COL Takashi

Congress wants to drag down America

2008-07-24T19:38:44Z

In the West, a 55 mile and hour speed limit really is insane. At 75 mph, the 600 miles distance from Salt Lake City to Denver on I-80 and I-25 can be covered in about 8.5 hours driving time, a reasonable day's work--and driving IS work. But at 55 mph, the time from Salt Lake to Denver increases by a full 2.5 hours to 11 hours. Not only is that an unnecessary stealing of over two hours of the time of each person in the car, it adds time to the end of the trip when the driver is most fatigued and night is falling, resulting in much more time spent by very tired drivers in the dark. How is that conducive to safety? In winter, as night falls, roads become more icy and slippery as well.

The fact is that, with more efficient modern vehicles, with lighter materials (including the removal of chrome steel bumpers), computer controlled fuel and ignition systems, aerodynamic design, and using cruise control to maintain steady speeds, we are already saving the amount of gasoline that was "saved" by the 55 mph speed limit at its inception in the early 1970s. New vehicles are designed to be even more economical at real freeway speeds, using not only hybrid engines but also engines that cut down the number of cylinders firing during highway cruising.

Here is the ironic part: If we indeed save gasoline by cutting highway speeds, the incentive for consumers to move to more efficient vehicles is reduced. More efficient vehicles will be more efficient as well at the speeds below 55 that apply to local streets. The net effect of a 55 mph speed limit on consumers may well be, in the long run, slowing the turnover to more fuel efficient vehicles and thus using MORE gasoline over the next decade.

Gasoline at $4 to $5 a gallon is already penalty enough for anyone who drives faster than he needs to. Often there are specific needs to get places faster, both in terms of family emergencies, work needs, and the need to not be dragging over the highway for extra hours late into the night. If he is ready to pay the extra fuel cost of 75 mph driving, he should not have the Highway Patrol risking life and limb to pull him over on a freeway in order to force him to increase his fuel economy by 5%.

Voters are less inclined in 2008 to accept baloney like a 55 mph speed limit now. They have already suffered through it and know what a relief it was to finally be free of it. They are much more skeptical of government officials than Americans were when the pre-Watergate Nixon imposed the low speed limit, and a 55 mph speed limit will mean the end of the road for any Congressman in the West who votes for it and insists he or she knows better than the voters what speed they should drive.

How to make the Electoral College more Popular

2008-07-14T19:38:52Z

A recent column in the Wall Street Journal Online criticized the effort in some states to render the Electoral College meaningless, by states passing laws that, regardless of the vote in that state, the electoral votes of the state would go to the national winner of a popular vote plurality. The column and its reasoning can be found at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121581748685547419.html?mod=djemEditorialPage .

I agree that the attempt to neturalize the Electoral College is dumb. To give the decision to a plurality of the popular vote (remember Bill Clinton never won a majority of it) would give only the illusion of voter power, when in fact the reality of media market efficiency would push political power into the major metropolitan areas with the largest concentrations of population and destroy the influence of more rural (and Republican) regions and the states which are made up of such regions where the ad cost per thousand voters reached is much lower. The Democrats know that these urban media markets are precisely the demographics that are predominantly Democrat Blue, so they favor such a system of urban political domination.

We can make the Electoral College more closely resemble the popular vote by the simple measure of allocating the electoral votes according to the popular vote. The approach I propose would be to recognize the correlation between electoral votes and the congressional votes of each state. A state's electoral votes equal its two senators plus one for each member of the House of Representatives. The requirements of equality of representation in the House have forced each congressional district in a state to be equal in population, and generally equal in population with other congressional districts across the nation. The electoral vote corresponding to each House district could be allocated to the plurality winner in that district. The two electoral votes that correspond to the Senate seats could be allocated to the overall plurality winner in the state as a whole. That would not necessarily be the same as the winner of the most congressional districts, if there are three candidates splitting the vote (as happened in Utah in 1992). This allocation can be done by each state's legislature, and it avoids the insane notion that the electors for a state should vote for a candidate that the majority of the state rejected, just because other states' citizens supported him or her.

Unlike the author of the Wall Street Journal article, I see no special value in protecting the two-party system against third-party challenges. On the other hand, I agree completely that it is important to avoid chaos in the presidential election system and to limit voting recounts and legal disputes that push elections into courtrooms. If we allocate electoral votes by congressional district, instead of having the current "winner take all" system for a state's electoral votes, recounts would be limited to specific congressional districts rather than be allowed to revisit the entire state's election process. Additionally, this approach would completely remove the incentive to fish for more votes in a congressional district where a candidate won the popular vote by a large margin, in order to override votes for the other candidate in the rest of the state, which is what Al Gore was doing in 2000. Gore had won Miami by over 60%, so his asking for a recount there was not because he thought George Bush should have won that county, but rather because he could be confident that any new random votes he snatched would tend to be in his favor. With a congressional district vote system, there would be no point in asking for a recount in a district where you won the popular vote, and where your party probably controlled the local government. You would only get more electoral votes if you could change the count in a district where you lost, and the chance of that happening are low. It would only make sense if the popular vote loss margin in a district were very small. If the margin of loss were large, the poll results would be like a super survey representing the views of all persons whose votes were not counted, and a recount would be unlikely to make a difference.

Vote counts for president within each congressional district are in fact recorded, along with the votes for members of the House, so it should not be difficult for political research organizations to assess how this Popularized Electoral College System--PECS--would have come out in the last few elections.

If the vote for president is made to reflect the same congressional districts that elect the House every two years, it is very possible that the presidential election would largely resemble the outcome of votes in the House of Representatives. Looking at the Democratic House dominated by Nancy Pelosi might cause Republicans to reject PECS. However, one of the impacts of the change would be to force the presidential candidates to campaign in ALL states, especially when there are large minorities of their party in a state doinated by the other side. Such presidential campaigning by Republicans in California and Democrats in Utah would make many more states into "battleground states" and could help elect congressional candidates of the presidential candidate's party. "Coattails" could actually mean something. And it would make it harder, for example, for "blue dog" Democrats to distance themselves from the typical liberals running at the top of their ticket. Congressional candidates would need to be integrated into the presidential campaigns, and party unity and consistency of message would be more important. Thus, this system for electing presidents could have a salutary effect on Congress every four years.

One side effect would be to spread presidential campaign spending into more markets. It would be popping up in states now solidly red or blue, and the amount that could be spent on the few "battleground" states in the middle would drop off. The value of each state's senatorial electoral votes would increase in smaller states, so all states' voters would need to be reached.

The result seems to me to be a much more rational election system that is less susceptible to "gaming", increases the value of votes in every state that is not totally dominated by a single party, preserves the importance of consensus across many states, and is less likely to leave people feeling that their votes will never count. Indeed, when the threshold for getting an electoral vote for your preferred candidate is lowered to your congressional district rather than the entire state, I predict that it will energize supporters both to vote and campaign for their neighbors' votes. Voter turnout and election volunteerism will increase significantly. At the same time, we will destroy the incentive to steal a presidential election by digging up a few hundred votes in a divided, big state, and increase the finality and simplicity that are the virtues of the electoral college.

If you agree that PECS is a good idea, please feel free to copy this essay and redistribute it, so long as you keep the source identified and don't edit or omit the text.

Responding to the Brethren on gay marriage

2008-07-11T23:25:39Z

The following is a comment I made on a discussion on Timesandseasons.org concerning a recent editorial in the BYU Daily Universe that suggested that Mormons who publicly oppose the official position of the LDS Church, which endorses the amendment of the California Constitution to reinstate heterosexual marriage as the law, are no longer "active Mormons." It can be found at http://www.timesandseasons.org/?p=4652 :

I would first note that the Daily Universe claiming that a particular viewpoint renders one an "inactive Mormon" is not simply a arguable description, but strikes at the heart of a student's ability to even attend BYU. It is a threat of suspension. As such, I think it may well go far beyond what even the Brethren have said is Church policy. After all, if you are not going to be denied a temple recommend for lack of active support to the advice of the Brethren, why should it affect your attendance at BYU? Such unwarranted adding to the words of the Brethren is itself contrary to the guidance of the Brethren.

