FLASHBACK 1998: A majority of Utahns have been led to believe that you can't be a "good" Mormon and a Democrat, too 

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In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.

Title: One-Party Disaster
Author: John Harrington
Date: April 9, 1998

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Without a balanced adversarial political system watched carefully by a vigorous independent press—things we do not have in Utah today—we arguably live in the equivalent of a dictatorship, even though our government can claim it has been elected "democratically."

The most serious problems in this state can be traced directly to the total collapse of a multi-party political system. The collapse is no accident. It is the outcome of a 30-year effort to create a religious/political state that began on the laughable fringes with a right-wing, anti-Communist, Mormon political splinter group in 1960s Provo.

A little history is in order: At the end of Gov. Scott Matheson's second term, the two-party political system in Utah was diagnosed as terminally ill. It appears to the casual political observer that, in the end, Republicans simply out-hustled the Democrats in a "conservative" state and that the one-party domination of Utah was a political phenomenon.

In reality, the American model of democracy was wiped out in Utah in Mormon wards. Against that backdrop, political hustle on the part of the Republicans had little to do with it. In fact, it wasn't even real Republicans who pulled it off. It was ultra-right-wing conspiracy-peddlers who seized control of the Republican Party in the mid-1970s. Traditional "country club" Republicans were pushed out with the Democrats, and that's where they remain.

In right-wing Republican/Mormon Utah, the evidence of unchecked power-as-failure is everywhere and the contradictions are clear.

Our "Republican" state is one of the most-heavily taxed in the nation, yet, nationally, the Republicans are supposed to be the anti-tax crowd. The massive construction disruptions on the Wasatch Front are the direct result of across-the-board lack of both planning and long-term strategic thinking statewide; another classic hallmark of paranoid, short-term, ill-educated right-wing thinking that is acceptable only because of the perceived Republican-Mormon Church link.

We own a reactive, catch-up-to-the-crisis mentality, rather than practicing a holistic, long-term approach that would recognize and eliminate future problems before they could occur. The gap in wealth widens at an alarming rate, while the general population is spoon-fed distracting arguments about moral issues that have nothing to do with putting food on the table or shoes on children's feet.

Years of bashing Democrats—even in church—has successfully indoctrinated a majority of Utah voters to believe you can't be a "good" Mormon and a Democrat at the same time.

But, we should not give a damn about Democrats and Republicans. The only thing that matters in any healthy society is balance. Without a balance of power, you get abuse. In life, if you don't balance your diet, you become ill. It's all a matter of balance. In America, we simply refer to that balance as Republican and Democrat. They are just names representing what we need to survive in a free nation: a true balance of power encompassing numerous points of view.

The reason most of the people in Utah live from paycheck to paycheck while they exist among road rage, terrible air pollution and high taxes is because a small handful of right-wing political zealots have gotten away with using the Mormon Church to pull this place so very far out of balance at the expense of the main bulk of church leadership and everyone else.

Here's one key reason it happened: In the 1960s and early 1970s, former LDS Church president Ezra Taft Benson, his sons, and former Salt Lake City Police Chief Cleon Skousen set out on a mission to spread the message that the Democratic and Republican parties harbored Satan's communistic workers, who had been sent to destroy the "Divinely Inspired" United States Constitution. They bore testimony in Mormon Church firesides and ward meetings from Saint Anthony, Idaho, to Orange County, California, that God was calling upon the Mormon Church to save the "Divinely Inspired Constitution."

In those days, Benson and Skousen were tied to the John Birch Society and the now-defunct American Party. So, even though they were well-received as religious leaders in Mormon circles, the men were politically isolated because of their ultra-extremist views.

The American Party was a joke. What there was of it was operated by Skousen out of a Provo storefront, near the BYU campus where he taught religion. Politically speaking, virtually all Utah Democrats and Republicans ignored American Party members as nuts—a big mistake, it turns out.

Skousen correctly figured that if the vision of a religious/political state with the Mormon Church as the keeper of the "Divinely Inspired Constitution" were to ever come true, he and his disciples would have to take over one of the two mainstream political parties in Utah. He picked the Republicans.

In 1976, Skousen won his first mainstream political success. His block of former American Party John Birch Mormons known as the "Freemen Institute"—now the National Center for Constitutional Studies—got together as Republicans to back the U.S. Senate candidacy of an obscure railroad accident claims lawyer named Orrin Hatch.

Skousen ran a "telephone tree" to organize his Freemen members to get out the vote in their respective church wards for Hatch. It worked. Hatch scored a stunning upset Republican primary win. Skousen then used the same tactic to beat incumbent Democrat Sen. Ted Moss by spreading lies and fear about the senator.

Years later, after expanding his influence, Skousen repeated the success by helping elect Mormon Freemen Institute member Evan Meacham as the Republican governor of Arizona. Meacham was eventually impeached.

But, what happened to Hatch became Utah's political-success blueprint. Ever since, right-wing religious conspiracy-mongering and Republican politics have become the same thing in Zion.

The American Party took over the Utah Republican Party by pushing a week-in and week-out agenda from the pulpit, under the guise of Mormon Church-approved moral issues and "family values." Now, every Utah Republican candidate has been convinced he or she must lick the boots of the ultra-right if they want to win. Democrats simply became the devil—even Mormon Democrats, like Ted Wilson, Wayne Owens, Stuart Reid and Larry Echohawk.

You have been conned into buying this. Take note: If you carry a balance on your credit cards at the end of the month, you aren't making enough money to get by. You are taxed to hell and back, while the state falls apart at the seams. Inexplicably, most of us remain members of the Mormon Republican Party.

The reason? We have been indoctrinated to believe it would be against God to do otherwise. You allow false religious indoctrination and testimony that has no place in politics to steal your free agency, just like the 1965 American Party and the John Birch Society.

We pay dearly every day for this big lie. If balance isn't restored in Utah, democracy is over, whether you're a Mormon or not.