What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.

So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment — I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General — having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now — are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important– one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in cover-ups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law — and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.

Never mind. At the recent Netroots Nation convention, close Obama adviser (and University of Chicago Law Professor) Cass Sunstein backed away from the notion of going after any Bush officials, or Bush himself, for crimes such as torture and unlawful surveillance. The exchange with Sunstein was detailed by The Nation’s Ari Melber. Melber wrote that Sunstein rejected any such prosecution:

Politicians, legal experts and progressive activists grappled with Republican abuses of power at the third annual netroots convention on Friday, debating how an Obama administration might restore the rule of law. Cass Sunstein, an adviser to Barack Obama from the University of Chicago Law School, cautioned against prosecuting criminal conduct from the current Administration. Prosecuting government officials risks a “cycle” of criminalizing public service, he argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton–or even the “slight appearance” of it. Update: Sunstein emailed to emphasize that he also said and believes that “egregious crimes should not be ignored.”

Are violations of the Constitution, torture and illegal surveillance therefore non-egregious crimes? What would be an egregious crime, then? Sunstein didn’t say. How about “planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.” That was the principal charge at the Nuremberg Tribunal.

See below for video and an update…

Jonathan Turley, George Washington University law professor and constitutional expert, comments:

With many Democrats still fuming over the refusal of Democratic leaders like Speaker Nancy Pelosi to allow even impeachment hearings into detailed allegations of crimes by President Bush in office… The combination of Obama’s vote to retroactively grant immunity for the telecoms and Sunstein’s comments are an obvious cause for alarm. We have had almost eight years of legal relativism by both parties…. A little moral clarity would be a welcomed change.

As time runs out on the Bush administration, we have to address the issue of pre-emptive pardons. President Bush (except in case of impeachment) has the power to pardon himself and every other criminal. On Tuesday night, Keith Olbermann talked about this possibility and interviewed Professor Turley :

UPDATE: Slate offers a neat interactive guide: Who in the Bush administration broke the law, and who could be prosecuted? Unfortunately, the guide only covers five of the Bush scandals (and not Iraq). In a related piece, Dahlia Lithwick explores what (if anything) might be done in response to the Bush administration’s widespread illegality.

Please colleagues, don’t forget procedural due process. I stated this circumstance as best I could, in much better days, in the Reynolds Lecture, Ends and Means in Conflict. This was published in several law reviews and religious journals, circa 1987. Our fellow citizens hate us for these laws that seem to them to be trivia: protecting a murderer by having taxpayers pay the fees of defense counsel. And protecting whatever is left of the Fourth Amendment, in this manic lawlessness of this administration, and their lackeys on the bench.

If Texas police can invade an FLDS Temple, have absolutely no doubt that they can do the same thing in Salt Lake City. Or New York. Or Los Angeles. Any of you who give a tinker’s damn about your own synagogue, mosque, temple, chapel, parish or ward, take notice. As W.H. Auden warned in the opening days of World War Two, writing as I recall in New York as Hitler’s armies swept into Poland, you’re next. If you don’t protest when the state comes for the Roman Catholics. And you don’t care much for Protestants. And you’re really not interested in the aristocracy in the military. And you never liked big industrialists either, then don’t be shocked as the shock troops knock on your door. We know this is next. It always has been. Insanity is defined as doing the same thing many times and still you expect a different result.

St. Thomas More lost his head. (As Rudyard Kipling, who died as I was born, noted, if you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs, you’ll be taller than they are.) He had been sheriff, like our Texas brother; but More was sheriff of London and later Lord Chancellor, circa. fifteenth and sixteenth century, when Cardinal Woolsey introduced him, fatefully and fatally to Henry VIII. A young rogue, a varlet, an opportunist, was seeking position with St. Thomas More. More, of course, was Roman Catholic and remained so, in all faith and fervor, to the end. He finished the race, as St. Paul so often analogized to the Olympics. Roper, a good man and close to More, told him that he should do for the royal toad or he would surely have More’s head. St. Thomas said that no harm had yet been done. Thomas didn’t believe in pre-emptive war. More said that procedural law, like large oaks, peopled Great Britain, Ireland and Wales from stem to stern. “Would you have me tear asunder the great forests of procedural protections?” “Yes, I would tear down every tree in England to get” the toad. ” Then where would you be, Roper, when the winds roar, where would you hide?” Well, this was St. Thomas More.

A warning about metaphors. We kill each other for and by metaphors. We launch Crusades with entire civilizations in murderous self-slaughter. We excommunicate over a creed that has god in a bottle. From the tenth through the next several centuries, Crusaders slaughtered Roman and Greek, Catholic and Orthodox. And millions died, between civil war in Christianity and holy war (what a oxymoron) between Muslim and Christian. What a waste. Our local version was called the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

So the Judge in Texas says “Sarah” is a metaphor, even though she likely doesn’t exist. Good God, have we all gone nuts? Is it something in the Water in Texas? We have Bush in the White House and a very able woman trying her best in a very difficult case. But Due Process of Law hasn’t been repealed by this administration, just ignored. I hope for the resurrection: the resurrection of the Fourth Amendment searches and seizures protections. In the First Amendment and freedom of speech, including religious speech–like prayer anywhere and anytime we wish and without guards of any faith monitoring them, to see if we lie to God. I believe in freedom of religion. Don’t assume we are all brain dead, judiciary, telling us this “isn’t about religion.” Again, it must be the alkali in the Texas water. I truly pity this able judge in this Solomon-like cutting of the babies in half. And then quartering them, cutting them off from their mothers, not to mention their fathers. Nursing mothers denied their babies. This sounds to me like the slaughtering of the innocents. And of course I recognize that the innocents are being terribly hurt and surely permanently damaged by people on both sides of this slaughter.

I said “both sides” of this slaughter of the innocents. I misspeak. We must remember, daily and then again, that there are as many sides of this centuries-old story as there are people. The murderous slaughter of the truth by CNN and Fox, in their 24/7 repetition of their mangled one-dimensional bit of truth with a thousand parts error, mirror their lethal progenitor, in one and only one respect. Joseph Goebbels, head of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment in Germany in the thirties and forties of the twentieth century, gave us the heart of the problem. Tell a lie often enough, long enough, and everyone, finally, accepts it as true. BY NO MEANS AM I EQUATING THIS STORY, THIS HUGE TRAGEDY, AS IF THIS NATION WAS ANALOGOUS TO NAZI GERMANY. I know as I state this disclaimer, that I will face a pasting in letters to the editor, not a few from the Bar. Nevertheless, the principle and the principle only, of telling a lie until it is the accepted truth lies at the heart of advertising and the political process that this year, is nastier than I have ever seen, in life and in history. In canon law and scriptural history leaders were chosen by casting lots. How much better than this utter debasement of American democracy.

