One Is Too Many

The symbol of the skep (a type of beehive) is a ubiquitous symbol in Utah. It represents to many the industrious nature of Mormons. There was a conscious decision to relate the societal structure of of the frontier Mormon settlement in Utah with a colony of eusocial insects. Despite the fact that such an association has gathered up images of Orwellian dictatorship and a loss of individuality like a snowball rolling down the frozen sledding hill of time the image is still lovingly propagated.

When the Mormon settlers chose the skep as a symbol of their industriousness in the mid 1800s the skep had been supplanted as the beehive design of choice. The modern Langstroth hive would be invented just over four years after Brigham Young looked out over the Salt Lake Valley and proclaimed: “This is The Place”.

Image from the Utah State Flag

Today use of skeps for beekeeping is illegal in many states. Because the comb is fused to the wicker bell it is almost impossible to check the hive for disease or parasites. The bees should be especially happy about the obsolescence of the skep as the way honey is harvested from a skep is to place the skep in a press and squish it, and every living thing in it, till the honey leaks out. On the plus side skep honey should have a much higher protein content.

For some the details of the skep-type hive are also representative of aspects of Utah's authoritarian culture.

It seems like there are adds with smiling faces atop a tag-line stating they are Mormon placed all over everywhere in both virtual and real environments. They could be saying “I'm a bee”. Maybe they are saying “join the hive and get some honey”. Scrutinizing the mechanism of Utah's authoritarian machine can come across like a slap across those million smiling “I'm a Mormon” testifying faces.

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” – George Orwell 1984

I joke about Utah and its one party system. The ideal of a one-party system in a democracy is one where a community is so similarly-minded that election results are foregone conclusions. Kinda like Chicago and the string of amazing victories by the Mayors Daily. Sometimes, however, one party is just a bit too much democracy for Utah.

I've written earlier about how John Huntsman was elected to governor using moneys from only a handful of individual donors. It turns out that he only needed a handful of individual votes to get elected also.

When Huntsman began his campaign for governor the sitting governor was the hugely popular Olene Walker. Olene was easily the hardest-working person in Utah politics. Her approval ratings were typically above 70%; I remember hearing that they hit 85% at times. If the voters of Utah elected Olene there would have been no question that it would have been the result of singleness of preference, but they never got the chance.

On May 8^th 2004 the Utah state Republican convention elected not to put Olene on the ballot for the June 22^nd primary. Instead they decided to run Nolan Karras against John Huntsman. Who was Nolan Karras? Most people never will know. Huntsman was nominated with a plurality of the vote.

Olene went on to become president of Primary at the Bloomington 7th ward. Huntsman went on to a 2008 gubernatorial re-election where he won 77.7% of the popular vote.

To the nation Huntsman will always be remembered as the guy who delivered a rousing nominating speech for Sarah Palin at the 2008 Republican National convention.

If you can make it there.

Some believe that the GOP nomination for president will be clinched in the next few months. The clincher, as it is with so many things, will be cash. In 2007 most candidates experienced a major bump in campaign contributions during the second quarter. The bump was not equaled except in the campaigns of those candidates who were successfully nominated.

Utah is expected to deliver huge bags of cash to Mitt Romney and John Huntsman. In 2007-2008 Utah residents (a state with less than 1% of the population of the US) donated 11% of the money Mitt Romney received from private donors. The top zip code for donations to Romney’s 2008 presidential bid was 84604 (Provo Utah) where the haul was almost 30% greater than the next highest (06830, Greenwich CT). For all other candidates the donations from Utah mirrored Utah’s tiny population size.

One of the things that makes the Utah financial support for Romney interesting is that Utah’ns generally do not contribute to political candidates. There are not state limits on contributions, and state elections do not generally involve the use of a robust two-party system. John Huntsman is recorded as running a successful gubernatorial campaign on just $150,000.00 dollars in individual contributions (that’s right, just $150K). For this he needed just 130 donors. Because of the $2,300.00 (now $2,500.00) contribution limit for federal campaigns Romney had to pull in several thousand Utah donors.

Being a Mormon is the most significant plus for most Utah donors; though if Harry Reid ran for president the donations from Utah would be less than what we have seen for Mitt Romney. This same attribute is seen as a significant negative to donors in other parts of the country. To counter this the Mormon church has been pummeling media outlets with a multi-million dollar “I’m a Mormon” campaign. The campaign features people talking normal, or just looking normal, who then say “I’m a Mormon”. The campaign kicked into high gear co-incidental with the vital second-quarter contribution window.

Quentin L. Cook (Member of the LDS church’s Quorum of the Twelve) was quoted about the LDS church efforts to modify their image in a Deseret News article titled “Coverage of Romney's Mormon religion appears more fair than in '08” . He says the LDS church “visited the editorial boards of most of the major newspapers, starting with the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and all across the country” with suggestions about how to properly talk about Mormons.


The bill for the New York campaign was about a million bucks. One of its features was a 40 foot digital billboard in Times square playing “I’m a Mormon” clips on infinite loop. New York was specifically targeted because the playing of “The Book of Mormon” musical on Broadway was seen by the LDS church as an “enormous opportunity”.

The effort by the LDS church is a foray into anti-negative politics. On the face of it the effort is a welcome relief from Rove-Boat attack politics. It is wonderful to imagine an election where third party money is spent on erasing a candidate’s negatives rather than inventing negatives for his opponent. However, the impulse for religions to create general attacks on atheists in order to craft a positive image for themselves may be too tempting.

I can’t help thinking that if Trey Parker and Matt Stone had not been beaten down by the Scientologists we could be talking about a scientology presidency. Tom Cruise?

I don’t think that the positive flavor of this initial campaign interest is indicative of the all the tricks in Utah’s political strategy bag. After the Utah’s successful venture into Californian politics with proposition 8 we may be ready for the national stage.

Point 5 Failure

Yesterday I posted an entry about Monday’s Salt Lake Tribune article which suggested that the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon” would be good for both the LDS church, and LDS presedential candidates. Yesterday a new article was published in the Salt Lake Tribune that whined on about some of the same persecution points developed in Monday’s article.

It was in the regular Peggy Fletcher Stack and Kristen Moulton “Following Faith” column. In it they present LDS blogger Jana Riess’s five conversational clues to tell when someone is anti-Mormon.

1.You claim that a religion is inherently violent or dangerous, much like many American Christians say about Islam and some say about Mormonism.

2. You claim that the religion has deviant or illicit sexual practices — as people said about Mormons even after the LDS Church abandoned polygamy.

3. You choose its more esoteric or odd-sounding beliefs to represent the whole tradition as in statements about the LDS belief that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri or that God lives on a planet called Kolob.

4. You place it outside your culture’s dominant history as in the way Nazis “distinguished between 'good Aryans' and the 'dirty Jews' who had turned everything wrong for Germany in the interwar years."

5. You suggest that its people are less moral than you are, or unfit for full rights in society.

The last point is, for Riess, “the most damaging.”

Many Mormons hold with the idea presented by Mitt Romney that: “Freedom requires religion”. Since Freedom is a big placeholder in the “full rights in society” section of American culture I think Mormons show a big point 5 failure. What Mormons object to is the more specific statement that freedom might require a specific non-Mormon religion.