Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 12

 

“Ultra”: Insurrection in America, Then and Now

During the holidays, I’ve been listening to Rachel Maddow’s podcast “Ultra.” If you have not heard of this podcast, you need to look into it. This nine-part series recounts a piece of American history that we have been all too eager to forget. But history does tend to be forgotten, and it also tends to be, if not repeated, at least able to produce echoes down the corridors of time. So it is with this episode of American history.

This story took place in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Nazi Germany was trying to keep America out of World War II. Nazi agents such as George Viereck had infiltrated Congress through political figures including Senator Ernest Lundeen and Representative Hamilton Fish III, sending pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic propaganda to millions of Americans using Congress’s franking privileges (free postage). Nazi agents also worked through ultra-right organizations, including the America First Committee (notice the echo in the name to today), the largest political pressure organization in the country, and militant ultra-right groups that had concocted a rather impressive plot to violently overthrow the government and replace it with a Nazi-style government.

The story presented in “Ultra” is far too involved to even summarize in a blog post, but throughout the podcast series the parallels to today’s America are just too obvious to ignore. While today’s Republican Party is not colluding with a hostile foreign power like Nazi Germany, it is hard to ignore Trump’s obvious infatuation with Putin and other dictators. (It is hard also to not notice how, even after Putin’s illegal and miscalculated invasion of Ukraine, Trump still refuses to say anything negative about the heartless strongman.) Today’s Republicans are also not averse to supporting insurrection for other reasons—not in collusion with a foreign power but in fear of the wrath of a home-grown wannabe dictator who is willing to do anything, even toss the Constitution, in his self-centered craving for power and adoration.

What I found striking is that these far-right individuals and groups who were working to overthrow the government of the United States in the 1940s did not consider themselves traitors. No, they were patriots. The parallel here to today’s insurrectionists is staggering. Hundreds of Trump’s “patriots” are now facing jail time for their participation in the events of January 6, 2021. So it was in the 1940s also.

In the fifth episode of “Ultra,” Maddow recounts the work of Justice Department prosecutor William Power Maloney, who investigated this grand plot to overthrow the government. He indicted scores of individuals and investigated many members of Congress who were involved with the Nazis . . . until Senator Burton Wheeler, a leader of the America First Committee, whose congressional frank had been used by Nazi spy George Viereck to distribute German propaganda across America. Maloney’s team found evidence of Wheeler’s involvement in the plot, but Wheeler fought back. He went to Attorney General Francis Biddle and threatened to launch an investigation into not just Maloney but the entire Department of Justice.

The echo here shows up in wannabe Speaker of the House Kevin McConnell’s threat to investigate the January 6 Committee. The guilty threaten to turn the tables by investigating those who are trying to hold them responsible for their sedition. In the 1940s, Francis Biddle caved to the pressure and fired William Maloney. Today, I can’t imagine Liz Cheney or Bennie Thompson or Merrick Garland caving to any amount of pressure from Republican threats, so the parallels are limited, but there are definite echoes.

At any rate, “Ultra” is a sobering lesson in what happens when we forget the uglier episodes of our own history. It is a fascinating story, and not just because of what we have experienced in the past few years. It is, however, yet another reason for Latter-day Saints to reconsider their overwhelming support of today’s Republican Party while it is still unrepentant over its involvement in (or merely its silent acceptance of) the devastation wrought by Donald Trump on our republic. Until the GOP returns to a principled conservative party, it does not deserve your vote, at any level of government.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 11

 

Distrust of Science and Expertise in General

 

The COVID-19 pandemic not only revealed a growing chasm between the parties on questions of trusting science, but it also accelerated the widening of that chasm. This happened primarily because the Republican Party politicized a public health crisis. When wearing masks to protect others (and self) and getting vaccinated became political signifiers instead of commonsense behaviors, the gap between the two parties in terms of serious illness and unnecessary death became quite stark. In recent months, as immunity has increased generally through mediocre vaccination levels and the prevalence of those who have been infected, COVID deaths and hospitalizations have transitioned from affecting primarily the unvaccinated to the elderly. But for a time, the chances of dying from COVID were far larger if you were Republican.

I’m not sure what lies at the root of the Republican distrust of science. Perhaps it is merely the expected result of less educated Americans gravitating toward the GOP. But why do they lean Republican, especially when other GOP policies penalize them? The answer probably has a lot to do with the conservative echo chamber and the message that is being broadcast through conservative media outlets. Regardless of the cause, though, the results are not in question. They can be and have been measured.

A recent Pew Research Center survey, for instance, showed that 36 percent of respondents who are or lean Republican had no (or not much) trust in scientists as of December 2021. This is up from 27 percent in June 2016 and up from 14 percent in April 2020 (I’m not sure why the percentage dropped almost by half in those four years). By contrast, only 10 percent of respondents who are or lean Democrat have no (or not much) trust in scientists. This number has decreased from 18 percent in June 2016 and increased just slightly from 9 percent in April 2020. The numbers are similar for trust in medical science. So, why the drastic change during the pandemic’s worst months among Republicans? I’m sure it is largely due to the politicizing of a public health crisis. But it probably goes beyond this, as evidenced, for instance, in the difference between the two parties on questions such as climate change.