We must realize that there are several major groups of Mormon polygamists, each hugely different from each other. All are based, really, upon a notion that surely possess a huge truth. Hundreds of millions of people on every continent practice polygamy. And monogamy and every variant and position known to humankind. Criminal law will never change this.

BUT criminal law can do what I believe every member of this panel believes, and insists: there must not be physical or mental abuse of anybody, particularly the innocents, our own children. The abuses of patriarchy or for that matter, matriarchy, must cease now. Torture is forbidden by what was just said and must be said and said again. And this law must be enforced.
At the same time, we all know that there will be offenses of the law, in civil and religious law, in every system known to humankind. The central issue here, of course, is whether any particular system fosters criminal conduct, offense, especially upon children, women and girls, and young men.

This is the crux of the matter. I don’t know the answer. But I strongly suspect that isolation fosters incest. The most dangerous kinds, because it fosters every other kind, are the intellectual and spiritual incest that warps the minds and the souls of those who think they hear the voice of God in the desert and then act when they hear only their own sick minds. But here, too, we must be careful. For all the millennia of human experience, the human has sought God in the Desert. The numinosity of the burning bush.

Paul, some historians tell us, was manic. He fell off his ass and said he saw god. In another of his epistles, he says he only heard god, on the way to Damascus to persecute another hated sect. This story of Israel in the desert attempting to find or build or find Zion, or Shangri-La, echo down throughout time. But for the Mormons, Zion was a tangible sensuous place to be made in the here and now. Don’t wait for Enoch or angels, build Zion where we stand. Mormons of the nineteenth century failed in their dream. They were simply swallowed up. Daniel Boorstin, one of America’s great historians, from the University of Chicago and a graduate in law, wrote words that hit this then young Mormon bishop, on leave in New York and Geneva with the United Nations, like a punch in the belly. He said how different the story of New England, or America, would be if the Puritans had been located in some American Swiss-like city, in a valley encircled with American Alps. He said that the oceans opened Puritan minds and made them into Yankee traders, with each new idea from Europe and Asia and Africa opening our minds and forming our souls . If they had been in an American Geneva, where I served long ago, how different, how isolated and how insulated and how narrow our minds. This is the setting, unless we are very careful and very respectful of our own tendency toward insanity rather than spirituality in God’s open spaces of the American West.

On a completely different scale I admit, remember the Japanese Relocation Cases, that blighted our human rights during the last just war, perhaps, World War Two. Tens of thousands of Japanese Americans, innocent all (no Japanese American was ever convicted of any crime against her country in World War Two. No national ethnic group can match this. Several German Americans spied. Not so the Japanese. ) Now, I know the limited meaning of this comparison: crimes have been committed by polygamists, not to mention monogamists. But the land at issue, seized and dealt with by courts, is enormously valuable. Just how far will we go to eliminate communal ownership of land and wealth and the sources of production and supply, to protect our perfect version of selfless capitalism?

And now back to the beginning. Each polygamous person and every sect in the world, monogamous and polygamous, is marvelously different. Like everyone in the world. At least, stereotypes and stigmas are not ever to be taken literally. At worst they play a fundamental role in every holocaust ever endured. Our commonality as human beings is a huge truth. Parallel and always necessary in this life is the beauty of the utter originality of every human being and our utterly subjective perception of truths, however objective or subjective they may be. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his own person the truth of what I’ve so inadequately tried to explain, was a gay man in the most austere and monolithic religious Roman Catholic order in nineteenth century England, a Jesuit. He was quite possibly the greatest English writer who ever lived, except Shakespeare and the translators of the King James Bible. In Pied Beauty, he said:

Glory be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh fire-coal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings,
Landscape plotted and pieced–fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise Him.

Here is Brigham Young’s, the theocrat of all would-be kings, we’re told, own two-volume set of Blackstone’s Commentaries of the Laws of England: in four books; with An Analysis of the work. By Sir William Blackstone, Knt. one of the justices of the court of common pleas. In Two Volumes. From the nineteenth London Edition. With a LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. AND NOTES: CHRISTIAN, CHITTY, LEE, HOVENDEN, AND RYLAND: AND ALSO REFERENCES TO AMERICAN CASES, BY A MEMBER OF THE NEW YORK BAR.” Published in New York. Year? Why 1847. Year One for Utah’s Mormons. Taken from tithing in kind, from the Presiding Bishop’s Storehouse, in Utah’s own Christian Socialist system. Brigham put in a Mormon scrip to honestly buy these volumes, for his own reading, and housed until his death in his office, obviously well read. Blackstone’s Commentaries were very probably the only books, other than the King James Bible, had by most homes of the West. And for that matter, until very late in the day, in most homes in America most surely, Blackstone contributed more than all but a handful of people, living or dead, to the democracy, and the rule of law, in our Republic. I was given these volumes personally, by the last granddaughter of Brother Brigham. So much for stereotypes.

I propose in conclusion that instead of seizing DNA we provide something that will really work. An amnesty open to all polygamists who are not guilty of a very specific non-metaphorical crimes: rape, torture, child-and spouse abuse, fraud other than that we force upon a people denied the protection of due process of law honestly to buy or make their bread for over two hundred years and counting. In all reality our polygamous sisters and brothers are immigrants, many of whom wish to come home. Why can’t we do for these our fellow citizens what President Bush and John McCain, for a moment at least, until shot down by their own Party, proposed? So courageously and honestly? The clock and the law would start now. With the last and by far the largest and worst-led polygamist group, the Jeff’s group, with Warren Jeffs now in jail? I believe all polygamist groups of Mormon descent, “get it.” I have met personally, in my home or theirs, with all polygamist leaders of Mormon descent. Times have changed. Come home. To your churches, your cities, your government, your fellow-citizens.

The criminal law is far too brutal to bring this change. St. Paul knew the limits of the law. So does every lawyer and every criminal here, or in jail. Only the civilizing communion of the secular (thank God) polis; and the parish,the temple, the mosque and the synagogue, can democratize us all. In the secular city, thank God and Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson, and Abigail and John Adams, of the Village Square.

The Mormon Zion, like all that have gone before and will yet be birthed, cannot be made with our hands. We must always try and we will always fall short. Finally, with Joseph and Brigham, and St. Paul and St. Augustine; with the Dalai Lama and Sally Hemings and Fawn McKay Brodie and Thomas Jefferson, we wait for better times. My grandfathers, Joseph Smith by temple sealing, Brigham Young and my grandmother, Zina Diantha Huntington Smith Young by my particular DNA, as if that mattered, thought, like St. Paul in First Thessalonians, that the Second Coming would surely be in their lifetime.

It would seem that we must wait for angels, after all.

God bless us, every one.

Edwin Brown Firmage bio, website
Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. A.

