I Was a Republican
In 1964 I was a moderate Republican and I was heart-broken that Romney, Rockefeller (whom I supported), and Scranton were were not only defeated, but intentionally savaged, about like politics today, by members of their own party. I feared Goldwater. I later learned what a splendid man he was. I think he would have been a fine president, maybe a great president. Roads not taken. We’ll never know. I served at the side of an honorable man, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, during the Vietnam years. I saw his pain. And LBJ’s. Their ghastly war was as disastrous, at least, as Iraq and Afghanistan. BUT it began in 1870. Under Napoleon Third. French troops and Jesuit priests. A host of Republican and Democratic presidents were looking the wrong way. For me, I got to work with HHH on civil rights, with Martin King, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young. HHH knew I was a liberal Republican, but took me under his wing as if I were his own son. When I came back to Utah, run essentially by the John Birch Society, I said, “well, if these guys are Republicans, I must be a Democrat.†I’ve never regretted my affilliation with the Democratic Party.
Frankly, Mr. Matheson means zero on matters of war and peace, except for the one vote he will cast on the first day of Congress. If he shows up; and if he votes “present,†as a Democrat, he’s done everything I will ever ask him to do. THEN with the Democratic (notice how Rove and the Republicans can’t say DEMOCRATIC….it always ends with the T….) Party in control of just one house, investigative powers, demanding “persons and papersâ€, can issue from the House of Representatives. And a lot of people in office, including some from near at hand, will find themselves and their papers subpoena’d. THEN and only THEN all the law you know so well can be brought to bear. Not only in this country. But before the World Court.
And before the courts of the land in most nations of which I am aware. They will be, literally, under house arrest. They will not be able to step outside. Or hide. Anywhere. THEN the war criminals that head our nation will pay, as did the defendants in the dock at Nurenburg. Ed Firmage p.s. I’ve written two articles, one long and one short, on the impeachment power, that is, a “how to do it†manual, done originally for the Senate, aiming at Mr. Nixon, but published long ago, in the Utah Law Review (substantive law of presidential impeachment) and the Duke Law Journal. A book, published as an article.
October 27th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
Ok Ed,
So what I want to know, why, why, why are the vast majority of mormons republicans? Makes no sense to me.
Have you read Steve Olsen’s booklet?
http://oneutah.org/2006/03/22/why-most-utahns-are-democrats-and-just-dont-know-it-yet/
October 27th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
I have rememberances of the split not being so lopsided. There were the govenorships of Rampton and Matheson, and we had a very brave representative, Francis Farley, who was sent to Washington almost against our wishes, (a tender thing in that den of wolves), but she insisted and did a very good job, I might add.
Given Eds’ fervent sensibility in this day, it may be that there are other Mormon Brothers and Sisters who, having given thought over the past 6 years to this corrupt mess we claim as our leadership, will be correcting the mistakes of the past several voting cycles. This is my Prayer.
October 27th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
Ed,
We share similar feelings. I remember, for example, walking to the polls in Nov. ‘92, not knowing whether I would vote for daddy Chimpus or Clinton. I chose the latter, having been given no affirmative reason throughout the campaign to vote for the former.
I am curious, however, why you think Utah was run by JBS? My experience with Utahns is most would not know the difference between the John Birch Society and the Jim Backforty Shithouse. Utahns are just not that informed.
Utahns are competent at group-thimk, espeically when fear from outsiders are at issue. But comprehending topics such as communism and socialism, even civil rights for that matter, just seems beyond the thinking capacity of most Utahns.
Just a thought. Keep up the interesting posts.
October 27th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
hi friend Paula. You ask why are almost all Mormons Republican, and like me, you think it makes no sense. It’s nonsensical, in a sensical way. Mormons, dispite some evidence to the contrary (look at the polls…..a fine young guy, Pete Ashdown, runs for the Senate. Well qualified. Obviously honest, informed, good-looking. He creams Orrin in the debate, the only debate, Orrin won’t make that mistake again, in my book…..making Orrin look, well, like Orrin: Pleased as punch with himself, made for television with no hair out of place, plastered down with Brillcream. A little dab, hell. A bowl-full. Guess who has all the money. Guess where he got it. Some in Utah. But from groups I wouldn’t want to meet in daylight, let alone as shadows fall……and guess who’ll win.), do have brains.
First, they are very very conservative. Not fiscal or monetary conservatives, but social conservatives. That means they blanch at seeing a left tit on the screen, but don’t blame the Bush administration for breaking the bank in national debt, waging a criminal war of aggression, raping the world for oil a misguided god somehow, just somehow, placed under Iraq when any fool knows it’s ours. Don’t give a damn about the environment, as long as their lawn is green.
