I was watching television in the break room with a co-worker who was a Vietnam Vet and there was something on that prompted him to refer to “Hanoi Jane” (probably during the 2004 election). I was genuinely surprised, and after he mentioned that his depth of feeling came from the men he knew that died there, I asked…

There was a local daycare called The Tender Touch. I think they changed their name a year or two ago.

Is there something I missed about Richard Pryor?

Are pro-life advocates complicit in every murder committed by a human who was born?

It’s certainly true that LDS teachings have implicitly and explicitly gone hand in hand with Republican policies for the last sixty years or so, especially in Utah, but it’s also true that LDS Democrats like Harry Reid and Jim Matheson pop up from time to time, and it’s very likely that the Democratic candidate will…

Fair. I make this point explicitly, because I suspect a lot of outsiders (I’m an outsider myself as a “Gentile”, but I’ve lived here for over twenty years) assume that a large number of Mormons secretly support polygamy, rather than what I think is by far the dominant view that modern polygamists are disobeying modern…

Jeffs’ group isn’t really far right, though, unless you define David Koresh as far right. There are a lot of far right Utahns, no question, but I think that looking for someone connected to Jeffs is like looking for the next candidate from New Mexico to turn out to be a meth dealer.

Am I one of those retards? Sure.

That’s easy and fun to say, but not quite right (unless you are talking purely about hair). First, as Governor of Massachusetts, son of a Governor of Michigan, and general cosmopolitan, Romney has a lot of carpetbagger baggage. Yes, he’s LDS, and that goes a long way, but I guarantee any primary opponent will also be…

No apologies necessary, we are indeed living in interesting times. The Catholic Church is having tremendous positive effects in people’s lives right now and heartbreaking negative effects in people’s lives right now and it’s all personal and it’s necessary to keep talking about all of it.

My wife is Catholic and experienced abuse from a member of her own family (who was also Catholic but not professionally connected to the Church) and later in her life has had profoundly meaningful and personally healing spiritual relationships with priests, nuns, and monks. She has read the papers, but her personal…

It’s not by default, it’s just easy. Most white people do realize it, but don’t care because it’s comfortable. Taking off the racist lenses means publicly acknowledging a fuckton of privilege, and that can be uncomfortable, both for successful white people and for unsuccessful white people. If you’re not willing to…

I think you’re probably right that abuse is not widely institutionalized among the LDS hierarchy on the scale of the Catholic Church. Again, it’s a very different structure. I don’t know if Catholics are any more or less likely to be abusive than Mormons, my guess would be that it’s about the same, both in inclination…

Yes, the structure of the LDS patriarchy definitely sets up women and children to be vulnerable and it sets up covering up.

No, it won’t be a polygamist - there’s no support for that in the base that decides Republican primaries, not even among the “ordinary” political fringe of the Utah GOP. There are polygamists, and plenty of folks who want to leave them alone, but Utah LDS Republicans totally support the leadership of the Church, which…

It’s a cliche, but it really is different in Utah. We’re so far from a two party State that we really have needed folks like Jon Huntsman and Olene Walker to be what Democrats are in other States. On top of that, Utah is pro-immigrant and suspicious of both mainstream Christianity and secular Republicans like Trump to…

It occurs to me that Evan McMullin could split the conservative vote against a “Roy Moore” even more effectively than he did against Trump, if he ran as an independent and the Democrat were a new Matheson. Romney, though, would win the general in a walk, no question.

Oh yeah, looking at Mike Lee we could very easily do worse.

The primary could be tough, if there’s a crazy Chaffetz/Lee/Love (maybe Love herself), Romney is vulnerable to attacks from the right.

On the one hand, I’m glad Mia Love has finally said something that isn’t an embarrassment to the state of Utah and that she is seeing daylight between her unique twisted insane version of conservatism and the equally twisted but more straightforwardly racist version held by Trump and his white allies.