Further reading;

Firmage - The Pox Letters

• 1. Intro & 1st Letter - Christianity Inc,
• 2. What DOES The Bible Teach Us?
• 3. Polygamy, Monogamy and Monotheism: The One and the Many

Savagery exists now, played out with the goading of the news media, in 24/7 mode, driven to make news of the most lurid kind, pouring blood into the water. CNN outdoes Fox in idiocy and sheer fabrication. Their local authority here, the most savage of all, did not learn his facts nor his law in my class in constitutional law, nor from the table of his loving mother and father, my dear friends. Watch out, national talking heads, Look over your shoulder. He has a lean and hungry look.

I’ve lived through seven decades of this drama, and written about the story of polygamy since its Mormon expression. I say “Mormon” expression, because hundreds of millions of people in almost every country and culture on earth practice polygamy, just as huge numbers practice, or at least preach, monogamy. I know and have lived through almost half of the Mormon story. Realizing that Mormons didn’t invent polygamy seems to be an understanding that none of the electronic media, and those who unfortunately rely upon such media for their information, find beyond their reach. My conclusions, for what they’re worth, from two hundred years of the Mormon experience, and my work in most countries of the world, from Tibet and India, China, almost all of Europe and the United Nations, in New York and Geneva and the White House:

First, “family” is an ever-defining fluid thing. Blood? Adoption? Choice? In-law or outlaw? I remember two months in Rome with a Franciscan sister, Rosemary Lynch, Franciscan to the core, still alive in her ninety-second year and, with the Death of my dear friend, Sister Mary Luke Tobin, at ninety-eight years, of the Sisters of Loretto, the only American order of women Religous without European antecedents, for most of a century headed by Luke, and the only woman with speaking rights at Vatican Two (four women there, to balance off 1800 men), arguably the most famous revered and profoundly loved living woman in Christianity. Luke and Rose and I had met as we all battled the existence and the basing of the MX Missile in the Great Basin of the American West. I was giving a series of lectures, several a week, to all the Congregations of Women and Men Religious, headquartered in Rome. I was a year or two away from a divorce that would shatter me after thirty-three years and eight children. Blessedly ignorant of what was just around the corner, I asked Rosie if she ever missed having a family, a husband, children. She treated my naive Mormon question with all the thoughtfulness that is so lacking in today’s national dialogue on the same question. She said, “dear Ed, I have children. Thousands of them. I have biological brothers and sisters, and hundreds of brothers and sisters of the faith, and of scores of other faiths, particularly in the Muslim world, as my father Francis Assisi was especially concerned about his Muslim sisters and brothers, and echoes of Francis still resonate within the Muslim community.”

Rosie’s sister Franciscan for decades, Klaryta, was born of Polish parents, one tortured and murdered by the Germans and one by the Russians as World War Two reached its savage end, after 50,000,000 people had be slaughtered in another clash of civilizations, stretching that word past civilized meaning. Klaryta works mainly with German and Russian immigrants in her ministry, along with many thousands, now, of immigrants here, with or without papers.

As the present drama of FLDS polygamists plays itself out to its bitter end, probably decades from now, if measured by the damage already done to these women, children, men, of all ages, and after growing in my own experience of “family” these past three decades, I see violence as evil and the law, for all but the most limited and heinous of crimes, the least worst alternative. The American culture is reaching out, now, to immigrants of all sorts. This is not without pain and loss. But the gains are enormously greater. These Mormon Fundamentalists should be seen as immigrants, really. ( More on this later in this piece.)

In this country right now, if we were facing abuses in Muslim polygamy, even after 9/11, we would be giving far far greater care to the human rights, the constitutional rights, the international legal human rights, of our Muslim brothers and sisters. Can’t we see these Mormon Christian people in Texas, Utah, and Arizona as similarly situated and protected? Mormons didn’t invent this polygamous system. Think about it, talking heads of CNN. Place this wherever in the world. Hugely more compassion and, just perhaps, a bit more factual reporting would be done. Not just never-ending vitriol. Have we no shame?

When my grandmother, Zina Diantha Huntington Smith Young, and her Husband, Brigham Young, came to this valley of the Great Basin, Brigham claimed an area slightly larger than the rest of the United States. Native Americans were here, as were many of Spanish and Mexican descent. When Zina crossed the Mississippi, frozen but not quite, wagons fell into the freezing water. Zina wrote in her diary of seeing their Nauvoo Temple desecrated and burned by the mobs. Brigham had gone ahead with a few of the men, toward their Zion, the Great Basin of the West. Babies were born and died. They had been forced by murder and rapine into the wilds. When they left Nauvoo, slightly larger than Chicago at the time, they were headed for Mexico and Texas. A war of unmitigated aggression by the United States began against Mexico, as the Mormons were on the march. Brigham was asked to enlist Mormon young men to go to war. The Mormon Legion completed the longest forced march of the American infantry, in response, ending in California, whether owned by Mexico, the United States, Britain, Russia, or Native America. It was all fluid for many decades. Thus the United States seized over one-third of Mexico. And now we are enraged when thousands of Mexicans remained in what was their land, and millions return to a land by all justice they still own.

Zina married Joseph Smith when she was twenty. She loved him very much. She shared his bed in this “spiritual marriage.” So did Emma, but not at the same time. When Joseph Smith was murdered by a mob, Zina, then twenty-three, married my great-great grandfather, Brigham Young. From that union I came to be. I remember going with another Zina, my grandmother and the wife of Hugh B. Brown, First Counselor of the Mormon Church in an earlier time, to see “aunt” so and so, many such, all surviving wives of polygamist men long dead.

In every century before the twentieth, in every land in the world, marriage in the teens existed. John Adams had to threaten his son, John Quincy Adams, with a caning and worse if he did not stop seeing the woman, or girl, his loved, then fifteen.

The Fundamentalist Mormons of four or five clans have been frozen in time, to some extent, by being marginalized, like gays, or at an earlier time, marriage between different racial or ethnic groups, sent into the badlands: geographically, intellectually, socially, politically, and by the hardness of our hearts and the vacuity, the stupidity of our brains. I have known the leadership of all of these groups and I have enjoyed their company in my home and at their table, for seventy years. I have taught many polygamous young women in my forty years teaching constitutional and international law. Many have visited my home and told me why they, as women, favored the polygamous life. Most wanted children, and obviously, and all wanted a career outside the home. Their sister wives, by tending the children, made this possible. I have not met one woman in sixty years of more or less adult life who wanted divorce, or a monogamous life. Obviously some did, but I never met them, and I’ve met hundreds of polygamous women. For whatever reason, in the study of law, in my own experience, my students have almost all been women. So much for stereotypes.