As #42 (Drex) points out, one of the fundamental principles of Church leadership is the problem of leaders abusing their priesthood authority, and the statement by the Prophet that true priesthood authority does not reside in such actions. Bishops, Stake Presidents, General Authorities and even Apostles have been excommunicated. The only fully reliable religious leader on earth is the Prophet himself, partly because (this is the sense I get from the statements about it) the Lord will simply take him out of mortal life before he can do too much damage.

As many have noted, it is clear that the Brethren engage in a LOT of debate, as well as prayer, about policies and decisions before they are promulgated. Elder Eyring has related how, when he was Commissioner of Education, he first observed how the Presidents of the Church strive for consensus among the Apostles, and are willing to table a question if one of them is even uneasy about a proposed decision. He noted that, as a scholar of organizational behavior, he found the Brethren operated as an outstanding decision-making body.

So when the First Presidency and in many cases the Twelve as well have a consensus on an issue, and announce it to the Church, we individual Saints may not have participated in the debate, but we can feel assured that THEY have reached consensus on the issue. Separate and apart from our confidence in their ability to receive revelation, we know that the Brethren are pretty consistently outstanding people whom almost any governmental entities or corporate boards would be proud to have leading them. They have wisdom in law, social policy, medicine, education, as well as in religious faith and doctrine. When a body of people with those qualifications takes a question seriously, and offers their considered advice, any rational person should take that advice seriously, and if we casually and publicly oppose it, without even pondering the advice and the reasons the Brethren gave it, it is simply foolish.

Brigham Young repeatedly advised the Saints to seek their own testimonies from God about the truth of the things he taught over the pulpit. I assume that includes the same kind of study and pondering and prayer, with humble willingness to be enlightened against one's will and one's own prejudices, that is involved in finding a testimony of the Book of Mormon.

As far as the issue of gay marriage in California goes, for Latter-day Saints it boils down to choosing between the views and reasoning of two opposing groups: the four out of seven justices in the California Supreme Court majority, and the three dissenting justices plus the 15 ordained apostles of the Church. The three dissenting justices on the court argued strongly that the majority had overstepped their authority, and created a fictional "right" to gay marriage. Agreeing with the three dissenting justices, plus the 15 Brethren, is a fully rational and honorable and moral and legally justificable position. Specifically, a court decision does not preclude an effort by the people to overrule it by amendment to the law that the court asserts was the basis for the decision. That is the honest way to enact one's disagreement into law. There is nothing immoral or disrespectful to the authority of the courts or the state constitution about doing so. Judges, after all, are just attorneys with authority to decide things rather than simply argue about them. They do not acquire wisdom or divine inspiration by dint of donning that authority, any more than attorneys who are elected as governors or legislators do.

As an attorney myself, I see the reasoning of the majority to be specious and disingenuous, lacking in logic and consistency. As the dissent pointed out, the reasoning of the majority would also justify making polygamy and incest between adults a constitutional right.

One can certainly present an argument that one's own reasoning leads you to conclude that it is appropriate to enact gay marriage into law. But simply asserting that one's own reasoning must be automatically assumed to be a better guide to truth than the considered judgment of 15 experienced and wise men who have a lifetime of engagement in the "real world" of practical affairs along with their extensive experience in dealing with the foibles and failings of humanity, especially including sexual morality, seems to me to boil down to an assertion that you are always a more reliable guide to right and wrong than the people that Latter-day Saints sustain as inspired in their leadership of the Church. One is always free to dissent, but to claim you are sustaining the Brethren while automatically disregarding their counsel, seems hypocritical to me.

My own experience as a California attorney and my review of laws related to sexual behavior in California leads me to conclude that the California ruling is a real threat to Churches like the LDS, Catholics and others that hold to traditional sexual morality as taught in the New Testament. For example, after the US Supreme Court upheld the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude from leadership positions those who are homosexual, many Calfornia cities withdrew all support for the Boy Scouts, and there was an effort in the California State Bar to bar anyone from serving as a judge who belonged to the Boy Scouts as an adult leader. Actually, the wording of the rule that was proposed would also exclude from judgeship anyone who belonged to a church that took a similar position of discrimination against practicing homosexuals. If the constitutional amendment is not enacted, I feel certain that this kind of sanction and many others will come before the courts and the Assembly, including proposals to revoke the tax exempt status of any organization that does not sanction gay marriage, and to disqualify from holding state or local government office anyone who does not endorse gay marriage. You may think this is far fetched, but precisely such penalties are being gradually enacted in Canada on that grounds.

It might be useful to compare the issues that arose during the controversy over the Equal Rights Amendment. It is clear from the present perspective that the advocates of gay marriage would have seized on an ERA as establishing a firm constitutional anchor for the legal equivalency of homosexual relations with heterosexual relations. Equal pay and equal treatment for women alongside men was not per se a problem, and statutes and court decisions based on the "equal protection" requirement of the 14th Amendment have taken us to almost total legal parity while preserving the ability to make a few distinctions that take into account the basic distinction that women can bear children while men cannot, and that protecting that capacity is not unreasonable discrimination against men. Thirty years down the road from that controversy, the wisdom of opposing the overly simplistic and therefore infinitely malleable ERA is now becoming apparent.

And it should be remembered that only a few people who opposed the Brethren over the ERA were ever subject to Church membership disciplinary hearings. To obtain that result, one had to be actively and publicly fighting, NOT in the ERA political process itself, but against the advance of the Church itself. When Sonia Johnson made it clear that the advance of the ERA was more important to her than the advance of the Church, that she asked the help of those outside the Church to penalize the Church to pressure it into reversing the opposition of the Brethren to the ERA, she was clearly choosing one over the other. Her excommunication merely formalized her own decision to take a stance against the Church per se, as distinct from a stance against the policy on the ERA. Her continuing to be a member of the Church would allow her to abuse her membership as a vantage point to publicly oppose the larger mission of the Church.

So I would suggest that there is certainly room for members in California to disagree with the advice of the Brethren on this issue, while still being "active Mormons", but to publicly try to enlist Church members to follow you rather than the Brethren, and to hold the Church up to ridicule by those outside it in order to advance you own opinion, is nothing less than explicit rebellion, and to use one's membership in the Church, or record of current or former leadership positions to support your views, is just as much an abuse of authority and priesthood as that of any Bishop or Stake President who uses his position to satisfy his pride and vain ambition.

The cheap and smart solution to Global Warming!

2008-07-11T21:00:22Z

The current issue of WIRED magazine has a story about two scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories who have published a series of research papers supporting the argument that we can totally neutralize the increased heat caused by mand-made greenhouse gases by investing about $1 billion a year in spreading sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere.

This grows out of the consensus among scientists supporting the global warming hypothesis that the 40 years of global COOLING from 1935 to 1975 were caused by sulfur emissions from coal and other fuels, which shaded the earth and formed nuclei for water droplets that reflect sunlight, so that, even as CO2 emissions were growing during World War II and the post-war boom, the net temperature of the earth was going down rather than up. More recently, when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines had a massive eruption in 1992, the sulfur and other particulates put out by the volcano caused world temperatures to drop.

Restructuring our economy, including our food, housing, heating, cooling, electrical power, and transportation, to limit the amount of CO2 emitted, is like regulating food production and sales based on the goal of reducing flatulence. You might cut out half of the flatulence in America, but the burden on people's freedom to choose the foods they grow, process, distribute, sell, cook and eat would just not be worth the benefit.

The economic analyses of attempts to regulate greenhouse gases, such as the Democrat's bill that just failed in the Senate, have shown that they would be tremendously expensive, giving us $10 a gallon gasoline, while producing at most a 2% decrease in total CO2 in the atmosphere. They would make NO detectable difference in the amount of warming, since annual variations in temperature up and down, due to chaotic factors like El Nino and Mt. Pinatubo, are far greater than that. The inefficiency of this approach to fighting global warming is clear on its face. Why try to reengineer the climate by reengineering our economy, with a minor side effect of reduced greenhouse gases? Why not do our climate engineering in a more focused, rational way, so the cost benefit ratio is a thousand times higher?