But again, this growing gap between the parties on questions of science is likely inseparable from the education gap that is also growing. On average, the more education a person has, the more that person tends to move toward liberal stances and causes. I suspect also that the prevalence of conspiracy theories on the right has an effect on Republican distrust of science. Conspiracy theories, by and large, are a refuge for the ignorant who want to appear intelligent. They are the lazy person’s path to pseudo-expertise.

This would be less concerning if Republican leaders were encouraging their constituents to seek out good information and get as much education as possible. But in the Trump years (which the GOP seems still stuck in), ignorance became a point of pride. Republican thought leaders disparaged “experts,” as if knowing something was actually a character flaw. I’m not sure what can be done to change this, but I am concerned about the percentage of Latter-day Saints who have embraced the Republican values, including the embrace of disinformation, regardless of what their religion says about intelligence and in spite of their leaders’ warnings against getting information from questionable sources.

I’m not saying that science is always right. Of course it isn’t. But science is self-correcting. It is always changing its conclusions when better evidence or better analysis comes along. In fact, the heart of the scientific enterprise is to question methods and conclusions. So a trust in science includes, by default, an awareness that science will constantly seek better information and demand rigorous examination of that information. The results of the scientific method cannot be questioned. They are all around us, including, or course, the computer I am writing this blog post on and the device you are reading it on.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 10

 

Abortion

There are many Latter-day Saints who are Republican for one reason only: abortion. It used to be two reasons. I remember a high priests group discussion years ago when we somehow got onto the topic of politics and the issues we should be concerned about. Someone mentioned abortion and same-sex marriage. Someone else said something about other issues, and my home teacher said, “Well, what other issues are there?” Over the past few years, the Church has changed its tune about same-sex marriage, except where it involves Church members. So abortion is now the only reason many members ignore other important issues and vote against their own interests.

But abortion is not as straightforward as most Latter-day Saints seem to think, especially since the Republican Party has pushed a set of extreme laws that go well beyond the Church’s stated position. But even the Church’s position is not as well thought out as many people assume. I’ve written about that topic in this space before, but in the interest of brevity, let me repeat here what I wrote in an op-ed for the Salt Lake Tribune, printed on May 23 of this year.

There Is a Hole in the LDS Position on Abortion

Since the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, emotions on both sides have run high and extremism has carried the day. In this climate, it would be wise to turn down the heat, recognize the complexity of the abortion issue and realize that the best solution is not on either extreme, but rather somewhere in the middle.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long espoused a position on abortion that, while not in the middle, is certainly not extreme.

“The Church opposes elective abortion for personal or social convenience,” the policy reads, but “the Church allows for possible exceptions when . . . pregnancy results from rape or incest, or a competent physician determines that the life or health of the mother is in serious jeopardy, or . . . determines that the fetus has severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth.”

The fact that the Church allows for exceptions means it does not consider abortion the equivalent of murder. The Church recognizes complicating factors that can make abortion not just acceptable, but perhaps even preferable in certain circumstances.

Abortion, however, is even more complex than the LDS position allows. Indeed, there is a significant hole in the official LDS abortion statement. The unspoken assumption is that any abortion that does not fall under the three exceptions is by default an abortion of “convenience.”

But thousands upon thousands of abortions are not sought for mere convenience but for reasons that include, among others, severe economic hardship, the fear of bringing a child into a family with an abusive husband and father, or the protection of the future life of a mentally or emotionally fragile woman who would be devastated by bringing an unwanted child into the world.

Perhaps the problem is the word “convenience.” Unless you redefine the word, it simply doesn’t cover the many complex situations that fall outside the bounds of the three exceptions. I’ve tried, but I can’t come up with a word that covers both convenience and all these difficult situations.

Consider the fact that 75 percent of women who terminate their pregnancies are low-income, and nearly half live below the poverty line. Fifty-five percent are either unmarried or do not live with the father. The average cost of having a baby in the United States is $13,024, which rises to $22,646 for a C-section. Such an expense would devastate many women who seek abortions, especially since a large percentage of them live without private health insurance or do not qualify for Medicaid. For many of these women, an abortion is not for “convenience”; it is for survival.

Some activists argue that the alternative to abortion is adoption. But adoption is often not a viable option. The cost for an adopting couple using an independent agency generally runs between $15,000 and $40,000. And adoption is not an easy, one-size-fits-all solution to unwanted pregnancy. Often finding an acceptable adoptive couple is not easy. There are already more than 400,000 children in foster care in the United States. Banning abortion would certainly increase this number.

