). Gardasil, created by Merck Corporation, has now been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. In a clever campaign, if clever is the right word, Merck is essentially saying "They're gonna do it, so we need to give them the opportunity to be inoculated against HPV." Merck has recently had to buy a new bandwagon, because at one point 20 States proposed legislation that would require 11 and 12 year old girls to receive the vaccine, because "in order to be effective, it must be taken before girls become sexually active, and so sh...

No entity is better than government at avoiding the understanding of how its actions cause way bigger problems than they were intended to fix. The federal requirement to change when Daylight Savings Time begins is causing untold millions of dollars of computer fixes to be applied just to be in compliance, and that's not even taking into consideration what the program patches might break in the process. (Updated: 2/23/2007) If you have a SmartPhone, you might want to check here to see how you might be affected. How come my COBOL programs won't compile today? They did about a week ago. The only thing that's changed is that our system techs applied Daylight Savings Time program patches to a whole bunch of our servers over the weekend. I sure wish I lived in Arizona about now, because they don't do the DST shuffle. Do you have Windows Vista or XP with service pack 2? If not, on March 11th, the new beginning date for daylight savings time, will catch you by surprise . ...