From all that I’ve seen, written, and read of polygamy in the nineteenth century, the system was at least as much matriarchal as patriarchal. Zina ran the home, the farm, raised the children, and presided in most of the healing, today what we would call “priesthood,” since Mormon women then, and now, believe they hold the same through Temple endowment. ( Yes, just like the one raided and pillaged in the name of Texas law. If Texas can do that to Fundamentalist Mormons, when will it be your turn? In your sacred house? church, temple, mosque, or the temple of your home and your body?) Brigham was left to decide upon the foreign policy between Zion, in his Great Basin Kingdom, and Spain, Mexico, Canada, Native America, and yes, the United States, smaller but more heavily populated. So much for polygamy as a device for geometric Mormon catch-up. Even when Mormon evangelical preachers recieved tens of thousands of converts, with tens of thousands of Mormons in Great Britain and Canada; and all would come to Zion at Brigham’s call, more Mormons lived in Canada and England by far than resided in the United States, and though many thousands of emigrant saints marched on foot, in wagons, on oxen and horseback, pulling handcarts whose ruts still remain in the Momon story dug deep into the land of the West Brigham lost, by a nose.

I beieve, strongly believe, that all the leadership of the few Mormon fundamentalist groups now understand that underage marriage is out. Their own precepts forbid abuse, torture, and fraud. Of course all this occurs. But their own legislation forbids all such. The law, with its complete lack of the capacity for subtlety, for fine-tuning, is no place for massive sweeps of thousands of people, hugely most having committed no crime. If this were any of the other candidates for the honor of being skunks at the garden party, there would be national outrage over this criminal misuse of the criminal law. Now, Mormon men and women: lead. Really lead, and in the right direction. Your concept of Zion is flawed. Preserve the parts most holy. This, of course, was the chief givt of St. Paul to the Saints of his time. How could he hold onto the central holiness of the Lord, and still preach a gospel that spoke also to the gentile world?

Leaders in every century face this awful delimma. For the Christian, the model is always taught by St. Paul. It would surely seem to me that such centrality of belief is certainly not found in marriage to underage women or girls. Or young men. Eighteen is still too young, in my book. Consent demands enough years to have real meaning. Mature leaders, men and women, suck it up and follow the myth of Arthur, in Camelot, his Zion. When Arthur learned of Gwenievere and Lancelot, he could have had them killed, but at the cost of Camelot. He said: “This is a time when violence is not strength. And compassion is not weakness. And we shall live through this, together. May God have mercy on us all.” Thus the myth survived. As St. Paul told the faithful in Jerusalem, just before its destruction by the Roman General, Titus, in 70 A.D.: “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.’”(Heb. 13-14) All people of the Book, in fact every religious group of which I am aware, including the Tibetan Buddhists with whom I work frequently with His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, in exile in Dharamsala, India, must balance his desire to return to Tibet, over against his exile in India. His heart has broken .Hence his compassion. The story of exile and return, the holy city and the diaspora, plays out in every age and in every community. Brigham, like many thousands of millenarians through time, thought their diaspora would end early in his lifetime. With St. Paul in First Thessalonians, he had to revise and provide for the next generation.

I don’t doubt the Texas ‘judge’s kindly intent. Nor the sadness and the professional care of the police, the Texas Rangers, and surely not the loving kindness of Baptist mothers and fathers who have stepped in to help, as saviors. But kindly intended but ill-informed people can produce havoc and death. Hence, the Buddhist admonition that “if you see the Buddha on he way, kill him.” (Please, my Fundamentalist friends, continue to maintain the moral high ground of non-violence. This buddhist koan is not meant to be taken with fundamtalist literality.) I have very little hope that the sterility of the capacity of the state to match the loving kindness of these children’s real mothers and fathers, sister-wives and all. I’ve lived in this culture. I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of diaries of polygamous women and men. They were no more perfect than am I, or anyone else in the human story. But blood and loving care from sister wives and husands will continue to nurture children far better than Family Service for all but a tiny few. And foster homes are even more seductive in that they may in fact be better than state offices, but that is dying from faint praise.

The Jeffs group’s few thousands are, of course, the last to get it. The last to understand, fully, the change in national acceptance of teen-age marriage, as girls and boys become, unevenly, women and men. This is so because they have been the most persecuted and, by choice or force, those who have found themselves in the badlands of the American West, or for that matter, in Mexico and Canada, where my mother Mary, was birthed by a Zina with another Zina as mid-wife. This was in Cardston, a polygamous community in Alberta Province, though my grandparents, and of course my parents, were monogamous.

Whether or not polygamy was “inspired below a man’s belt,” as my grandfather Brown said to me, as I recorded his lfe, or god-or-satan-sent, really doesn’t matter, now. If indeed polygamy, the Mormon version, was such a mistake, then the Latter-day Saints don’t need another mistake for the next millenia, at least, to render them forever a sect in the eyes of others, really doesn’t matter, either. For here it is. The real question is what do we do about it in this time and this place.

The Texas disaster was the perfect storm. It would have happened, tragically, some place, some time soon. I have no doubt, now, that every fundamentalist polygamous sect of Mormon descent now understands the rules and the consequences of violating them. From this point on, as long as this matter runs its course in the criminal legal system, the only thing that will be accomplished is to punish, likely forever, every person touched by this tragedy. And believing in Karma as I do, I believe savage hurt will come to all who touch this issue with hatred. We batter each other by metaphors. We go to war for metaphors. We launch crusades with metaphors and myth. We have a Mormon Mountain Meadows Massacre, of over one hundred and twenty people. Or on the grand scale, we launch holy wars of five hundred years of Christian slaughter of each other, Roman v. Greek, and huge numbers of Moslems, slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands in the name of metaphor.

And now the Texas judge tells me that “Sarah” is a metaphor? What a ghastly admission of the absolute failure of the Texas system of justice. Is “Texas Justice” to justice, what “military music” is to music? Or for that matter, what “military justice” in this time of a Texan in the White House, is to lady justice? Blind she may be. But she isn’t heartless or brain-dead.

Now is the time for education. By the best the media, as our bully-pulpit for educating us all; by people, our citizens who don’t need lawyers or judges to tell them what their hearts already know. This is not justice. It is the current skunk at the garden party providing us with the test, the very creation of our human rights, the role skunks at the garden party always play. Mormons, Catholics, people of color, immigrants, Muslims. We all get our turn. That is the meaning of karma. Thank God for the skunks at the garden party. How we respond to such people at once creates and defines human rights.