Much of the rhetoric surrounding abortion is religious in nature. The theory that “life” begins at conception is largely an evangelical Christian argument that is of fairly recent origin. The LDS position on this question is undefined and is complicated by the unique doctrine of the pre-existence of human spirits. The Church has never officially declared when the spirit enters the body, but LDS scripture and policy suggest it is not at conception and may even be at birth.

As historian Ardis Parshall put it in a recent blog post, “The practice of the Church bolsters the thought that body and spirit are not joined until birth, because a child who dies in the womb, at any stage and from whatever cause, cannot be sealed to his or her parents and is not carried on Church records as a child of a family even if the parents were previously sealed in the temple.”

Abortion is a difficult decision for any woman, and there are uncounted complicating circumstances that make forced childbirth by blanket law an unwise and oppressive measure. Considering all this, the policy that makes the most sense for Latter-day Saints is to restrict abortions for mere “convenience,” but to support the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy when she, her doctor, her clergy, and (in many cases) her partner deem this to be the best overall solution in truly difficult circumstances.

___________________

My point here is that if abortion is the only or even the primary reason you are Republican, the issue is more complicated than you might think, and there are certainly reasons to oppose the overly restrictive laws the GOP is promoting and passing. It is actually possible to be both pro-life and pro-choice. It all depends on individual circumstances, and blanket laws just don’t make sense because of the many situations where women find themselves somewhere in that yawning hole between “convenience” and the Church’s three exceptions.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 9

 

Corporate Self-Regulation

 

If I could recommend just one book for you to read in the next six months, it would be Celine-Marie Pascale’s Living on the Edge: When Hard Times Become a Way of Life. Pascale is a professor of sociology at American University in Washington, DC. A major part of her research for this book involved interviewing Americans from what she calls the “struggling class” in communities across America—from inner-city Oakland to Ohio’s Athens County to the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota to Central Appalachia. The book is an eye-opener from beginning to end, but for today’s segment of this series I want to focus on what Pascale calls “sacrifice zones.”

One of the big campaign talking points of Republican candidates is deregulation. Unfortunately, though, this is more than a talking point. It’s something Republicans have been serious about acting on whenever possible. Their free-market ideology includes the hare-brained notion that everything is better when corporations are allowed to self-regulate. Granted, some regulations are excessive, but most are not. Most regulation exists to keep corporations from doing what corporations are programmed to do—make a profit in any way that is legal (and sometimes when it is illegal), regardless of the human or environmental costs. Economists refer to these costs with the harmless-sounding euphemism “negative externalities.” But let’s talk about some of these far-from-harmless externalities.

Pascale introduces her chapter on sacrifice zones with this statement: “If it seems surprising to find a chapter on environmental contamination in a book about families trying to make ends meet, consider that the most toxic environments in the country are consistently those that struggling families call home. This isn’t an accident, and it can profoundly affect the health and well-being of residents.” She gives many examples, but I’ll focus on just a couple here to illustrate the point that government and corporations often collude to harm the lives of individuals, especially those who do not have the influence or means to fight back—all for the sake of profit.

Republicans, especially Trump, have made coal mining the poster child of the GOP, bemoaning the loss of jobs that have disappeared largely because cleaner energy is also now a lot cheaper. But coal mining creates massive negative externalities for the local populations. “Sludge or slurry is the name for toxic waste created when coal is washed to separate it from rocks and dirt. The slurry is a mix of rock, water, and mud that carries arsenic, mercury, chromium, cadmium, and selenium—for starters. . . . Coal mining generates millions of tons of slurry each year and coal industries use the cheapest way of handling it, which is to build containment ponds. Because ponds are not lined, these heavy metals inevitably seep into groundwater and local waterways; and, of course, the dams holding the ponds fail with some regularity” (86). One breach in West Virginia in March 2017 spilled 5,400 gallons of slurry into Drawdy Creek, which polluted the drinking water of everyone in St. Albans and Lincoln counties. “Studies . . . consistently find that residents of West Virginia’s mining counties were more likely than folks in non-mining communities to suffer from cancer, kidney disease, obstructive lung diseases, birth defects, high blood pressure, and a shortened life span.”

Coal power plants not only put harmful chemicals in the air, but burning coal creates coal ash, which has the same heavy metals as coal slurry. The cheapest way to deal with it is to mix it with water and store it in ponds. In 2008, the Kingston Fossil Plant in Tennessee had a retaining wall collapse, which “released more than a billion gallons of toxic material into two rivers. The disaster . . . cost the federal government over one billion dollars to clean up. Regulations to secure coal ash waste were finally implemented in the Obama years but were rolled back by the Trump administration” (87). We might ask why such regulations would be rolled back. The answer is that this is simply what Republicans do. Government is evil, so we need to get government out of the way of corporate profit. Community health is not an issue at all with Republicans.

