FATHER WAS A MORMON OUTCAST Buss hated Mormons. Father had some Mormon friends, though. More precisely, Buss hated the Mormon Church. He wore a Masonic ring, proclaiming subtly, he told me confidentially, members of his Illinois brotherhood murdered Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, in a hail of gunfire at the jail in Carthage on June 27, […]
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I took the call from my maiden Aunt Leona. Uncle Myron and his idiosyncratic wife Marjorie—Republican activists and occasional pranksters—were piloting their black Cadillac limo to the Utah Governor’s office from Leona’s home in Ogden. “Expect their arrival at the State Capitol momentarily,” Leona announced resolutely. My octogenarian aunt and uncle were pre-World War II […]
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A century-and-a-quarter ago, Utah’s Mormon culture yielded to a quest for statehood, culminating in 1896. Once formally admitted to the Union however, the dominant religion returned to its “dance” with the secularism it had chosen to adopt. This “truth dichotomy” continues into the present. To out-of-state visitors, Utah’s culture warfare may appear as a “dust-up” […]
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