Now, there’s nothing in Mormon scripture, not one lonely little jot or tittle (not that kind of tittle, Cliff), to justify such mind-numbing immorality about all that truly matters. In fact, in every Mormon ward this Sunday, people will be taught to do good deeds, and god knows, and so do we, that a Mormon community is a good place to be when bad things happen. Mormon folk, like folks everywhere, folks, at least everywhere I”ve ever been, almost always help each other. And most of us, well beyond the tribe.
But Mormons, again like most of us, especially us lawyers, spend most of their time looking in the wrong direction. People like me. And all my kids. Just looking the wrong way when the train came. In or out. For Mormons, they’re looking backwards. We Mormon folk still feel persecuted. It ended around the turn of the century, unless you’re a polygamist. For them, blesss their hearts, the persecution, relentless, remorseless, without beginning of days or end of years, goes on. And from a liberal persuasion, like mine, forget the “good guys–bad guys” labels. CNN makes FOX look absolutely balanced, judicious, even wise and literate.
And here, virtually leaderless, the Mormon heirarchy are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they extend a helping hand to a polygamist, or even one of the groups, well-known in recent press savagery, who don’t, in the main, poly’g; but just want to live in communal justice economically, the national media (think parochial, folks. Nothing like a New York or, now under shitty leadership, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C. group to be parochial. I mean, think the last time you saw Orrin out of his suit and without the brillcream) would skin LDS leaders alive.
Or so they think, anyway. Age has something to do with this. Good hearts, but decades out of touch with any but their own subordinates. And I mean subordinates.
But maybe most important of all, a reason reeking with irony: Joseph Smith taught, perfectly biblically, that revelation, public revelation of the nature of scripture reception NOW, existed. Really, most all believers believe something like this, but we Mormons think we have a lock on it. ( Sort of like the one true church. We all know that we’d be damned lucky to be in any church, or mosque, or temple, that was occasionally trying to be true. ) So: revelation comes. Always. In the nineteenth century, Mormons, and most others, spoke in tongues, interpretted, actually had fun in church…..kids and husbands not forced to come under threat of death or no sex. Everybody was dreaming dreams.
But the cost was fractionalization of social organization. Splinter groups. I would say, except for adults hurting other adults, or anyone injuring a child, the more the merrier. BUT life on a frontier was never boring. But life was hard. With the fed’s after you (think how poor Pete Ashdown must feel, with all of Orrin’s millions….of dollars and PAC’s and polluters coming after Pete…..and Pete’s so thin anyway). Native Americans wondering, sometimes with bow and a few arrows, just why the Mormons, and the miners, and the forty-niners, were on their land, shooting their buffalo, and them. And Mormons starving for the first few years. Crossing the plains on foot, sometimes, almost always much of the way. Thousands dying.
In such a situation, order seems paramount. So Brigham organized. Like Joshua on the march. Or the First Armored Divison. And Mormons, we Mormons, stayed that way. In social organization. (see my Dialogue article, “God: CEO or Master of the Dance)
Now, back to revelation. And I mean back. Looking backward to find the way forward. Stupid, at least. But that’s what we’re doing. We, like lawyers, look for precedent for every little thing. Straining out the gnats, and swallowing the camels. In desert days in bible times, water was strained through cotton, or fine linen, to get out the bugs. Makes sense. That’s what Jesus accused the religious leaders of his day of doing. Same thing now. If everything any general authority says is heavenly, revealed, no matter how ill-informed, stupid, even evil, but revealed, then follow the leader, look backward, march backward. Cause god says to do that.
That’s why I love the Enlightenment. People like Abigail and JohnAdams, Martha and Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and his brilliant and beautiful wife, James Madison, and John and Abigail’s brilliant son John Quincy, all considered themselves walking embodiments of the Enlightenment. Read their letters, folks. Turn of the damned TV. Let CNN go. FOX I hope you turned off years ago. Your brain was given you to think. Go think. Go figure.
Joseph Smith was an ardent Jeffersonian. No formal education, like Brigham. Though I suspect, Brigham favored Jackson. But no one called either stupid. The federal government beat them into submission.( Not Joseph. Missouri banditti murdered him. And Brigham died from the doctors of his time. Some things just never change. See, e.g., As Good as it Gets. Jack Nicholson, et al. ) And submissive they have been. And isolated. That is why I hate our church excommunication, after which they settle down and preach to the choir. Or by civil society doing the same: criminalizing gays, lesbians, polygamists, and Latinos. The “race card” being now used by Republicans, just as it was by Democrats, before by boss, bless his heart, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, chased all the followers of Strom Thurmond out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican world, in his stem-winding keynote speech before the 1948 Democratic election. And there, by god, they’ve flourished, and still do.