The second example comes from oil production, another extractive industry that has bought many politicians. In recent years, oil production in the North Dakota Bakken fracking fields, 160 miles from the Standing Rock Reservation, has increased 600 percent, leading to an increase in environmental disasters. “Between 2006 and 2014 an estimated 5.9 million gallons of oil were spilled in North Dakota, along with 11.8 million gallons of fracking wastewater called brine. While ‘brine’ might sound harmless—like something you’d use for making pickles—it isn’t. Fracking brines contain over 200 toxins including arsenic, benzene, formaldehyde, lead, and mercury. All of which have harmful impacts on health, ranging from lowered IQ levels and behavioral issues in children, to kidney, brain, and central nervous system damage in adults” (93). Fracking brine also contains radioactive contaminants, such as radium-226 and radium-228, which are linked to bone marrow and lung cancers.

“At Standing Rock, the Keystone Pipeline System [which Republicans have again used as a rallying cry against regulation] offers one more example of collusion between business and government at the expense of people and the environment” (94). This is a system of three pipelines that carry oil from tar sands over thousands of miles. “Tar sands, which are thicker, more acidic, and more corrosive than conventional crude oil, make pipelines prone to leaking. . . . The original Keystone pipeline commissioned in 2010 runs 1,600 miles from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. It has a long history of spills and leaks, including nearly 400,000 gallons of oil in North Dakota wetlands in 2019. The Keystone XL also runs from Canada to the Gulf Coast by a slightly different route. In its first year of operation it had twelve leaks that resulted in significant oil spills, one of which poured almost 407,000 of crude oil into the ground” (94). The third Keystone pipeline is the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). It runs 1,200 miles from the Bakken Formation in North Dakota to refineries in Illinois, passing through South Dakota and Iowa. Originally, it ran through wealthier white communities, but in 2016, because people in Bismarck complained, it was rerouted through historic and sacred sites in the Standing Rock Reservation. When the Standing Rock Sioux protested peacefully, they were met with a militarized response from the National Guard and private security forces who “used tear-gas, pepper spray, tasers, water cannons, rubber bullets, and dogs against protesters” (96).

“In September 2016, President Obama vetoed the pipeline construction, citing the pervasive threats to ecosystems, drinking water sources, and public health. Kelcy Warren, the billionaire head of Energy Transfer Partners that developed the pipeline, donated more than $720,000 to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and upon entering office Trump immediately signed an executive order reversing the Obama decision. . . . Since 2016, at least seventeen states have introduced legislation to criminalize pipeline protests” (96–97).

Of course, nowhere in this discussion is there any mention of global warming and the desperate need we have of transitioning away from fossil fuels, particularly those that are toxic to the environment in addition to putting massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But as discussed in an earlier post in this series, Republicans are still determined to delay any response to human-caused climate change, even as climate catastrophes continue to exceed the scientists’ predictions.

In a post dated February 21, 2021, I wrote about the movie Dark Waters, based on the true story of Rob Bilott as detailed in the New York Times article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” (January 6, 2016). The movie and the article depict how DuPont knowingly dumped highly toxic PFOAs (perfluorooctanoic acids) into a stream that provided drinking water to tens of thousands of people who eventually forced DuPont to settle for $671 million. This is just another example of what happens when government allows corporations to “self-regulate,” which generally means not regulating their harmful behavior at all. But this is the world our current Republican Party want to perpetuate.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other ways corporations make life miserable or dangerous to their employees, customers, and society in general. There are inhumane working conditions, starvation wages, lack of health insurance, tax evasion, and dangerous products. All of this needs to be regulated, because if it is not, corporations will do whatever they can get away with in order to make a profit. And the Republican Party wants to simply get out of their way.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 8

 

Government Is the Enemy

 

At a press conference on August 12, 1986, President Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” This statement was the beginning of something, but it certainly was not the end, and I’m sure Ronald Reagan would be appalled at how far the Republican Party has run with this catchy bit of antigovernment rhetoric.

The message from Reagan was clear: the government is inept, perhaps even harmful in its attempts to help American citizens. But it also indicative of a fundamental conservative belief: namely, that almost everything is better if left to the free market. And this is a fundamental difference between the two major political parties. To Democrats, government is the people’s tool to address sticky problems that the market either ignores (i.e., limited access to health care) or exacerbates (i.e., pollution). To Republicans, government is not only ineffective, but likely evil. Government is the enemy. According to conservative lobbyist Grover Norquist, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” The difference in these perspectives led humorist P. J. O’Rourke to comment, “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

These different perspectives on government have led to two very different approaches to solving problems. On the left, this means passing legislation or taking executive action to address problems like out-of-control health-care costs, millions of Americans without health insurance, global warming, gun violence, economic inequality, crumbling infrastructure, and the high cost of a college education. On the right, this means literally trying to take health insurance from millions of Americans, pushing for more fossil fuel production and consumption, giving tax breaks to the wealthy (because taxes are evil), defunding the IRS (which only reduces revenues and increases the national debt Republicans claim to abhor), kicking the infrastructure can down the road (until “infrastructure week” became a sick joke), and keeping the minimum wage as low as possible (it hasn’t changed since 2009).