Rulon Jeffs, the father of Warren Jeffs, was my uncle by marriage, and came to be the prophet leader of his people, the largest polygamous sect to separate from the Mormons when they abandoned the practice. Uncle Rulon married my favorite aunt, aunt Zola, my mother Mary’s sister and daughter of Hugh B. and Zina Card (Cardston…back to polygamy)Young Brown. When Rulon decided to follow his father into polygamy, grandfather Hugh Brown took aunt Zola by the hand, just as did John Adams to his son John Quincy when he wanted the hand of a fifteen year-old girl, and accomplished their divorce. But I grew up loving and admiring Uncle Rulon. I asked him to review my chapters on polygamy, in my book, Zion in the Courts: a Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which he kindly did. We met in Chuck-a-Rama, not for the food, but as a way of hiding in plain sight. Of course, many scholars, in and out of Mormon culture, also vetted this volume, including my orthodox Mormon former student and now law professor, with an endowed chair, the only endowed chair, in that Roman Catholic university, Collin Mangrum. I spoke with many people of all of the polygamous groups in the American West. Rulon, a tall patriarch of the old school, lived in body and in office too long. He became senile at the end time, and huge mistakes occurred. Now, those chickens have come home to roost. Truly I pray that such energy can run its course with as little damage as possible. That prayer is doomed to fail, I believe.

Texas, Utah, polygamy, and gay rights, are entertwined inexorably. We return to my question to Sister Rosemary Lynch, in Rome. What is family? A group of men and women Religious? Gays? Polygamists, Mormon or by the millions, otherwise? Serial monogamists? ” Spiritual”polygamists who don’t polyg? Or monogamists, perhaps in the Senate or the White House, who don’t monog? God only knows, and she seems silent at this moment.

Four cases, four of several hundred, come to mind. In Loving v. Virginia, so aptly named, people loved and married, in violation of miscegination laws forbidding inter-racial or inter-ethnic marriage. The Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s laws and similar laws in every state in this nation. Before that, as a young man, before Brown v., the Board, I remember well when Ralph Bunche, of the United Nations, and Nobel Laureate, was denied a room at the Hotel Utah, which stately old Hotel now houses the overflow of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ bureaucracy, then and now the owner of Hotel Utah . Lawrence v. Texas is a harbinger, I hope and believe, in the movement toward marriage or civil union between gays and lesbians. Lawrence v. Texas is for gays, and for us all, what Brown v. the Board was to people of color, the flagship of all the human rights flotilla in the United States from the twentieth century, to now: after race, ethnicity; after ethnicity, gender; after gender, sexuality, alienage, and so on. Now, citizens, Loving meets Lawrence meets the U.S. v. Reynolds, the case forbidding Mormon polygamy. These strange bedfellows, not to put too fine a point on it, are all in bed together. Mixing our dangerous metaphors, untangling this rope of many colors and strands is not ethically or intellectually possible, no matter the parsing of the law or the facts.

And don’t forget Dantean greed. There are millions of dollars in land, held by some of the last Christian Socialists, though Mormons, Fundamentalist or mainstream, would wince at the term. Brigham hated capitalism. He thought that was a nice word for greed. In a sense,” Sarah” v. Texas is a case, like those in Utah and Arizona, where millions of dollars in land are at issue. In a very limited sense, and different by an order of magnitude, this is similar to the Japanese Relocation cases of early World War Two. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans lost their land to greedy folk in California and elsewhere. Never mind that no Japanese American, anywhere, anytime, was disloyal. But perhaps in Texas, “disloyal Japanese” is merely a metaphor. And perhaps such stretched hermeneutics is why “lawyers and hypocrites” is hypnenated in the New Testament. And why, for Robert Frost, America’s greatest poet, “the hearse horse snickered as it drew the lawyer away.”

Finally, a suggestion. I said earlier that polygamists, residing in the badlands of the American West, and beyond, are in fact, immigrants. Let’s do the one good thing George Bush the Less suggested in his eight years of horror. He, along with John McCain, briefly, proposed an amnesty for the millions of people who are here without papers. I wonder if Native Americans considered the fact that all those Europeans lacked papers? Or the Mexicans and the Spanish and the Native Americans that were forced off their land by another war of aggression, in the last century? Perhaps we might just extend amnesty to polygamists who just happen to be our neighbors? Surely DNA testing would find, in the polygamist community exactly what it would find in the monogamist community, that is, a lot of in-breeding. Something like Clarence Darrow, in the Scopes Trial, said to his hero, earlier. Like Rulon Jeffs, William Jenning Bryan died too late. His brain and much of his soul had departed before his body gave way. Darrow said to Bryan: when Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel, just who did those boys marry? A damned good question. Let our sisters and brothers come home, with total amnesty regarding the age of anyone’s marriage. This needn’t and shouldn’t include cases of forcible rape or torture. Of course these people fear forcible DNA samples. Just as hundreds of millions of other people would. In this and in any community.

In the life story of St. Thomas More, an underling of great pretension and little capacity approaches Sir Thomas and prays for employment. He is rejected by the Saint, due to the supplicant’s obvious venality and the lack of a shred of character. Roper, a hot-blooded intimate of St. Thomas More, senses the threat to the Saint from this viper. He proposes that Thomas do him in, regardless of the means. In the jurisprudential world, the ethic of means, not so much ends, occupies our interest. The right to counsel. To keep your home and hearth free of the state. To keep the police from placement under the marital bed. Like the polygamists, we don’t like the state to trespass into our homes, at will and by the entire community being judged, as a metaphor. Thomas says to Roper:”Our island is dotted, and preserved, by a whole forest of mighty trees. Trees that protect the potential malefactor until the actual commission of a crime. Would you have me violate such laws?” To which Roper responds, more or less: “I would cut down every tree, every old oak, every law in England to get this man before he gets you!” Thomas says:”And what would you do then, Roper, when the winds howl? What would you have to protect us all, with all the trees down?”

The palpable violation of many rights guaranteed by the American Constitution: our Bill of Rights, our Fourteenth Amendment, in “Sarah” v. Texas is obvious and huge. Similar restraints on the state exist in International Law. Thank God for the skunk at the garden party. Changing metaphors in this savage game of metaphors, what will we all do when the winds howl, and our own time to be the one left out, the marginalized and stereotyped. wilthout the great oaks protecting our homes and churches from the secular and savage state: For those not allowed within the civilizing city? The town square?

Let us let in our sisters and brothers, without reproach. Religious leaders, grant amnesty and forget the savagry of excommunication. Political and civic leaders, open our businesses and government offices without discriinataionl Never force a polygamist to lie to preserve his job securityl Ditto the military in revision of its “don’t ask, don’t tell” form of slippery ethics and law.

NOw is the time for mercy and justice to kiss.

Ed Firmage
Samuel Thurman Professor of Law, Emeritus
University of Utah College of Law.
Salt Lake City, Utah

Website: ed firmage.net
email:  ed.firmage at comcast.net

Until Dubbya, I had never heard this new idea that the Separation clause actually meant the opposite of what it said, and that the Founding Fathers were all Christians.

Ed confirmed for me, this was a novel and recent interpretation, but has never given it any shrift, I imagine because as one who could make or break law students based upon their academic understanding of the Constitution, the very idea is so utterly vacant of merit, it doesn’t deserve his attention.