At a billion dollars a year, the Sun Shade Program (my coinage) would cost Americans no more than $10 per vehicle per year, or $1 a month per car or truck. A few cents added to the Federal excise tax on fuels would cover it. And we would not need to make concessions to China and India to get them to play in the climate change game.

Indeed, I suggest the cost could be less than that. The scientists base their cost estimate on a special program to deliberately spread sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, especially over the polar regions. But the fact is that petroleum naturally comes with sulfur, which is usually removed at additional cost. If we simply allowed the sulfur to stay in commercial jet fuels, so that it would naturally be spread over the polar region by international flights on Great Circle routes between the US, Japan, China, Russia and Europe, we could get the benefit of enough cooling to counteract global warming while REDUCING the cost of fuel production! That approach would take a modicum of itnernational cooperation, but it is so much easier than any other approach to global warming, and does not require complete participation by all nations, that it seems feasible.

Does that sound too easy, too cheap? The fact is that the IPCC scientists generally agree that the direct cause of global warming over the last 30 years has been increasing regulation of power plant emissions, cracking down on sulfur dioxide, which was intensified with the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments intended to fight the (actually very minor) problem of acid rain. They also agree that the changeover from Chlorine compounds to other refrigerants in 1990, out of fear of the Ozone Hole, has been a major factor in INCREASING global warming, since the substitute chemicals are ferociously efficient greenhouse gases a thousand times stronger than CO2. Going back to CFC refrigerants would give TWICE as much cooling, according to the IPCC, as the Kyoto Protocol goals! Additionally, recent studies have shown that, as ozone increases over the South Pole, MORE solar radiation is absorbed as UV but re-emitted as infrared, ADDING to the heating of the earth. The more we worry about the minor problem of the ozone hole, the worse we are making global warming!

When I say the ozone hole and acid rain are minor problems, I am quite serious. The $500 million, ten year study conducted on acid rain by the US, involving thousands of scientists, was published in 1990. The National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program concluded that the ONLY place actually affected by acid rain from sulfur oxides from power plants were a few lakes in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. A more rational solution to their acidity problem would be to add lime to the water to neutralize the acid. Voila! Otherwise, the alleged effects were simply wild speculation that did not hold up to objective scientific scrutiny. Yet the overreaction to sulfur oxide pollution has directly caused global warming! Without it, the earth would still be cooling like it was from 1935 to 1975.

The ozone "hole" is not really a hole. At its worst it is only a 10% decrease in the concentrations of ozone (O3, three atoms of oxygen) in the air over Antarctica, which is only a temporary event in the Southern Hemisphere Spring. It disappears after a few weeks as ozone levels return to normal. The reason ozone drops over the South Pole is that, during the winter, there is NO SUNLIGHT. Ozone is manufactured in the atmosphere by ultraviolet light hitting oxygen (O2) molecules, producing free oxygen atoms that unite with oxygen molecules to form O3, ozone. During several months of total darkness, there is no new ozone production to keep up with the normal rate of breakdown of the ozone molecules, which are chemically unstable and tend to combine voraciously with other molecules (the reason that flying at high altitude can burn your lungs, from inhaling ozone). When the sun rises over Antarctica in the Spring, ozone levels are at their ebb (but still around 90% of maximum). The return of sunlight renews ozone production, and soon things are back to average.

Having thinner ozone over the holes is not a problem because (a) the angle of sunlight, and concentration of UV, is low even in the Antarctic summer. It is spread out over a larger area than in the inhabited latitudes, so the effective UV concentrations are much lower than they are in New York or San Francisco even during the "hole"; and (b) Antarctica is largely uninhabited, especially in the Winter and early Spring when ozone is thinner, and the humans are covered with clothing against the cold, while animals are covered with fur or feathers, and most animals spend a good deal of time in the water, which cuts out UV far more efficiently than ozone. Chlorine compounds cannot cause ozone holes over non-polar regions, because they can only contribute to breakdown of ozone molecules when the stratosphere is cold enough to have ice crystals, which only happens over the poles. CFCs could never cause ozone breakdown in daylight over inhabited areas of North America and Europe and Asia, South America, Africa and Australia. The UV over the tropical regions is naturally so intense that relying on ozone to protect you from UV radiation is foolish. So the ozone hole was never a serious problem, and trying to fight it has created a much worse problem.

The simple scientific truth, according to the UN IPCC, is that there would be NO global warming problem if we did not have regulation of sulfur oxides and CFC air pollutants! Now the misguided "regulate everything" crowd wants us to fix THEIR screwups by making huge sacrifices in every aspect of our lives, rather than forcing them to admit that they didn't really think about the long term consequences of their environmental programs in the 1970s and 1990s.

Richard Mouw's "Opportunity for Mormons" really an "Opportunity for Evangelicals"

2008-07-09T21:31:10Z

Recently Professor Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Theological Seminary, wrote an essay for Beliefnet entitled "A New Opportunity for Mormonism?" (found at http://www.beliefnet.com/story/233/story_23378_1.html) in which he suggested that the LDS Church convene a Vatican II style conference to review its doctrines in consultation with theologians of other denominations.

We Mormons can never be too grateful to Richard Mouw, professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, for publicly acknowledging that Evangelicals have for many years aided and abetted an enterprise based on telling lies about Mormonism. (See http://www.beliefnet.com/story/156/story_15656.html) That enterprise has been formally endorsed and financially supported by bodies like the Southern Baptist Convention.

Mormons have, on the other hand, not carried out any formal efforts to issue propaganda about other churches, or portray the people in those churches as either culpably ignorant or conniving. You can go to LDS Sunday School every week, and you will never see a Church-endorsed video on the topic of "the Satanic origins of Protestantism". To the contrary, Luther and the other people responsible for the Reformation are honored as good people whose work laid the foundation for eventual American religious pluralism that allowed the LDS Church to be organized and thrive, despite opposition, rather than be ruthlessly suppressed.

Mormons are more than happy to explain to other Christians (as well as Buddhists, which I did in Japan) what the Latter-day Saints believe. All of the literature that most people could read in a lifetime, explaining the LDS faith in detail, is available at no cost, both on the official LDS Church web site at www.lds.org, and its auxiliary, www.mormon.org, as well as at the BYU web page FARMS.byu.edu, and the unofficial web site www.fairlds.org. This material includes not only the King James Version, with footnotes and cross references to other LDS scriptures like the Book of Mormon, but also the lesson manuals used to teach Mormons, the articles from over 30 years of LDS Church magazines, including the sermons taught at the semi-annual General Conferences, a complete book on LDS history over 300 pages long that is used to teach college-age students, and many complete books of scholarship written by LDS PhDs in ancient languages and history, such as Hugh Nibley and John Welch.

Mormons are very open about what they believe. The only problem is that many Christians seem determined to create a “straw Mormon” that has the characteristics and beliefs that will please anti-Mormons who don’t care much about scholarly integrity, and who avoid actually reading the massive amounts of first-hand information. Mr. Mouw’s comment to Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune (See http://www.sltrib.com/ci_9775960?IADID=Search-www.sltrib.com-www.sltrib.com) about Mormon “secrecy” really does not relate to any doctrines; while the ordinances carried out in the LDS temples are not open to public view, and their details are held confidential among Mormons, the doctrines that underpin the ordinances are explicit in the published sources on the Web. As a young missionary, inside the walls of the Salt Lake Temple, and invited to ask an apostle questions about our temple experiences, the answers were provided by quoting public statements of Church leaders and the LDS scriptures. If you are not entering those covenants with God yourself, then you cannot regard them as sacred, and Mormons are not going to dishonor those experiences by laying them open to ridicule. But we are more than happy to talk about the general nature of the ordinances and point out at length the scriptural basis for them.