Republicans generally believe that a small government is good government. But this ignores one massive problem: the abuses of authoritarian business entities such as multinational corporations. This is not a new problem, and former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt recognized this 110 years ago. Nothing has really changed in those years except that the problem has gotten a lot larger.

In an address at the Coliseum in San Francisco on September 14, 1912, when Roosevelt was running for a third term as a presidential candidate for the progressive “Bull Moose” party, he said this: “The people of the United States have but one instrument which they can efficiently use against the colossal combinations of business—and that instrument is the government of the United States. . . . Remember that it is absolutely impossible to limit the power of these great corporations whose enormous power constitutes so serious a problem in modern industrial life except by extending the power of the government. All that these great corporations ask is that the power of the government shall be limited. . . . There once was a time in history when the limitation of governmental power meant increasing liberty for the people. In the present day the limitation of governmental power, of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power.”

Corporate interests have purchased influence in government by basically purchasing politicians. And this is a problem for both parties. But it is a far greater problem on the right. The Democrats are still determined to increase the well-being of the lower and middle classes. The Republicans, on the other hand, may talk a good populist game, but when you look at what they support in terms of legislation, they almost exclusively enact laws to help the wealthy and the corporate behemoths. Tax cuts and corporate welfare and allowing corporations to self-regulate are high on the GOP’s agenda. And as Roosevelt made clear, when you try to shrink government, what you are really doing is shrinking the ability of government to rein in corporate abuses. Consider all the EPA pollution regulations the Trump administration rescinded. Whom does that help? Not me, and not you.

So, if you believe in democracy, that the power should reside in the people, then you must also agree that government is the only tool we as citizens have to serve our needs, some of which are desperate. But if you believe the rhetoric that began with Ronald Reagan and has only intensified over the years, claiming that government is the problem, then the Republican Party is where you belong. I would hope that Latter-day Saints would be for democracy, and not for a government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 7

 

Health Care

 

Among all developed countries and many un- and underdeveloped ones, the United States stands alone as the only country that does not guarantee health care for all citizens. Not only that, but our health care costs us much more than other countries pay, sometimes more than twice as much, and our health outcomes do not compare very well either. For instance, the U.S. ranks 46th in life expectancy, with males expected to live 76.61 years and females 81.65. This is lower than Chile (78.54, 82.80), Costa Rica (78.53, 83.39), Slovenia (79.26, 84.44), Martinique (79.85, 86.10), Singapore (82.06, 86.15), and 40 other countries large and small. Other statistics, such as maternal mortality rate, are especially revealing. Compared with nine other developed countries, the U.S. rate is highest at 23.8 per 100,000 live births. Next highest is Canada at 8.4. The Netherlands is lowest at 1.2.

The U.S. spent $12,318 per person on health care in 2021, the highest costs per capita among OECD nations. Next highest is Germany at $7,383. The average among the wealthy OECD countries was $5,829. Japan spends $4,666 per person, and South Korea spends only $3,914. This discrepancy is largely due to the fact that U.S. health care is a for-profit system. Republicans have insisted that we just need to turn the market loose in order to rein in health-care costs and get better results. But for a variety of reasons, the market simply does not work in health care. When, for instance did you last go shopping for the best deal on angioplasty? Or have you ever seen a hospital offer a two-for-one deal on appendectomies? The nature of human health problems makes comparison shopping virtually impossible. The two largest culprits in creating outrageous health-care costs are pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. Let me use my own experience as an example.

Four and a half years ago, I was playing basketball one morning, as I have done now for over 30 years. Another player, stepped on my foot and knocked me over. My foot stayed in place, while my body tipped over backward. This rearranged the bones in my foot. I had two displaced metatarsals, a cracked cuneiform bone, and a Lisfranc injury (a torn ligament in the center of the foot). All this damage required surgery to repair. I now have a plate and seven screws in my foot that tend to set off alarms in airports when I fly. My foot healed fine, and I’m playing basketball on all that hardware, but my encounter with the American health-care system left me both amazed and baffled.

The real shock came when I received the itemized bill from Intermountain Health Care for my morning in the operating room. The doctor’s bill as actually quite reasonable, but let me share with you a few of the highlights from the hospital’s “Itemized Statement of Services.” The prices I will list are what IHC billed my insurance. What the insurance paid was, of course, a fair bit lower since the hospital was in their network. If I hadn’t had insurance, I would have been responsible for the full amount.

The hospital billed the insurance about $25,460 for “medical supplies.” The operating room, by contrast, was a mere $7,547.40. The total charges amounted to $35,542.13, 70 percent of which was for medical supplies. I wondered what on earth could be that expensive. Well, the itemized bill explained it.