Since then, however, the talking points (shall make no laws = shall not prohibit full gov’t endorsement) are being repeated by not only semi-illiterate bible thumping high school dropouts, but also by educated pundits via the MSM.

So, this morning, I stumbled upon this most excellent and concise review of THE FACTS appropriately entitled “Romney’s Founders.”

Mitt Romney’s recent reflections on the role of religion in American politics implicitly called to mind a disturbingly distorted version of history that has become part of the conventional wisdom of American politics in recent years.

That version of history suggests that the Founders intended to create a “Christian Nation,” and that we have unfortunately drifted away from that vision of the United States. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

It is worth noting that the Declaration of Independence does not invoke Jesus, or Christ, or Our Father, or the Almighty, but the “Laws of Nature,” “Nature’s God,” the “Supreme Judge,” and “Divine Providence,” all phrases that belong to the tradition of deism. The Declaration of Independence is not a Puritan or Calvinist or Methodist or Baptist or Protestant or Catholic or Christian document, but a document of the Enlightenment. It is a statement that deeply and intentionally invokes the language of American deism. It is a document of its own time, and it speaks eloquently about what Americans of that time believed.

The Constitution goes even further. It does not invoke the deity at all…

As a life long student of American history and politics, I can think of nothing more un-American, more un-patriotic, than the FREEKING ignorant LIE that the Founders intended a Christian Nation.

George Bush is a liar. His only possible defense in a criminal proceeding, or the felonious acts of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” must be that he lacks the mens rea, in his case, the intelligence to have a mens rea, or motive, that was criminal. He may just be so dumb, so lazy intellectually, and so protected by his staff who all know he has the intention span of a snail darter, that just maybe he didn’t know that Iraq did not cause 9j/11; or that Pakistan, not Iraq and Iran, is our true threat, with hundreds of nukes. That these folks, and not Iran or Iraq, produced 9j/11.

But we now know he did know. We know, as we said during Nixon’s impeachment, what he knew and when he knew that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program years ago. His Vice President, Dick Cheney, knew.

Of course, it is just possible, in this most unique White House in American history, that the real chief of the United States Empire, formerly a democratic republicn state, Dick Cheney, didn’t bother to tell Bush Lite. Why tell him and not the janitor? I’ve enjoyed the White House bathroom, with my fifteen minutes, in this case determined by a bladder and what very little remains down there following prostate surgery. The janitor, and the Secret Service agents who sidled up to me as I wandered the catacombs of the White House, obviously kept a clean beautiful John.

I’ve worked for two men who were number two. My grandfather, Hugh B. Brown, counselor to President David O. McKay, and a liberal Democrat; and Hubert Horatio Humphrey. I’ve heard the vice presidency described as a “bucket of warm spit,” by a fellow Texican of our boob. John Adams just stayed home with Abigail, much of the time, never leaving Massachusetts, which would have been very good advice to Mitt Romney. Jefferson did the same, staying much of the time in Virgina. For the first time in American history, we have a Vice President who governs an empire, while occupying and challenging Bush with the colored pencil and coloring books in the George Bush Presidential library.

But by employing the Ten Commandments of politics, all these cynical folk know the first and only commandment that concerns them. Protect your ass. So of course Cheney protected his butt by telling Stupid.

So: he lied regarding 9/11. He lied thereafter, with reports of such dazzling progress in Iraq that with our surge, this year will see far more deaths than any previous year. He lied, as did successive American presidencies since Eisenhower…or really, the Dulles brothers, Allan and John Foster Dulles, regarding the threats from Iran. This, among other things, was a topic in my interviews with Bill Moyers.

Bush the Less has enjoyed a few days’ relief by the focus, with all sexual innuendoes that would stun Freud and Jung, on the non-starter non-story of the year, Mitt’s Mormonism. Who cares?

But now the heat is on again.

Just how many lies over three decades (including deluding Texicans about life, love, and oil) can George Bush tell? How many “wolf wolf’s “before we impeach this criminal, then try him for war crimes. Then throw him in jail for the rest of his life. Or better yet, let him really be Commander-in -Chief, like the first George, George Washington. Place him on the proverbial White Horse of Imperial Military lore, at the tip of the Surge. And then like Uriah the Hittite, married to Bathsheba, after King David impregnated her (”knew” her, in the quaint King James Bible of Mr. Bush), retire the army Bush has destroyed, and let him atone for lying to the National Guard. And the American people.

When you boil down all the impeachment material in American history, presidents are impeached on only three grounds: lying to the American people on war and peace; total incompetence; and so mismanaging the national economy that we will be paying for our disastrous choice of Bush and Cheney, in 2000 and 2004, time out of mind. The children of our children’s children, squared and tripled, will be paying for our sins. Truly, as the Bible says, the sins of the fathers will fall upon the heads of the children, now, to the end of time. This is all I know of original sin.

Bush qualifies for immediate impeachment, conviction, and removal. Then the application of the criminal law. And then life imprisonment or exile.

Let us impeach this ignorant liar while the dogs of war are savaging the world, but somehow, by the grace of God, we’ve not gone nuclear. Please, impeach Bush, Cheney, and their mafiosi. Convict them in the Senate, with the Chief Justice of the United States presiding. (A certain wry justice there, since the Supreme Court stole the American presidency from Al Gore.) Cheney and Bush, in that order, must go. They are a stink in the nostrils of hundreds of millions of suffering people, world-wide.

Ed Firmage
Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law, emeritus,
University of Utah College of Law
Salt Lake City, Utah,
USA

It’s time for our best and brightest. Joe Biden I’ve known personally for many years. I’ve testified often before his Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate. He knows more, by a hundred miles, than any candidate in either party. About war and peace. The United States Constitution. The conduct of foreign relations and the art of keeping our country safe. He’s the best in his Iraq war- ending with honor, or whatever honor we can muster, as we bring our girls and boys home.

His running mate? Quite naturally, one of the best, perhaps the very best governor in our country, Governor Richardson. I don’t think I’ve met him. But as an executive who’s been at the top: the top in bringing peace as a presidential diplomat; in governing a major western state, New Mexico; and our nation’s first real candidate of Hispanic tradition, Richardson is as good as it gets.

The order could well be reversed. But the United States Senate, not a governorship, is where the aaction is in foreign relations. Whatever else a president may do or should do, keeping the peace and protecting the nation, and the world, is job number one. Richardson would be great as presidenent. And in this blood-drenched world, as a running mate to any American president, he just might well get that chance. But: Biden for President. And Richardson for Vice President.

Dear friends: this is a match made in heaven. The day all hell broke loose in Pakistan, about two weeks ago, I knew instantly that this is Joe Biden’s day. And Governor Richardson. Joe for President. And our most experienced executive diplomat and governor, Richardson of New Mexico.

