quote:Fundamentalist Christians are the only group I've observed who have a specific bias against Mormons. Many liberals have a bias against religious people in general but that isn't stronger against Mormons than against others.
That's how I feel about the issue. I knew that Reid is LDS, and I know that Romney is LDS, but until they start spearheading the drive for public stonings, I could care less, it's all a kooky class of Protestant to me. Granted, it's a religion with a complicated racial history, but seriously, I don't expect Romney to be more thoughtful about race relations in this country than Bush was. For the next four years, if Romney is elected, black graduation rates will continue to fall, black incarceration rates will continue to rise, and Romney will be blissfully occupied with other concerns.
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Wait a minute. How is any of that directly the fault of the President? ... I mean, inherently.
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I could not find a graph of black incarceration rates, to confirm that it rises primarily under un-race-thoughtful administrations (if we could identify which those are). I could find that NJ black incarceration rate rose 40% from 1990 to 2001: 2 years of Bush, 8 years of Clinton, and 1 year of Bush 2.0. Maybe other states are different. http://www.njisj.org/reports/portrait_present.html
This paper shows that liberal states have a higher percentage of the prison population being black than do conservative states, and that the reason would not have to be racism. I did not check it in any depth: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/prison.htm
I could not find numbers for black high school graduation rates for more than one year.
It is not clear how this would be a President's fault anyway. Presidents do not have jurisdiction over how schools are run or how crimes are prosecuted, because these are state issues. I suppose a President could indirectly affect college graduation rates by proposing student loan legislation, or vetoing it.
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I'm not saying that any democrat would be better than any republican, but the presidents are our chief executives. They set the tone. The President could set the tone to wean us off of foreign oil. If Presidents want to set a tone for more morally attractive business practices and accounting procedures, they could set the tone. The same way the Administration set the tone that allowed torture.
Romney's tone is business as usual, minus government inefficiency, and if you are happy with our cultural priorities--which include economic practices, education, and criminal justice-- then a vote for him seems well-placed. ____________________________________________
Politically, I am a world away from anyone running in this race, on the democrat or republican ticket, it's as if Mitt Romney were stranded in the middle of Baghdad and had to pick between Sunni and Shite sympathies.
quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: presidents ... set the tone.
I wish they didn't but I guess they do, at least if they dont' get drowned out by other talking heads.
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quote:The involvement of any individual other than John D. Lee in the Mountain Meadows Massacre is a controversial subject that is unlikely to be resolved here at Hatrack.
Not particularly controversial among historians of the subject (including several who teach at BYU). I can provide references if you'd like.
The federal investigators were eager to prosecute as many as they could. Most under threat hid from investigators in rural southern Utah. Brigham Young stonewalled for twenty years then turned in Lee under intense pressure.
Now, this is not to say Young had anything to do with the massacre itself; attempts to link him to it have, in my opinion, failed and rather miserably. The evidence shows, however, it was reasonably well organized at the local level.
I agree that tensions were high for good reason, and it's difficult to get inside the minds of those involved.
My apologies for my rather hiccupy responses - my connection has been questionable tonight.
That doesn't sounds like the religion had to do with the crime. I am admittedly not aware of the details, but at the time wasn't Young running the territory as well, so this could have been better considered a politically motivated issue that may have had some religious undertones? If so, I don't see the big deal people make of it regarding the Mormon faith. If not, there must be some things I don't know about.
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quote:I am admittedly not aware of the details, but at the time wasn't Young running the territory as well, so this could have been better considered a politically motivated issue that may have had some religious undertones?
Yes, actually. Briefly, the situation was this:
In 1857, Young was governor of the territory. The new president, James Buchanan, decided to remove Young (his legal right), and sent both a message to that effect and an army in case the Mormons, who the federal government to that point had more or less ignored, resisted.
The Mormons got word that the army was approaching before they got Buchanan's message. As you might imagine, people freaked out. Long history of persecution, etc.
It didn't help that this was also the period of what historians call the Mormon Reformation; lots of Mormon leaders were traveling throughout the territory preaching fire and brimstone, apocalyptic rhetoric about the Second Coming and repudiating sin and so forth. Two months before the massacre the Mormon leader Parley Pratt was murdered in Missouri. So the Mormons are kind of jittery.
When Young learned of the army, he sent raiders to harry it and slow it down; this is what is usually called the Utah War. Similarly, he sent orders to the Mormon settlements in Southern Utah that no food was to be sold not help to be given to the various groups traveling through Utah headed for California. He also gave some cryptic messages to various Indian groups soliciting their help. He's preparing for a siege.
Into this situation enters the Fancher party, a group of settlers heading for California. There's a lot of debate over what exactly happened as the party worked its way southwest through Utah - they certainly clashed with locals who proved less than willing to sell food, which the Fanchers were not expecting; there was a small riot in Cedar City in southwestern Utah. There are also reports that the Fanchers engaged in some Mormon-baiting, and that Mormons did things like poison wells. Both are of uncertain veracity in detail, but in general it's certain that neither the Fanchers nor the locals were particularly friendly toward each other.
What is known is that John Lee, previously mentioned, rode south from Salt Lake and met with some Indian tribes. There were also meetings among local Mormon leaders discussing the Fancher problem. The militia was mobilized. And one morning the Fancher party found itself under siege. First by Indians, then the militia showed up. Shots were exchanged; the party was killed.
Unfortunately, there's a movie coming out about the thing starring General Zod as Brigham Young that promises to be for Mormons what the Da Vinci Code is for Catholics. It's going to argue that Young ordered the event. There is no evidence that he did, and a fair amount of evidence that he was distressed afterwards, so, alas.
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Well, if you're (general you) getting a Mormon Da Vinci Code then that must mean you're finally making the big time, right?
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