The plate (Plate Ankle Lapidus CP 0 Offset) was billed at $5,332.32. I have to wonder about the thirty-two cents. Really? They couldn’t round it to $5,330? One of the seven screws was billed at $2,852.28. Three other screws were $907.39 each. The others were only $653.86. The local hardware sore apparently doesn’t carry these screws. The hospital also billed for a pin, three reamers, a K-wire, and other odds and ends. One of the reamers was billed at $2,219.32. And some sort of unthreaded guidewire came in at $2,935.68. I asked the doctor what on earth that was. “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t use it.”

The item on this itemized statement that had me scratching my head, though, was the “Bit Screwdriver T8 AO Quick Coup.” Yes, my insurance got billed $2,201.76 for a screwdriver. I can’t help but wonder why. Don’t they do surgeries like this rather frequently? Don’t they have a screwdriver in the drawer from the last surgery like mine? Couldn’t they sterilize it and reuse it? If not, then I want that screwdriver. I mean, they obviously don’t need it. I asked the doctor for it. He just laughed, but hey, that screwdriver is a testament to the insanity of the American health-care system. I’d bet even the military doesn’t pay that much for a screwdriver. And if they did, they’d probably use it at least twice.

The doctor explained that he has to buy a kit for the surgery. It includes all kinds of stuff, some of which he doesn’t even use. And $2,200 screwdrivers are apparently thrown away. He complained about the medical supply industry and pharmaceuticals. That’s where people really get ripped off, he said. Why? Because health care has become an industry, and profit drives everything, and these businesses charge what they can. That’s why we need to get the profit motive out of health care and go to a single-payer system like almost all other countries, a system focused more on patient care than on profit.

And this brings us to the two political parties. The Democrats, of course, passed the Affordable Care Act, an admittedly imperfect system that nevertheless reduced prices for many Americans and ensured that millions of Americans now have insurance who previously did not. If they could, the Democrats would pass into law some sort of single-payer system comparable to what other nations offer. The Republicans? Well, they have been trying to repeal the ACA ever since it was passed, and since John McCain prevented them from accomplishing that dastardly deed, they have worked hard to undermine the ACA at every turn and have tried to deny health coverage to millions of Americans.

The Republicans used to claim they had a better plan. Of course, they never unveiled it. It is still a secret. But now they don’t even pretend to have a better alternative. And yet they still promise to kill the Affordable Care Act. In the entire civilized world, it is only the U.S. Republican Party that wants millions of people to be without health insurance. Only the Republicans Party wants hundreds of thousands of families to go bankrupt every year because of medical debt. Indeed, every year, 530,000 American families file for bankruptcy due to medical bills. Overall, 66.5 percent of all American bankruptcies are due to medical bills. Medical bankruptcies do occur in other countries, but no country compares with the United States. Total medical debt in the U.S. totaled $45 billion in 2020.

If we were to ask what the Republican policy on health care is, we would be unable to answer the question. The party created no platform in 2020, other than slavishly following Donald Trump’s whims. There is similarly no Republican platform this year. They are running not on ideas or policies but on culture-war issues and criticism of the Democrats for many things the Democrats aren’t even accountable for.

So, if Latter-day Saints want to promote poor but expensive health care, which is denied to millions of poor Americans, they should vote Republican. But if they really take seriously the scriptural injunction to care for the poor, the sick, and the disabled, they will support a measure to introduce in America a universal, single-payer health-care system patterned after any of a dozen or two that are working fine in other countries. Once again, this means believing Latter-day Saints simply cannot vote Republican.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 6

 

Tax Cuts

 

For a variety of reasons, we are experiencing a bit of economic turbulence right now. Inflation is persisting despite the Fed’s efforts to cool off the economy. Gas prices are still high, even though they have dropped significantly from their peak, but they will probably rise again because of the production cuts agreed upon by Saudi Arabia and Vladimir Putin. The national debt just passed $31 trillion and shows no signs of slowing. And economists worry that we are heading for a recession. In spite of all this, the job market remains strong, likely too strong. And of course the Republicans are blaming everything on President Biden and the “free-spending Democrats.” But it would be wise to look at a few facts.

First, most of this has little to do with Joe Biden or the Democrats in the House and Senate and a lot to do with the pandemic, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and three needless Republican tax cuts. It is probably true that the current inflationary spell was jump-started by the COVID stimulus money, but the alternative would have been much, much worse. And Republicans are disingenuous to blame the Democrats for the massive outlays in response to the pandemic. The CARES Act, totaling $2.2 trillion was passed in March 2020 and was signed into law by President Trump. The CAA (Consolidated Appropriations Act), totaling $910 billion, was passed in December 2020 and was signed into law by President Trump. Both bills enjoyed large bipartisan majorities. The third COVID relief package was the American Rescue Plan (ARPA), totaling $1.9 trillion, which was passed in March 2021 and was signed into law by President Biden. It passed along party lines, the final vote in the Senate being 50-49.