My vote in Utah is a waste. Along with every other Democrat. BUT our votes mean just as much as anyone else’s, in our nominating process. Let’s hear it for BIDEN AND RICHARDSON. I give the government in Pakistan about one month’s life expectancy. Then the largest pile of nuclear weapons not governed by any real government will be upon us. This time, we’re not calling “wolf, wolf!”

ed firmage
salt lake city,
Utah, USA

Mitt Romney, you’re no Jack Kennedy. You’re no Hugh B. Brown. Given your new positions on gays, women, war, and an evident hatred for truth and peace, I don’t recognize your Mormonism. I didn’t think I’d live to see the day when George Romney’s son would stand to the right of the racist, sexist, most homophobic, war-loving religious leadership in the United States of America. You bring the Jihad home. We need a good Muhammad-like Muslim to run for president. She may just be sufficiently suffused, as a person of the Book, to let Mitt into her Cabinet. She may have the heart to forgive you. I’m a novice at forgiveness.

In any event, Pace e’bene. Shalom. Saalam. May the Peace of Christ be with you, this day, and always.

Ed Firmage
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Ironically, Mitt’s dad, George Romney, whom I supported for the presidency, might have been Mitt’s Al Smith. But George did something his too-slick by twice son did not do. George told the American people the truth about Vietnam, and why he was changing his position (see, e.g., Mitt’s conversion to deny women the right of choice regarding their own belly, the right under Roe v. Wade to make their own decision, with their doctor.). George said, truthfully, that “I was brainwashed.” The American people often don’t want the truth. They admire those, especially in war, who lie, cheat, steal and kill in God’s name. George Romney instantly lost any chance for the presidency. George was not as bright as his gifted son. But he had a great heart and people knew it. Too bad for Mitt. Had his dad lived long enough, politically, to draw the still-festering infection, the third of our people, nationally, to fear a Mormon president; the pus in the body politic, that potentially fatal boil within our body, would have been lanced. And Mitt could have been judged on his own quite substantial merit. Truth tellers rarely succeed in politics. We kill those prophetic leaders who do bear witness to truth.

From several months ago until now, Mitt’s Mormonism has been both the conscious and subliminal issue, the backyard gossip of our national political dialogue. This is the Freudian delight. Sex, polygamy, special underwear that’s well designed to make sex impossible; or even better, a Mormon Kama Sutra, the Yin-Yang Butterfly of Mormonism; the garment that gives a whole new meaning to the Missionary Position.

Getting into what my heart wants to say to Mitt is about impossible to this old man steeped in the faith of my youth and my life. Let me drop my Libra nature to never reveal the main points of my heart, my gut, my brain. Let me shout my end point in italics or capital letters: MORMONISM CAN ONLY WIN BY MITT’S ENTRANCE INTO PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS. No matter what he says, no matter what he does. He’s much to fine a man to do anything that would dishonor his faith or his party or his family. I do not believe there is any act, or even fantasy, hiding in the closet of his soul.

What he will do for his faith, I’ve tried, with no political or ecclesiastical power, and no mandate by anyone, always failingly, to do. From the Mormon position on race, sex and gender, to the arms race and the MX missile. I failed completely to change the nature of my church. Mitt has the chance to stand upon and speak through the world’s most gigantic bully pulpit since the Caesars of Rome: an attempt to win that bully pulpit, for a time, four or even eight years’ running. The Mormon church can only win, and win big. I hope they know that.

A wit once said that there is no bad publicity. Just spell the name right. This is true. A photo of Mitt in his temple garments now appears on this and many other websites. This will cause many Mormons gas pains. My advice? Fart and forget it. It’s open season on Mitt. And the Mormons. Such a photo is funny. Not to Mormons. But in today’s Tribune, and in every other news media in the world, there appears an Englishwoman who named a teddy bear Muhammad. Hundreds of thousands of crazed Muslims called for her whipping, beheading, and jail time as well (after beheading, that might be called piling on). Just who is holding the Muslim faith up to ridicule? Why, the only ones who ever can, for any faith, any time. The True Believers. Those who always threaten their faith and world peace. Witness the Crusades. And the Mountain Meadows massacre.

No outsider can lay a glove on anyone’s faith. By their fruits ye shall know them. As a wily politician said about a cruel libel, “just spell my name right.” There is no publicity that can harm a candidate. I know. I ran for Congress and couldn’t get my name in a paper, let alone a television program, even when I ran stark naked into the tabernacle and they caught me by the great organ.

Now, to Mitt’s church and state speech. Remember, Mitt, you now must do what I’ve never ever seen or heard you do. Humor, particularly when you poke fun at yourself, will help your wooden image enormously. Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has stolen your thunder, Mitt. Not because he’s smarter. And surely not because he has a fraction of your personal fortune and your professional money-raising capacity. Huckabee will beat you for one reason. He’s real. He comes across as he really is. He needs no professional managers to prepare him for what he’s been doing, all his life.

I do not believe people vote, in the main, on the basis of this or that position on an issue. A truly deal-breaking issue rarely, if ever, exists. People know, or at least intuit, that the issues of the next four years, or eight, are not necessarily the issues of the moment. History may not repeat itself. Paraphrase, maybe. But tomorrow’s issues must be faced as the Good Book says:” sufficient to the day are the evils thereof.”

Mitt, I feel like shouting in italics again, but I’ve been warned that surfers of the net don’t like screamers, unless sex is in progress. Get real. You come across as pre-programmed. A public relations creation. Something like you’re the result of virgin birth. Someone who came about when a public relations genius slipped, once, and impregnated a totem pole, or perhaps Phyllis Schafley.

In a very real sense, Mitt, you’re being anti-Mormon. Or, at least, non-Mormon. Since we both come from a religion that abjures a professional clergy, we’ve both spoken tens of thousands of times, virtually since we were in our mothers’ womb. You’ve held about every position a human being could hold in our Mormon faith. You need no speech writers. Really. Fire them. Save money. Give those millions to fighting poverty, homelessness, and opposing those who support this dreadful war. Our Doctrine and Covenants, section ninety-eight, verse sixteen, directs us to”denounce war and proclaim peace.” Pope John XX!!! couldn’t say it better.

I don’t fear someone, at least in the United States of America, who allows his faith to inform his politics. And vice versa. God suffuses the Village Square. This is so whether we want it or not. This always has been and always will be. There is no division between church and state that cleaves through our soul, walling off the right from the left brain, or severs our heart in two. I fear someone who is so pre-programmed that he or she does what is obviously against her faith. Like Hillary Clinton has done. Senator Hillary Clinton is a believing, bible-carrying Methodist. Her church’s Bishops supported our anti-nuclear fight and issued a statement, just like the Roman Catholic Church did. And the Mormon Church, in three successive statements by the First Presidency: an Easter message, a Christmas message, and then the final statement in May, 1980, condemning the MX missile by name and all nucear weapons: and praying and exhorting peace. Hillary, read what your Methodist Bishops said. Sadly, Hillary has supported every war in sight. She always has. She’s never seen a war she didn’t like. But she’s even brighter than you or, for that matter, her husband, Bill Clinton. And you’re clearly the brightest candidate in the Republican Party’s batch of presidential candidates. But Mitt. You’re slick. The question is whether I should buy a used car from you.