Other writings by Mouw and other Evangelical scholars have expressed a hope that maybe Mormons would, if they just spent enough time learning the gospel from Evangelicals, would come to agree with them and modify the distinctive Mormon doctrines. The attitude seems to be based on a view that Mormons are just a little naive. This latest essay, by acknowledging LDS scholarship, seems to back off of that posture.

Professor Flake, quoted in the Tribune article, is right in that the LDS Church is not going to convene a meeting that is expected to produce some kind of definitive statement of the areas of agreement and disagreement between Mormons and Evangelicals. For one thing, Evangelicals are actually pretty diverse on a lot of theological positions, such as the polarity between Calvinist and Arminian views on free will and the process of salvation, or the necessity of baptism over and beyond simply declaring faith in Christ. There is disagreement over the expectation of revelation to individuals today (a Christianity Today editor was excoriated by some ministers for telling how he heard a voice admonish him to write a book and donate its proceeds to help a student pursue the ministry; some Evangelicals don’t like God talking to people directly on even small matters).

The most important thing in a political context is that Mormons regard other Americans as perfectly entitled to pursue any religion they believe in, and not to be punished or limited in the exercise of theiur rights as citizens because of their choice of religion or faith or non-faith. This has been explicit since the earliest days of Mormonism, growing out of an experience with official persecution, and is summarized in the Articles of Faith and Section 134 of the Doctrine & Covenants.

By contrast, the attacks on Mitt Romney orchestrated by Huckabee and others implicitly argued that people who believe in the distinct doctrines of Mormonism should be barred from the opporutnity to hold the office of President, lest it make the religion “legitimate” in the eyes of other Americans, and make it easier for people to become Mormons and literally “go to hell.”

That attitude, that secondary effects on the salvation of unspecified people is sufficient basis to deny legal equality to Mormons, is a pernicious one, that violates the spirit of Article VI and the First Amendment. Any religion that believes those outside it are damned would be able to use that reasoning to place the members of all other churches in Dhimmitude, second class citizenship, just as Muslims seek to do under Shari’a law in some countires. That result is nothing less than a theocracy. To the extent that some Evangelicals seek that outcome, they fully deserve the epithet of incipient theocrats lobbed by those on the Left. The logic of making Mormons less than full Americans also applies to Jews, and Catholics, and Muslims, and Buddhists.

Frankly, when one hears certain Evangelicals talking about Mormons and members of other religions going to hell, the tagline implied is “and good riddance.” They seem to be looking forward to a heaven with a small population, perhaps in the belief it will increase the value of their “mansions” in Paradise if there are no lower class riff-raff like Mormons there. One is reminded of the explanation offered by SBC leadership for the fact that the membership of churches in the SBC dropped by 40,000 during 2007, namely that Baptists have developed a reputation for being judgmental of others, in other words, all too ready to send others to hell.

There are millions of Mormons all over America who vote for non-Mormons every election, such as George W. Bush, including in many cases even where a Mormon is an opposing candidate. Mormons can’t understand why some Baptists or other Christians don’t feel like they can return the favor.

Biblical Inerrancy vs. A More Rational Approach to Scripture Words

2008-07-09T18:08:50Z

In the practice of law, and argument over the meaning of a court decision as applied to a different case, attorneys assume that there are two levels of writing in court opinions. The writing that specifically addresses the questions placed before the court for decision, and which must be answered to come to a conclusion, are the "holding" of the case. Statements that are not essential to the chain of reasoning are called "dicta", meaning "mere words". The dicta are not considered to have precedential value for other cases.

The problem with this distinction is that judges do not bother distinguishing the dicta from the holding when they write their opinions. They don't put all the dicta in footnotes, they don’t use a distinct typeface for dicta, they don't put it in parentheses or brackets, and they don't insert a subheading for dicta. There is no opportunity for a judge who wrote an opinion to offer a statement as to what the opinion meant or which parts of it are more precedential and which are dicta, since by definition, anything that the judge says outside the boundaries of the formal opinion ARE dicta, in fact the only thing that is definitively, 100% dicta and that no one could possibly assert is the Holding.

So we have a typical legal rule: a standard that promises answers to our quandaries, but really only is an invitation to argue even more. Clarity is the enemy of ambiguity, ambiguity is the ecosystem of argument, and argument is what attorneys are paid to do.

Nevertheless, the distinction between "holding" and "dicta" is a concept that could usefully be applied in interpreting the scriptures. Some of the words said by Christ and the prophets and apostles mainly serve the function of giving us a picture to see, supporting the main thrust of an argument or assertion. They may not be that important in and of themselves.

This view is obviously opposed to conventional notions of what "inerrant" scripture consists of. The concept of inerrancy seems to assert that there is no dicta in the Bible, so that we have to accept every single sentence in scripture as a definitive statement describing the nature and characteristics of the thing referred to, rather than supplying a context to support the main thrust of meaning of the speaker. If we interpreted court decisions this way, there would be a lot of casual rhetoric enshrined as unquestionable precedent. It would force us to twist the meaning of words in order to escape being unreasonably bound by statements that were never intended to be binding and enforceable. We create similar problems in trying to understand the scriptures if we embrace inerrancy and reject the distinction between "holdings" or doctrine and the dicta that were never intended by the speaker to be viewed as inerrant or even important.

This is especially true of statements in the Bible that appear to assert the boundary conditions of space and time. "In the beginning", "all mankind", "the whole earth", "the whole land", etc. maybe be only approximations of the facts, dicta rather than absolute enforceable rulings. The creation, Noah's flood, the extent of Nephite and Lamanite colonization of the New World, are all scriptural assertions of completeness in application that are likely dicta to a great extent. Statements that assert universal application are easy to disprove with a single counterexample. The scriptures would be more robust against attack if we understood them to contain some dicta along with the statements that were meant to be taken seriously.

July 4--A Holiday for All Mankind

2008-07-04T20:36:42Z

One of the best recollections of Independence Day was offered on a cold day in November, 1863, by Abraham Lincoln, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Lincoln saw the need to maintain a unified and strong United States in order to demonstrate that the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence could be embodied in a real nation, so that the rest of the world could see that then-still-radical notion that "all men are created equal" is not a recipe for endless dissent and secession and chaos, and that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" could be a form of government that could endure and be adopted by other nations around the world.

While we properly honor Lincoln for using the Civil War as an opportunity to end slavery and create a legal foundation for racial equality, both Americans and others give too little credit to his initial and primary goal, of preserving a nation both unified and democratically governed. If the Confederacy had won, secession would have continued its course within both the CSA and the USA, with the national governments so weakened they could accomplish little. By the time of the Japanese imperial conquests in the pacific and the German conquests in Europe, there would have been no strong United States with the unity of will and material capacity to take on both new empires and defeat them, and then turn them into leading democracies. There would have been no unified America to serve as an inspiration to the captive nations of Eastern Europe and bring about a quiet revolution that ended the Soviet Union.

Today, billions of people live in nations that strive for democratic ideals of governance "by the people" because of the inspiring example of the USA, the direct use of USA military and economic power to support freedom, and the function of the USA as a "world nation" with immigrant ties to cousins all around the globe, ties that infect the people of ancestral homelands with the desire for freedom and equality and democracy. The Declaration of Independence rightly announced that the reasons for independence were universal principles that apply, not just to descendants of English colonists, but also to "all men" who are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" which belong to them and not to any form of government.

National survey of churches shows Mormon distinctives

2008-06-24T22:29:49Z

The Deseret Morning News has reported on a new Pew Charitable Trusts survey of religious groups in America and their views and practices in religion and politics. The story can be found at http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,700237373,00.html?pg=1. The Survey report can be found at http://religions.pewforum.org/.

A bit more than 500 people identifying themselves as "Mormon" answered the survey, about 1.7% of the over 30,000 people interviewed.

The survey demonstrates two things relevant to Mormon-Evangelical relations. First, the caricature made by many Evangelical anti-Mormon publications that Mormons are uneducated and poor, and therefore easily misled, is false; Mormons exceed Evangelicals in educational achievement and income.