This relief money prevented the economy from tanking during the depths of the pandemic, when hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying, millions lost their jobs, businesses were thrown into chaos, and supply chains were disrupted. The rebound, largely because of this relief legislation, was faster than most people expected. Indeed, the economy boomed to the extent that it got too hot. The Fed was slow reacting, but the inflation is largely a result of the pandemic, with a significant boost from Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions the U.S. and Europe placed on Russia, which pushed gasoline and natural gas prices into the stratosphere.

Significantly, although Republicans have blamed Biden and the Democrats for the current economic troubles, they have offered no ideas on how they would rein in inflation if they were in power. The only economic idea they have pushed, predictably, is another needless tax cut, which would of course benefit the wealthy rather than those who really need help. Tax cuts are the only tool the Republicans have in their economic tool belt. No matter what the problem is, their solution is to cut taxes. They criticize the Democrats for spending on things that are necessary, like COVIC relief and infrastructure, because this spending does increase the debt. But they hold themselves blameless for passing three unnecessary tax cuts (Reagan, Bush Jr., and Trump), which have had a massive impact on the national debt.

Tax cuts never pay for themselves. But they are extremely popular with a certain segment of society. And once you lower taxes, it is almost impossible to increase them. No politician, regardless of how large the debt grows, would dare propose a tax increase. But the result of these three massive tax cuts is that the United States has become one of the most undertaxed countries on earth. Republicans try to make people believe that Americans are excessively taxed, but the numbers don’t lie.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental economic organization with 36 member nations, produces an annual report that lists various statistics, including taxes for each member nation as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). The comparative statistics are enlightening. For 2020 (the most recent year on record), total taxes collected in the United States (for all levels of government) amount to 25.54 percent of GDP. This may seem like a lot. But the average for all 36 OECD nations was 33.51 percent. So we are far below average (23.8 percent below, actually).

But the average figure may be misleading. If we look at a few countries that are more representative of our level of development, the difference is even more stark. For example, Denmark’s taxes amount to 46.54 percent of GDP; Austria, 42.13; Belgium, 43.07; Canada, 34.39; Finland, 41.91; France, 45.43; Germany, 38.34; Italy, 42.91; Netherlands, 39.68; Norway, 38.61; Sweden, 42.60; and the United Kingdom, 32.77. The average of these 12 countries is 40.69 percent of GDP, or 59 percent higher than the U.S.

So, to claim we are overtaxed is to buy into a harmful fantasy. We are going to be racking up massive deficits in the coming years because half our population believes misinformation and our politicians are afraid to do what is expedient. Of course, all these other countries get a lot more for their tax dollars than we do. Each citizen has health care while overall they sometimes spend half as much as we do, and their social safety nets are far superior to ours. Their educational systems and highways and many other indicators of a civilized society also put us to shame. But if we were to increase our tax revenue even to the average of all OECD countries, we would bring in an additional $1.67 trillion each year. This would wipe out our annual deficit and contribute significantly to, say, providing health care for all Americans. If we were to match the 12 more developed countries, we would bring in an additional $3.17 trillion dollars per year. That’s a lot.

And taxing more, especially increasing the tax rate on the wealthy and on corporations, would reverse our unsustainable inequality and would actually help curb inflation. Inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods and services. Taxing the wealthy would cut spending and put downward pressure on prices. German Lopez of the New York Times, writing about the mess Liz Truss has caused in the UK with her plan to cut taxes (primarily on the wealthy), makes an important point about fighting inflation by some combination of cutting government spending and raising taxes: “When the government pares down spending, it effectively lessens demand for the goods and services that it is no longer paying for, whether it’s food, military equipment or health care. Similarly, when the government raises taxes, it pulls money out of people’s pockets, also reducing spending and demand. . . . The idea can sound counterintuitive—that government officials should work against economic growth. But fighting inflation calls for such an approach.”

The Republican Party has always preached tax cuts and spending cuts, especially when the Democrats control either the White House or Congress or both. But when they have had control, they have been spectacularly uninterested in spending cuts. So they have passed three unfunded tax cuts that have had the effect of increasing both our debt and our inequality. A major reason they have never really cut spending is that it is rather difficult and painful, if not downright cruel. If we look at the breakdown of our federal spending, it is easy to see why spending cuts alone are not a realistic solution to our debt problem.

Social Security and income security (unemployment) account for 33 percent of federal spending. Medicare and other health spending adds up to 27 percent. Military spending amounts to 12 percent. Interest on the debt is 8 percent. Veterans’ benefits contribute another 4 percent. These five categories add up to about 84 percent of government spending.