Now: if the Mormons wouldn’t paint themselves into a papal corner, i.e., general authorities, or at least presidents of the church, can never make a mistake, or just have a bad day, or perish the thought, maybe just maybe we ordained a damn fool. If we ordain a damned fool, we don’t have a saint. We just have a duly ordained damned fool.
The idea of revelation sould be liberalising, as god knows it should be. Look to the future, not the past. No more plastic Jesus” being sold in what once was Hotel Utah, the West’s best, this side of Molly Brown’s Palace, in Denver. And in what used to me Main Street, U.S. A., before it was Vaticanized, no more crappy non-art statuary of little kids running to daddy and mommie, in pioneer drag, decades after Leave it to Beaver went off televison.
A method just might be found for selecting leaders that doesn’t make God a hit-man (that’s not survival of the fittest……it’s just great genes), like, for example, emeritizing the ones who count, not the ones who don’t: the twelve and the first presidency, not the seventy that no one, anywhere, can name or recognize. Let people have revelations. You know what, folks? We all do, whatever the First Armored Division may say.
Finally. Follow the leader. I don’t mean group-think, though we all do that, Mormon or whatever other tribe you belong to. Watch your own dress. Or your teen-ager. Or a line of cars a mile long, and one lonely car pulls out and low!!!!!!!forms another line. Always was plenty of room. Don’t bore me, please, with any more utterly meaningless statements about how the Mormon Church loves Democratic Party members just as much as Republicans. What bilge. Mormons, contrary to the evidence, are about as bright as the next guy. They can see. And count. To three. Or twelve. Or fifteen. Or seventy. Beyond that, it doesn’t matter. We might also dress other than modeling after Digger O’dell, the friendly undertaker.
The gospel I believe in the the old social gospel. Matthew five through seven. The sermon on the mount. That speaks liberal compassion, not hateful cruel “race card,” race -baiting, gender-discriminating, foreigner-hating crap I see on all the TV ads, nationally and here. the rest is footnote. That, folks, is why I am a member of the Democratic Party. Not the other way around. I chose by religion first. Then my party. I’m Christian. And Jew. And Muslim. And Buddhist. And Hindu, the true Mother Faith. Catholicism, Or Orthodoxy, or Copts,may be mother church. And I love the Marlboro Man, cause he reminds me of Dad. Bless his heart. If horses aren’t in heaven, dad won’t be there. Me too, with Frances and Clare. ed firmage
October 27th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
Hi Caveat Emptor. All I can say, is Amen. I remember the good old day, too. Was it longer? Not in Provo. But a Cold War intervened. And Utah never left that war. Utah is still in it. See above. Revelation. Since so much Cold War rhetoric came over the pulpit. Cleon Skousen. Ezra Taft Benson. Benson’s idiot son. And since everything that comes over the pulpit was revealed directly from god….like, “hello, god. this is ed. May I chat with you just for a moment, just so I can give you the big picture?” the same crap is quoted, endlessly, mindlessly, mind-and butt-numbingly, every Sunday, it takes Wednesday to get over Sunday. And then the countdown begins toward Sunday……No one declared the Cold War over. Seriously, that’s precisely one of the major reasons we have a War Clause in the American Constitution (I wish to god the Mormons would put it in the Doctrine and Covenants, and READ IT.). Wars should have a beginning, and an ending. And like a good speech, which I would highly recommend in place of ANY war, keep the two very close together. Otherwise, we will be forever more govened by tyrants, fools, and gnaves. Like now. A fool for a president, a gnave for a vice-president, and….well, we have two fools, the president’s good friend, Donald Rumsfeld. And the president of the World Bank is all three. Like the orthodox trinity. In one. ed firmage
October 27th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
Outraged former Repub, dear friend. See above. I’m with you. I just came home decades ago, time out of mind. Literally, occasionally, I’m sad to say. ed firmage
October 27th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
There are a number of us within the LDS faith who believe in the doctrines of the faith and realize that liberal principles are much more in harmony with those doctrines than are the conservative principles. We may be fewer in number than those who follow the conservative path, but we are not as rare as you might think, and I do believe we are growing.