Second, the view of many Evangelicals expressed during the presidential primary elections that Mormons like Mitt Romney are not trustworthy supporters of conservative, Republican values, is demonstrably false. Mormons are far more Republican, conservative, and opposed to abortion and the normalization of homosexuality than Evangelicals. They also have more children per family, and there are far more families with 4+ children than any other group.

On many of the views that identify social conservatism, Mormons lead all other religious groups, including Evangelicals and Catholics.

It is interesting that Mormons are also far and away the strongest supporters of an active US foreign policy. The fact that many Mormons and their sons and daughters have lived abroad, and that they are very aware of their church's international membership, makes their perspective much more global than other Americans. After all, half of all Mormons live outside the US, in Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Pacific.

Mormons are relatively educated, prosperous, conservative, religious, and international.

What is a successful missionary?

2008-06-18T16:34:31Z

I was set apart for my mission by Bruce McConkie, back when he was one of the Seven Presidents of the Seventy, and also assigned to oversee my mission in Japan. Over my two years there, he would do periodic interviews with each of us, in addition to spending a couple of hours teaching us as a group. Looking back at the three things I had jotted down on the flyleaf of my Bible from the blessing he gave me at the start, I realized that he had not promised anything spectacular but that his words accurately summed up what I accomplished. Seeing that let me feel that I had lived up to what the Lord expected me to do.

Serving a mission in Japan was what I had always expected to do, since I was born in Japan when my Dad was an already-married missionary in the days after World War II, and my family had a lot of ongoing contact with the Japanese Saints in Japan and in Utah. Serving my mission was also a reunion for me with my mother’s family and the nation of my birth. I had a somewhat easier time speaking the language than many other missionaries, because it was really my first language before being set aside for English. So no matter what happened in my proselyting, my mission maintained my continuity with my family and my ancestral culture, and it helped me understand better who I was and what I was. Rather than creating questions of identity and purpose, it answered them.

I certainly saw other missionaries who had much more difficult times. Exactly halfway through my mission, the mission was split and we got a new mission president, Russell Horiuchi, a geography professor from BYU. He introduced himself by telling us the story of his mission call by President N. Eldon Tanner. He thought he was going to be admonished for supporting an underground newspaper at BYU. When President Tanner said “What would you think of serving as a mission president?” his answer was “Not much.” But President Tanner told him, “This is not a request, it is a Call.” He said he suddenly realized what it meant when he raised his arm to sustain Tanner as a prophet, seer and revelator. As the new mission had been formed, there was a flurry of transfers made by the existing mission president. Almost every missionary who had had a difficult confrontation with the previous president was (to their mutual relief) sent to the Japan East Mission. When we had missionary conferences, there was always a discussion on the topic “What I did that caused me to be sent to the Japan East Mission.” One elder had asked to be sent home, and was interviewed by Gordon B. Hinckley, who gave him a pep talk that persuaded him to give it a second shot, but he asked to be transferred to the new mission.

Another thing President Horiuchi told us was that his instructions from the First Presidency were that his most important job was to take care of the missionaries and their health and testimonies. When the missionaries were healthy physically and emotionally and spiritually, the work of proselyting could then go forward.

We had missionaries who were depressed, who had a hard time getting motivated to proselyte. One thing I noticed was that some of the most “successful” missionaries (in terms of number of baptisms) were the ones who didn’t feel like their worth and exaltation were being judged on how many baptisms they had; their own natural optimism and enjoyment of life attracted people to them. Conversely, those of us who were gloomy and desperate were investigator repellants. Now, I don’t think anyone’s emotional state was ever altered by someone else telling him to “cheer up” or “calm down”. If we HAD conscious control over our emotions, most of us are not so masochistic that we would intentionally make ourselves depressed. So, while I recognize the Catch 22 quality of this observation, I think it is nonetheless true; missionaries who were not desperate for converts actually had more of them.

We did have one elder for whom the pressures (mostly self-inflicted) of serving as a missionary and learning a totally new language were too much, and who started to have hallucinations. It was actually diagnosed by Bruce McConkie, who uncovered the fact that the elder was hearing voices during the interview he held with him. Elder McConkie came out of the room and told President Horiuchi to make arrangements to have that elder fly back to the US with the next missionary returning home. We were told later that, after some time in treatment, the missionary served out his two year mission in an English-speaking area.

One of the other things I concluded was that, for me at least, the most effective way of contacting potential converts was having them walk in the door of the meetinghouse. I don’t think the 8,000 hours or so I spent on going door to door or contacting people on the street directly produced any of my baptisms. Perhaps this was a lesson for me on the difference between my own efforts and the Lord’s way of getting his program accomplished.

I don’t know the psychology of anyone well enough to diagnose them, but I wonder if, at least in some cases, the pressures and disappointments of missionary life grow at least partially out of our own expectations for ourselves, our drive to be successful in an environment that was chaotic and confusing, and in which most of the rules don’t have anything to do with how many convert baptisms one garnered. (e.g. “Mission Rule No. 123: Hymn No. xxx is Elder Benson’s [the apostle supervising the mission] favorite hymn. Memorize it and sing it often.”) Hopefully, with the perspective of years, we will appreciate how many of our blessings (including the opportunity to be instrumental in someone else’s conversion) are simply unmerited grace from God.

When God speaks of sending out the “weak and simple” (Bruce McConkie read that with flair, looking out at us so that we knew WE were the people being described) to preach the gospel, he is telling us we are, by definition, inadequate to the task. We only accomplish it when God does the major part of the work. We cannot force God to be more gracious by punishing ourselves, or torturing ourselves, or making ourselves go door-to-door in the rain when we have the flu. We can only make ourselves fit instruments for the work, and humbly place ourselves in his hands to take us to those who are ready to listen.

The fact that we might spend a year of our lives doing work that seems to get us nowhere, until God sends us the person he wants us to teach and baptize, seems at first like an awful extravagance, a profligacy with our invested effort. Surely there was something better we could be doing during that time? Gaining an education, buying a car, hanging out with girls? Why not send us to Japan just for the one month when we teach the person we were meant to teach? But it seems that, to God, the worth of that one soul is greater than the worth of one year of our 20 year old lives. And if we don’t learn humility from that experience, we might need other lessons in the subsequent years of our lives.

What are they dying for?

2008-06-10T22:27:34Z

Because major road construction is being conducted all summer on the highway to our work site, the company sent out information about the hazards of road construction to both workers and vehicle passengers. It occurred to me, when I read that over 1,000 people die each year in accidents in road construction areas (including about 100 road construction workers), that it is comparable to the fatalities among US servicemembers in Iraq.

For some reason the fatalities here on US roads appear to be more acceptable than those in Iraq. Is it because we consider road construction more vital than stabilizing the Middle East, and therefore worth the sacrifice? Is it more acceptable for innocent men, women and children to die through negligence or oversight, than for soldiers to die in a struggle against terrorists, who intentionally murder innocent men, women and children?

Political Abuse of the New Testament

2008-06-10T20:33:49Z

The following is my comment on a posting on Article6blog.com, which is concerned with maintaining religious freedom in the election process, as required by Article VI of the US Constitution, which prohibits any religious test or oath for persons taking Federal office. This comment responds to an item that was quoted from PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, portraying the religious message of the Republicans versus Democrats as the contrast between the doctrinal messages of Paul's epistles and the charitable message of the Epistle of James:

"James stresses the theme of faith in action perhaps more than any other single book of the New Testament. Unlike other New Testament letters, many of them attributed to Paul, James plays down dogma in favor of practical ethical guidelines that center on loving one’s neighbor and, in particular, serving the poor.
"In 2004, said Coe, 'Republicans were really battering Democrats with religious rhetoric. The response offered by Kerry and others was to say, we might not be able to compete with the religious eloquence the Republicans have a handle on, but we can on policies more consistent with the New Testament, like uplifting the poor and fighting disease in Third World countries.'”

Let’s see . . . the author of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, the wonderful sermon on the primacy of charity over faith, is supposed to be unconcerned about helping the poor? The apostle who in many of his letters and in Acts is soliciting funds to help the poor in Jerusalem is only focused on “doctrine”? The apostle who writes to his convert and close friend Philemon and pleads with him to accept back his runaway slave Onesimus as a brother in Christ cares nothing for the lowest strata of society? Give me a break.