Now, stand up on Thursday and do what you’ve done, on your mission, and before and after. Throw away your script. Tell your huge listening audience that you have a text. Then rip it up and speak from your heart. You were my Dad’s counselor in a Brigham Young University ward, decades ago. You are the only candidate of either party to have far more experience as a religious stump speaker than my favorite in the Republican Party, Mike Huckabee. ( I’m hoping against hope that John McCain and Mike Huckabee will be the Republican standardbearers. I simply do not trust any of the others.)

The capacity to laugh at oneself is the true sign of coming of age, as individuals and corporately. And yes, of course that includes our garments, or pajamas, as our friends not of our faith call them. If we can’t take the heat, as Harry Truman used to say, get the hell out of the kitchen. We Mormons will benefit for the next three hundred years for this chance at prime time. Corporately, the Mormon Church of today is right where Mitt Romney is. That is, the church, and Mitt, have a public relations man at the helm. A very good PR man, Gordon Hinckley, whom I met at about age twenty when he came to my home in Provo, Utah, to solicit me to give a speech or two on KSL radio. Public relations experts like Romney and President Hinckley have a great challenge. They are so articulate, and such natural wonderful leaders, that sometimes they confuse ethics, particularly corporate ethics, with public relations. As if, so to speak, corporate ethics were an oxymormon.

I suggest you watch and listen to Huckabee. Then do what you’ve always done. You got to the top without public relations gurus. Fire them all. Then read the 12th chapter of 1 Corinthians, verses 12-20. We all have a role, Mormons too, in the body of Christ. And the fourth chapter of Ephesians, verses 3-3:13. All people of the book are part of this building, fitly framed together. I would apply these words to the people of any book. ( And to people who think, with much evidence to sustain them, that god is a bad joke. They prefer the Marlboro Man. ) You know your bible by heart. Say it. Secularize it for the very real separation of church and state that is one of the glories of the American Constitution. Just as did St. Paul, to gentiles, Jews, Greeks, Romans. You might also copy Thomas Jefferson, to most of the world the opposite of St. Paul. To me, they are brothers joined at the brain and the heart. They both spoke to a common humanity. Read the Declaration of Independence. And then the entire book of Romans, and the second chapter of Ephesians. A common humanity. The very epitome of the Enlightenment. Like Abigail and John Adams, Martha and George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Martha, and Sally Hemmings, and Dolly and James Madison. All incarnations of the Enlightenment. And all quite capable of citing chapter and verse, in most books in their enormous libraries; and most important, in the temple of their own soul.

Let your humanity out of that stiff box. You’re in the Village Square. Use your fifteen minutes wisely. To die, politically or physically, with influence unspent is a tragedy, a wasted life.

Mormon church, it’s time and past time that you grow up. Quit whining. Stop excommunicating your best and brightest. Stop this anti-Darwinian survival of the least fit. Treat your polygamous offshoots as your own children, for they are indeed that. Grow up and ordain women to the clergy. Grow up and treat your homosexual sisters and brothers, quite a few being amongst your own general authorities and their children, as your children, not as your bastard progeny. Follow your Thirteenth Article of Faith. Believe all things. Wait upon all things. Become the ecumenical and indeed inter-faith corporate body of Christ that you claim to be. I do not believe in a restored church. Past tense won’t do. I do believe in a perpetual never ending restoration of all humanity. The big tent. Do this now. Or kiss this splendid opportunity of Mitt Romney’s candidacy goodbye. Then, assuming Mitt loses, we Mormons can wait for a woman, a person of color, with three children and divorced, to run successfully for the President of the United States. And when she finishes her eight years, we can all sustain her as the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Edwin Brown Firmage bio, website
Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law, Emeritus
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Impeachment seems, at this point, highly unlikely. I have called for impeaching this president for seven years and counting. From before and just after 9/11. Within the next month, I will have to do something I never thought I’d do. That is, imploring the government not to impeach this boob. If impeachment cannot at least be started, by immediately calling for persons and papers, we all must work with this fool, this knave among knaves, to help this helpless greedy ignoramus, through to the end of his term. This is so because impeachment can only occur with bipartisan support. If that is not immediately forthcoming, impeachment won’t fit the crime. Impeachment is not primarily about punishing someone for “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Rather, it is about righting the imbalance of powers separated and in check, in favor of the Congress whose powers are temporarily seized illegally by the Executive Branch. Impeachment is about saving the country from its government. It is not about revenge, or even the punishment of malefactors. That can come later, though the criminal law.

Of course, as we’ve already seen with Scooter Libby, this president knows how to feloniously hide his own misdeeds, and those of the Dark Lord, Mr. Cheney. Pardons these crooks and war criminals will all receive from George the Less. But I guarantee you, none will be able to travel without the bounds of the United States (except, of course, to Saudi Arabia, and Iraq) and be free from trial and imprisonment in any other nation in the world.

In fact, it would be most interesting for a Native American court, fully sovereign, a tribal court, to arrest the president and his henchmen on tribal land.

Fellow Democrats, seek bipartisanship, immediately, with your colleagues of the right. Or drop, within the next month, all attempts at impeaching the president. After the New Year, all we can do is support the President and pray.

Ed Firmage

Most fundamentally, we still don’t know how to handle nuclear waste without it constituting a huge threat to humans and all other life on the planet. The hottest of the hot stuff can last for hundreds of thousands of years, half-life. The stupidity of such a decision is topped only by the venality of those who would sell such stuff to their own neighbors and their own children.

It seems that everything we have in this geologically gorgeous state is for sale. Including the votes of our legislators. Sell enormous amounts of water. Degrade forever our land, air and water. And put us all at nuclear risk in this time of terrorism. It seems our most dangerous terrorists are the clowns we send to the legislature.

We are now coming to be known not only for our legislators of easy virtue, but as the nation’s nuclear one-stop-shop state. One big nuclear mall. EnergySolutions (Envirocare) will stuff nuclear material in a tube and save it for the children of our children’s children, until now, hugely shipped here from other wiser states.

Now, with nuclear power, we can bury our own radioactive rubbish along with the rest of the nation’s garbage. The Bush administration continues to make overtures toward testing in our Southlands. Uranium is mined here as well. And though heretofore we’ve wisely left nuclear power out of our state, now, for a price we will regret forever, we will continue the degradation of that portion of the earth given us in stewardship.

If some of our legislators want to go whole hog, perhaps their constituents might want to return them to the farm, where their snouts can be in their own swill.

Ed Firmage
Salt Lake City, Utah