There are a few Yahoo! groups where we congregate to “fellowship” one another. There is also MESJ (Mormons for Equality and Social Justice; http://www.gomakecontact.com/mesj)
As to why so many of our fellows mistakenly take the conservative path, I believe the primary reasons are several:
Conservative advocates have done a masterful job over the past few decades in coopting the language of religion, tailoring their arguments to be superficially seductive to the ears of Christians in general, and Mormons in particular.
Conservative apologists have also become experts at exploiting emotional wedge issues, such as abortion and homosexual marriage.
The ’60s gave birth to a counter-culture celebrating (among other things) sexual freedom. This was shocking to religious communities throughout the nation, who came to see (rightly or wrongly) this counter-culture as an embrace of hedonism and licentiousness. As the counter-culture was affiliated with liberalism, it became inextricably linked with liberalism in the minds of a large number within the LDS community–despite other, more religiously oriented examples of liberalism such as Reverend Sloane.
Liberalism by its very nature entails a willingness to question authority and tradition. The LDS culture strongly values respect for authority and tradition.
As the Bible points out “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Conservative economic theory, which encourages the pursuit of naked self-interest and unrestrained acquisition, is extremely seductive, and has succeeded in turning the Mormon community away from the faith’s tradition of communitarianism and community interest to lust after wealth, as it has so much of Christianity.
Those seem the primary reasons for the dominance of conservatism among my faith, at least in my studies and contemplation of the issue.
October 28th, 2006 at 5:50 am
To All: As has been pointed out on numerous threads and in numerous ways, This admin. is corrupt. War, torture, debt, lying, etcetera, etcetera, are clearly Not our values. Associations made in other times, like Humphrey’s speach or Hippie misbehavior, reflect only that when thought is given, our brothers and sisters will come down where they think righteousness exists in its most fullness. That doesn’t mean ‘Just as it ever was’. Certainly when all this crap has accrewed presently unto the Repubs, it is safe to hope that a good number of previous bush supporters are giving this a very deep, moral once-over. Utahns have paid dearly for the support of this admin. though it has taken w while for it to sink in. I.e. the price of gas has remained higher here than in the rest of the country because we’ve been taken for granted, they keep viewing Utah as a waste-land despite our repeated, in-general pronouncements to the contrary.Then there’s Orrin, who left Pennsylvania…why again did Orrin leave Pennsylvania? Then there’s Cannon.
This is not good. I think we are one power-point presentation to the General Authorities away from seeing the entire flock take a stand in a new country, or rather an old country where the Constitution has some standing, where perpetual war, and torture are not contrived for our wealthy plutocrats’ and corporate topperss’ sole benefit. In other words, if we, who are just part of the flock can see where our votes need to be cast, so too can many, many others of us. Thanks for reading. C.E.
October 28th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
You said it all, Ed. For my part, all I can say is I was a conservative Republican in NY (in 1970 I volunteered on James Buckley’s Senate campaign– he ran as a Conservative without the GOP nomination, which went to a liberal). Without changing any of my core beliefs, by Utah standards I’m a left-leaning Democrat (although I did support Merrill Cook).
October 28th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
Richard, Merrill Cook, and his talented wife, are my friends of Many years: Utah Opera, etc. With Merrill, I too joined him in opposing food taxes and a lot of other good libertarian issues. He’s a good guy. ed firmage
October 29th, 2006 at 12:10 am
Ed, thanks for the kind words. You may be interested to know that Orrin and I have had four debates with a fifth scheduled for Tuesday the 31st of October in front of the Salt Lake Rotary. I have all the debates for viewing up on my website.
http://peteashdown.org
October 29th, 2006 at 8:05 am
Go Pete.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Thanks, Pete. Let’s all get behind Pete and make these polls change, fast, straight up. I predict they will, based on many seeing the debates. You won all the voter who truly watched. Which obviously excludes the Tribune. What a lot on ink money can buy. And has. After berating the good senator for favoring the torture of prisoners and waging criminal aggressive war; and being on the wrong side of civil rights and Constitutional justice, The Tribune says that Hatch has the seniority to continue the same, so they endorse him. So much for new ownership. I miss the real press. The old owners. To better days. Restoration. And Pete. I think you will go up so rapidly in the last week’s pollng, that you’ll have more $$$$$$$ than real opportunity, real time, to get TV and radio time. So go, Pete !!!! your friend, Ed Firmage
October 29th, 2006 at 9:56 pm
Derek, thanks for the references to groups with insight and compassion. And good thoughts on successful conservative advocacy. We must do the same. ed firmage