This kind of false dichotomy demonstrates the utter lack of familiarity with the scriptures that characterizes so much invocation of the Bible by politicians. It is in the same vein as Obama’s assertion that the Sermon on the Mount preaches tolerance of homosexual acts against the “intolerance” of Paul’s letters, when in fact the Sermon of Jesus emphasizes strict accountability for sexual sin–even for thinking about it–while Paul’s plea is for those Christians who had left homosexual acts behind them to not fall back into them, so they do not nullify the mercy and forgiveness that they had already received from Christ.

It is such picking and choosing among passages of scripture that Shakespeare seems to refer to when he says that “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
(William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), “The Merchant of Venice”, Act 1 scene 3) As John noted, it dishonors the Bible to think one can use a sentence from it as authority out of the context of all the other paragraphs, chapters, and books. What makes the Bible authoritative is that it comes from God, who is the ultimate author and authority of the whole. One cannot claim authorization from God while intentionally disregarding many of His words that are also relevant to the topic under discussion.

But should we be surprised by this abuse of scripture? Not when we realize that this “pick and choose” approach is also the way that liberal judges approach the constitutions of the US and its states. In the process of finding new “constitutional rights” that limit the choices of legislatures and voters, those judges ignore the fundamental principle that the most important “rights” guarded by any constitution are the rights of democratic self-government, the right to be free from rule by the whims of an oligarchy, such as the class of judges. For liberals, neither the Bible nor constitutions are sacred.

The fundamental problem is that the habit of “lawyering” with biased arguments on behalf of a client, which is inherent to the adversarial system of the common law courts, is being improperly extended to the political arena where we are supposed to be building consensus and unity, not pursuing division and contention and a “win or lose” mindset that allows for no compromise or even a concession that the other side has an honorable purpose in mind. Candidates are afraid that if the voters do not see an election as a life-or-death decision, they will not bother to vote.

The irony is that most lawsuits actually end up being resolved by a settlement in compromise, usually without a trial and its argumentation before a jury, but there is no room for compromise in the political arena, since any concession is viewed as an admission against interest, and a sign of weakness and lack of confidence in one’s own side.

When religion gets coopted into this unduly adversarial process, churches are pushed to take sides, when there is much more to a real church than political positions. (The problem with the church Obama recently resigned from is that it had apparently become more of a political advocate than a means to spiritual salvation for its members.)

Emma Smith--My Story: A Beautiful Film

2008-06-04T19:45:42Z

My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed the new movie, Emma Smith—My Story. The LDS Church clearly supported and cooperated in the production of this film. The actors who portray Joseph and Emma are the same ones who appear in the Church's own film about Joseph that it shows in its visitors centers. It uses outtakes form the film for some of its scenes. They are essentially twin productions, telling the story of these two people at the center of the Restoration from their respective perspectives.

One aspect of the Emma movie that I found interesting is that it did not show any of the miraculous events that were experienced by Joseph, even those to which Emma was a direct witness, such as healings of people with malaria in the initial settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois. This is in contrast to the Joseph Smith film that is shown in church visitor centers, which specifically affirms those experiences which Joseph testified of and which were witnessed by others. This contrast emphasizes that Emma was exercising faith and trust in Joseph and his prophetic calling throughout her life, from the time they courted to the end of his life. It is pointed up directly in connection with the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was recorded, which she never sees or touches except when they are wrapped in a cloth. Emma's faith was tested in this case and others. When we see the faith that she has in Joseph, expressed by her defense of him and her faithfulness through all kinds of trials, including the rejection by her father, it is a testimony to us that he is someone worthy of our trust as well. The person who knew him most intimately had to exercise faith, and she did.

Another theme of the film is the yearning of Emma and Joseph to have children, and the heartbreak of several deaths of their infants. When Joseph promises Emma the fulfillment of whatever blessing she writes for herself, she asks to raise her children. Hers is a selfless wish.

What comes through loud and clear is that Joseph loved Emma and that her love for him was one of the anchors of his turbulent and difficult life. Anyone who loves Joseph must love Emma too.

When Emma loses the husband that has been the main force in her life, we understand how her battered and bruised heart lacked the energy to follow the other Saints to a refuge in the unknown West. To leave Nauvoo would have been to leave the last vestige and visible evidence of the love that had been the center of her life. Those of us who never went through her heartache are in a poor position to judge her harshly.

The film is beautifully photographed, often in the original locations where the events took place (another mark of the Church's cooperation with the producers). There is nothing amateurish about the movie to distract us from the pure experience of the story. The actress who portrays Emma in old age deserves commendation as well. Anyone who sees this film will be prepared to see the Church film with a deeper appreciation for the reality in which Joseph's miraculous experiences were anchored. They will know through Emma's eyes that Joseph was an honest and sincere man who earned the love and trust of his intimate companion, and so deserves our trust in his testimony about God and angels.

The enemies of Mormonism will hate this movie, because it makes Joseph real for us. It invites us to approach him and trust him, as Emma Hale Smith did.

Texas Supreme Court Si, California Supreme Court No

2008-06-04T18:57:12Z

In today’s Breakpoint commentary from Chuck Colson (see http://www.informz.net/pfm/archives/archive_610178.html), he criticizes not only the California Supreme Court for imposing gay marriage and overruling a law passed by vote of 60% of citizens, but also the Texas Supreme Court for liberating 400 children of polygamous families. The following is a letter I sent to Mr. Colson:

I completely share your distress at the outrageous usurpation of authority by the 4 person majority of the California Supreme Court. It takes away from the people of California their fundamental right to incorporate moral values into the law that governs them.

However, I do not share your concern about the Texas Supreme Court ruling. I have no association with the FLDS and don’t think I have ever consciously ever spoken with any of their adherents. I am simply an attorney who, as a Japanese American, is very aware of the ability of even Americans, who are taught about the importance of due process of law and equality under the law, Americans whose have sworn an oath to uphold those constitutional rights, to cast them aside and imprison people en masse due to nothing other than irrational fear and hatred of people who are different.

The Texas Supreme Court did not address polygamy, but rather another outrageous and tyrannical state action, this time by the Texas child welfare agency and a cooperative local judge, who deprived hundreds of children, plus two dozen adults that the State claimed were children, of their liberty for two months without due process of law. The only physical danger that Texas identified was the "marriage" of teenage girls under the age of consent to older men, basically as victims of statutory rape. That would be a basis for removal of girls in that age group. But the Texas authorities removed all male children, who by definition were not at risk from such abuse, and children as young as 12 months of age. They also erroneously classified women as old as 37 who had teenage children as "minors" and imprisoned them without any specific evidence that they were in fact not adults.

There was no evidence that small children were victims of pedophilia. There was no evidence that any of the children had been battered. The "harm" for over 400 minors was alleged to be that they were being "taught" to accept underage "marriage" as acceptable.

The law in Texas, and I am sure most states, is that the remedy of summary removal of children from the custody of his or her legal parents is justified only if there is imminent threat to the health of the child. Sadly, such physical abuse happens in every city, most often perpetrated by boyfriends of the mother or a stepparent, although occasionally even a natural parent so lacks any love for his or her own child as to commit such injury. But there was nothing of that kind happening in this case. The Texas authorities talked about generic "child abuse" in their statements to the press in order to encourage speculation that would justify their actions, but in truth the only evidence was their argument that a 4 year old boy was being taught that underage marriage was acceptable.

But Texas allows gay couples to adopt children, and this surely involves teaching them that such relationships are "acceptable", so is the state going to summarily remove all children from the custody of gay parents? Texas tolerates de facto polygamy by men who have multiple children with multiple women, who simply avoid even the pretense of marrying the mothers, in situations where the children are surely NOT being taught that this behavior is wrong. Does it plan to summarily remove all the children from their mothers? Of course not.

As the dissenting judges on the Texas Supreme Court pointed out, there would be an argument for taking custody of actual minors at risk from actual statutory rape. But the removal of 400 children was based solely on hatred and distrust of their parents' odd religion.

The Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court in Texas pointed out that the Texas Child Protective Services have many powers to intervene to protect children from actual danger short of removing them from their mothers. Anyone who has dealt with child custody issues in the context of divorce or alleged child abuse knows that forcible removal of a small child from his or her mother does incalculable damage that can have repercussions in that child's behavior for years. These children were treated worse than the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. They were allowed only restricted communication with their mothers. For weeks they were housed in a mass dormitory without any privacy under the watchful eye of Texas CPS proctors who treated them like criminals, refused to comfort them when distressed, and failed to provide careful medical attention, all of which was attested to by volunteers who assisted in the shelters. A child who is treated like a criminal will feel that he or she has done something terribly wrong for which they are being punished. They were being told that their mothers were criminals. When finally taken to foster homes, they were placed in the control of strangers, many of whom were explicitly hostile to the children's families' religion. It may be many months before we find out how many of the children were physically abused while in the custody of strangers.

We should not lose sight of the fact that NO man who is suspected of statutory rape has been arrested or indicted. The only people who have been punished are the alleged victims of statutory rape, and hundreds of innocent children who had no role in such crimes. The Texas method of prosecuting polygamy punishes everyone except the guilty. The whole scene is something out of a Kafka story.

what is more, it is clear that the Texas authorities were so anxious for an excuse to raid the YFZ Ranch that they seized on an obvious hoax phone call from a woman in Colorado, when they could have easily used telephone company resources to trace the origin of the calls to the cell phone of the disturbed 35 years old black woman who never had any relationship to the FLDS other than a strange obsession to make up lies and make phone calls to authorities and women's shelters. Apparently the Texas women's shelter that got the calls lacks caller-ID on its phones, even though it is in a business where identifying the location of victims of physical abuse is a matter of life and death. And the Texas Rangers don't know how to ask the phone company for that information. It is clear that the phone records of the woman in Colorado show she made the calls to Texas. She used the same false name and story about being a 16 year old mother in many other fake calls. Arizona authorities were able to confirm that the man she claimed was the father had been in monitored probation in Arizona and had not been in Texas for 30 years. The Texas Rangers could have learned all that in a few minutes using their own telephones. But they were obviously intent on not looking a gift horse in the mouth. They thought they would do a fishing expedition throughout the houses and then take all the kids into custody and not let them talk to their mothers so the kids would be witnesses. But the only thing they have accomplished is to screw up the case so badly that none of the evidence gathered will be admissible in court. They were so eager to exercise their authority that they forgot who they were supposed to be protecting, and that they were in America and not a communist totalitarian country.

Their apparent model for handling child custody disputes was the armed raid on the home of Elian Gonzalez, using automatic weapons against unarmed women and children, without regard for the risk that their invasion could result in a crossfire that could kill the child they were supposedly protecting. If Elian's (illegitimate) father endorsed the raid, he should have lost his parental rights for risking the life of his son.

What has the state of Texas taught the children? That it is wrong to "marry" a teenage girl, but it is OK to, at gunpoint (Texas had an armored personal carrier with a machine gun, for gosh sake), take teenage girls and boys and children as young as 12 months old and put them in jail. Until the intervention by the Texas appellate courts, it was clear that you will be treated better if you are a terrorist, and with more respect for your religion, than if you are a 5 year old whose parents might be polygamists.

The Texas authorities have basically put on the black hat in this story. Their attempts to portray the FLDS as pure evil have backfired as the mothers have acted lawfully, through the courts, to seek redress for the unlawful imprisonment of their children (and in two dozen cases, themselves). Texas has demonstrated its impotence in actually addressing the problem of polygamy, and incompetence in conducting a criminal investigation that will produce durable convictions.

In conclusion, I fully concur with you that the California Supreme Court's ruling was a tyrannical abuse of authority that violated the explicit, fundamental right of Californians to govern themselves. But the abuse of authority in Texas was stopped by the Texas Supreme Court. While the California decision utterly lacked authority in law or the state or federal constitutions, the Texas ruling was an enforcement of the explicit terms of the statute and the clear requirement of the 14th amendment that Texas not deprive any person, even 12 month old babies, of liberty without due process of law.

Liberals can't tolerate freedom

2008-06-04T00:17:13Z

In today’s Salt Lake Tribune [http://www.sltrib.com/News/ci_9462164], liberal columnist Rebecca Walsh complains about “self-segregation” of people, including in Utah. She specifically identifies the two groups as liberals, like her, who want to be around people who think like themselves and therefore stay in the city of Salt Lake, and conservatives who live in the suburbs. Like a typical liberal, Walsh is not happy until she makes everyone else live the way she wants them to, for their own good, of course.

The situation Walsh complains about is the result of free choices by many people. It is NOT the result of a tyrant ordering people to live in a particular place to satisfy some goal chosen by that tyrant. America suffered through that kind of idiocy for twenty years. It was called busing for racial balance in schools. If you are black, Hispanic or American Indian, your IQ does not depend on your proximity to white people, but that was the arrogant assumption behind the do-gooders who used litigation to force taxpayers to generate millions of tons of unnecessary greenhouse gases busing children for an hour each way to schools on the other side of their home towns. The harm done by depriving the kids of study time, and of making it impossible for parents to participate in the schools, did lots of educational harm, while the alleged benefits never showed up. In the Prince Georges County, Maryland, suburbs of Washington, DC, as the demographics of neighborhoods evolved, the buses were carrying black kids to schools that were predominantly black, but everyone was afraid to stop the stupidity because the NAACP threatened to sue.

It took the US supreme Court to stop similar stupidity in the Seattle school district, which thought that decreasing the concentration of Asian kids from 25% to 15% was going to help kids be less racially prejudiced as adults, when the coercion and arbitrariness of the system was teaching them to be passive, powerless dolts and submit to whatever government told them to do. Liberal social engineering schemes need people to be passive and dependent so they can be manipulated by the self-anointed geniuses of the Progressives.

Let people live where they want to live. Let this be a free country. And let the do-gooders keep their hands to themselves instead of treating the rest of humanity like we are pawns in their vision for the perfect society.

Keeping politics out of church

2008-06-04T00:10:28Z

After reading New York Times piece [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/us/01evangelical.html?pagewanted=2&_r=3 ] on the effort by some evangelical churches to be less identified with one particular political party, I was confused. If you are intentionally discussing politics in a church-sponsored gathering, how does it get away from the problem of having your church’s leaders endorsing particular political positions and parties and candidates? It may be worthwhile just to help people in the political minority at a particular church to comprehend that they are not alone, but it sustains the basic problem: that people are mixing their politics with their religion.

In any group of more than one or two friends, whatever emerges as the majority view can be intimidating to people in the minority (except for the few people who like to argue and end up becoming lawyers), and make them feel like they need to suppress their expression of political views in order to avoid being ostracized from the ostensibly religious group.

Occasionally a Mormon social gathering and its conversation will informally hear a joke told on a political candidate, but it is pretty well understood that the purpose of church dinners and other activities is to build unity by concentrating on what we share, not to highlight controversies or build “unity” by offending and excluding people who hold minority political views. I frankly have no idea what political affiliation my bishop (leader of our congregation) or my stake president (leader of several local congregations) has registered for, and I don’t expect he will tell me.

Sometimes a stake president might run for state or Federal office (Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho used to be the president of my own stake)–after all, LDS Church positions are held by part-time, unpaid volunteers–but he doesn’t get to campaign in the church or on church time.

The only way to get your church out of politics is to take politics out of your church. No political position is worth offending a child of God and driving him out of the Church. You can have those discussions in your own house or at a political rally, on your own time, where it will be clear from the context that if someone disagrees with you they are not at risk of losing your fellowship and love as a brother in Christ.

Religious people care about God's creations

2008-06-03T20:11:43Z

Recently Article6blog.com ran this excerpt from a left wing blogger named Cory Farley:

“Politics should be informed by science . . . .

“In the matter of religion, I have no preference. I don’t care what you believe or what you preach, though I’ll be obliged if you don’t preach creationism in the schools. This nation is far enough behind in the sciences without digging that hole any deeper.

“Where elected officials are concerned, though, I want decisions to be made on pragmatic grounds. I have friends, for instance—OK, acquaintances—who see no reason for conservation, because Christ will come back and carry us all away before everything runs out. Use up the oil, cut the old-growth trees, foul the water—makes no difference, because soon there will be a flash of light, a burst of music, and we’ll all grow wings and flutter off to Heaven (I may have some details wrong, but that’s the gist of it).

“Certainly they can believe that if they choose. But I don’t believe it, and I don’t want a politician who believes it making decisions that affect what the world will be like after he or she is gone.” [http://www.newsreview.com/reno/Content?oid=667991]

With respect to this kind of left wing attack on Christians who believe in the Second Coming of Christ–or for that matter Jews who believe in the First Coming of the Messiah–I can believe that there are some people who believe some version of that. Out of 300 million Americans, you can find somebody who believes just about anything you can think of. I can believe that there even may be a minister somewhere who has said this. But the public discussion in forums like Christianity Today, First Things, Dialogue (an independent journal oriented toward LDS interests), and BYU Studies is much more sensitive to mankind’s responsibility to account to God for how mankind cares for the Earth that God created. I have certainly never seen or read of any specific sermon by any Christian minister (or Mormon leader) that encourages mankind to be profligate with natural resources on the grounds that it doesn’t matter if we turn the Earth into a garbage dump.

The viewpoint of the LDS Church specifically is that the Second Coming will be a time when “the Earth will be renewed and receive its paradisaical glory.” Ultimately, according to LDS belief, the righteous who are resurrected will literally “inherit the Earth” and it will become Heaven for eternity. Indeed, according to N.T. Wright, a seniuor Anglican bishop and theologian, in his new book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, what the New Testament actually says about the future of the Earth is precisely what Joseph Smith taught: rather than being whisked away to some other place, the renewed Earth will be the abode of the righteous for all eternity. Writhgt has even been criticized because his interpretation of the New Testament is so closely ligned with Mormon beliefs, but his response is that Joseph Smith was obviously paying attention to the Bible at the precise time when many other Christians were “dematerializing” the promises of Jesus and the apostles.

While there are plenty of Intermountain Mormons who are steeped in the hunting and land exploitation culture of the American west, the fact is that Mormon leaders like Smith and Brigham Young emphasized that the Earth itself is holy, as made by God, and should be treated with respect and gratitude for its blessings.

In The Pearl of Great Price, a Mormon scripture, the narrative of Enoch relates him seeing and hearing the Earth personified, groaning under the “pollutions” of sinful men upon its face, and appealing to God for relief and cleansing, which is accomplished first by the great flood.

The ethic of the Old Testament, which emphasizes stewardship and sustainable use of land for the benefit of future generations, is renewed in Mormonism and the Book of Mormon emphasis on “promised lands” which are also testing grounds to see if those given the blessing of possessing the lands will live up to their promise of obedience to God. In the Book of Mormon, men are only tenants of land that belongs to God, beggars who owe all of their material blessings to God. The land is not theirs to exploit and ruin.

I believe there are similar views among most Christian churches that we owe it to God to care properly for the Earth He created.

Contrast that with the disregard for environmental protection that was endemic in the officially atheist Soviet Union, which was notorious for polluting the land with chemical and radioactive poisons.

ACLU opposes military recruiting of high school students

2008-05-28T00:54:54Z

The notion promoted by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch that it is somehow a violation of the human rights of teenagers to inform them about careers, job training and educational opportunities offered by the armed services assumes that only the evil or insane would ever consider military service (although the same "progressives" love to criticize any Republican who did not serve in Vietnam).

As a 20 year veteran of the Air Force, who has a son and son-in-law who are veterans, my view is that military service can often be the best thing a young man or woman can do after high school. It is a vital and irreplaceable service to our nation, a place where they can mature in an environment that challenges them mentally and physically and helps them to grow in every way. It is one of the few places that will give you full pay and benefits while you are in extended training. Much of that training translates directly into civilian employment.

The military is the single greatest financer of college education in the nation, with evening classes offered at every military base, including overseas, plus opportunities for graduate study and special courses in foreign languages. It is an opportunity to become familiar face to face with people from other nations.

When teenagers are in the midst of planning what to do with their adult lives, and looking for ways to make a positive contribution to their fellow citizens, they have the right to learn about the opportunities provided by the US armed forces. The ACLU's campaign is part of its goal to keep all Americans in a state of perpetual childhood, and not learn how to think for themselves and make their own choices.

Opposition to Italian low level radioactive waste being disposed of in Utah

2008-05-28T00:52:40Z

Anyone concernd about whether the states or the Federal government control radioactive waste might want to look at the decision that was issued by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on May 21, 2008, which invalidated Initiative 197 in Washington. I-197 was an attempt by the state of Washington to prevent disposal of Department of Energy low level radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear site in eastern Washington. The court affirmed, as have other courts for decades, that Federal supremacy and control over interstate commerce and radioactive materials prevents states from stopping shipment of radioactive waste that is authorized by Federal authority. I am confident the folks at EnergySolutions are going to use it in their arguments to the Federal District Court.

I-197 was always a fool's game, because if Washington was successful in blocking importation of radioactive waste from other states, other states could do it too, and Washington would be forever stuck with all the radioactive waste at the Hanford Site, including over 100 million gallons of highly radioactive toxic chemicals, which is far and away the largest amount of rad waste both in volume and radioactivity in the country.

Another bogus environmental crisis--Human sound

2008-05-28T00:37:24Z

Biologist Bernie Krause's theory ("Quiet Please!” in WIRED magazine, June 2008) that anthrophony--man-made noises--are threatening species survival, because they are masking parts of the audio spectrum, is certainly highly original. I suggest that is because it is contradicted by the evidence we all see and hear every day. If the Krause Hypothesis were true, Central Park in New York, and every other urban park, would be devoid of natural life. If it were true, the many wildlife refuges near urban areas, like the massive Willard Bay refuge on the Great Salt Lake, next to the 2 million population of the Wasatch Front, would not be major stopovers on the North American migration flyways. If it were true, heavily visited Yellowstone National Park would be devoid of fauna. If it were true, highly urbanized Oahu island, Hawaii, would be a wasteland. If it were true, airports would not have the serious problem of masses of birds that congregate near the runways and risk plane-killing collisions with 747s, like the one that tore an engine off the Presidential Airborne Command Post at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, twenty years ago.

I served 20 years in the Air Force, most of it working on environmental issues on and around Air Force bases, but most of the wildlife issues arose because birds and mammals loved living there. Military bases, bombing ranges and maneuver areas are often the last, best refuge of many endangered species, because what really threatens their survival is destruction of their habitat, and the security requirements of military bases prevent the unrestricted intrusion, hunting and land development that destroys habitat. One of the last colonies of the endangered Least Tern was between the runways of the Alameda Naval Air Station on San Francisco Bay; when the Base Closure Commission closed the base, the Fish & Wildlife Service turned it into a refuge. In the middle of urbanized Riverside County, California, the endangered Stephens Kangaroo Rat survives among the former weapons storage bunkers of closed March AFB. Vandenberg AFB preserves 32 miles of coastline habitat in Santa Barbara County, California, including several endangered species that don't mind the sound of space launches and ICBM test firings. On the small island of Guam, home to 300,000 people, the last habitat of several endangered birds, being destroyed by the non-native Solomon Islands Brown Tree Snake, is on Andersen AFB, which hosts military transport planes. I lived at Hamilton AFB, just north of San Francisco, amidst thriving populations of deer, raccoons, owls, buzzards, hawks, ducks, egrets, and skunks.

So please reassure your readers, and Mr. Krause, that military planes even at close range have no perceptible impact on wildlife populations. Quiet ATVs would just facilitate hunting, and if we were to make our cars run silently, even more wildlife would become roadkill.