Some conservatives clamor for cuts to “entitlements,” but this is rather unrealistic. With my generation, the Baby Boomers, retiring at a rate of 10,000 per day—many of them with little or no retirement savings because they either weren’t paid enough to save for retirement or their employers eliminated their pensions—demands on Social Security and Medicare will increase, not decrease, over the next several years. And with pay for the bottom 80 percent of the workforce flatlining, more and more young people will require government assistance in one form or another just to make ends meet. So “entitlements” are difficult to cut significantly.

Raising the payroll cap on Social Security to $400,000 or higher makes sense and would help keep the fund solvent. Increasing the payroll tax from 6.2 percent to 6.5 percent is both popular and doable. And reducing the benefits of the top 20 percent of earners would also make sense. But cutting Social Security significantly is just not in the cards. The same is true for Medicare. We could easily cut military spending, since we spend more on military than the next ten countries combined, but that idea is anathema to the GOP.

So, that leaves us with just 16 percent of the budget to play with, and most of those expenditures are for programs we need to maintain or increase (such as infrastructure, agriculture, transportation, energy, and education). The only realistic way to balance the budget is to tax more, and as our standing among OECD countries makes clear, we can certainly afford this. It not only will not tank the economy, but it will likely strengthen it.

The rudderless Republican ship has not spelled out what exactly it will do if it gains control of Congress in the coming election, but we can be sure of two things. First, the GOP will follow Liz Truss into the mire and attempt another tax cut for the wealthy. (By the way, the Trump tax cut was advertised as a cut for the lower and middle classes, but in reality most of the benefits went to Trump and his ilk. I’m firmly stuck in the middle class, and the Trump tax cuts actually increased my taxes slightly.) Of course, President Biden would veto such a tax cut, but if a Republican president were elected in 2024, we can be sure he would rubber stamp it into law. Second, a Republican Congress would refuse to raise the debt limit in an attempt to extort “entitlement” cuts from the Biden administration. Any such cuts would hurt millions of poor and elderly Americans. But this inevitable game of chicken is dishonest at its heart. As Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post has pointed out, “Republicans have withheld their support from raising the debt limit before, usually framing their hostage-taking as a commitment to fiscal restraint. But the debt ceiling has nothing to do with new spending; rather, it’s a somewhat arbitrary statutory cap on how much the government can borrow to pay off bills that it has already incurred, through tax and spending decisions that Congress has already made. Refusing to raise the debt limit is like going to a restaurant, ordering the lobster and a $500 bottle of wine, and then declaring yourself financially responsible because you skipped out on the check.” Rampell also explains that it’s actually worse than this, because if Republicans force a default by not raising the credit limit, they would damage the creditworthiness of the United States and likely tip the world into a global financial crisis. Talk about playing with fire.

Well, all this information on tax cuts and such is just another reason why a Latter-day Saint should never vote for a Republican, at least in presidential or congressional races. Not if you want a working, solvent government. There are barbarians at the gate, and the Republicans are not only willing to cut the locks, but they are determined to join the barbarians in ransacking the country.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 5

 

Racism

 

Is the Republican Party racist? Is even asking this question out of bounds? The respected nonpartisan think tank Public Relations Research Institute apparently didn’t think so. PRRI conducted a study to tease out respondents’ racial attitudes with 11 carefully constructed questions.¹ The institute then used the responses to create what it called a “Structural Racism Index.” The median score on a scale running from 0 to 1 was 0.45. For Democrats, the average score was 0.27. For independents, it was 0.45. For Republicans, it was .067.

As Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts described the study, “No matter how they diced up the respondents by party and race, no other group ranked nearly as high. ‘Republicans’ and ‘white Republicans’—terms that are functionally redundant—tied for the lead. In second place at 0.58? ‘Republicans of other races.’”

This study should be disappointing to Latter-day Saint Republicans, but it can hardly be surprising. Indeed, as various recent news stories and President Nelson’s repeated admonitions indicate, the Latter-day Saints do have a racism problem. And maybe this is one reason why Church members feel so comfortable in the GOP.

It is no secret that since Trump took over, the Republican Party has thrown the door open wide to white supremacist groups. Why would it do this? Because these people tend to vote Republican. They just don’t vote Democrat. It’s all about power, not principle.

We don’t even need to ask, but which party has been up in arms about critical race theory (CRT)? Critical race theory, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, is an “intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Critical race theorists hold that racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.” In essence, racism is not just an individual matter of prejudice but is structural in many ways. This premise is not really that controversial.

For instance, this is what the “Utah Compact on Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion”² says: “We view racism as more than just an individual character flaw. It is a system of ideas, beliefs, practices, structures, and policies that give some people greater opportunity to be fully human and live a happier and healthier life than others. Unraveling centuries of internalized and systemic racism requires bold anti-racist actions and policies right now.” This document has been signed by a long list of important Utahns, including many Republican office holders.

But suddenly, likely because of exposure on Fox News, CRT became a rallying cry for Republicans, who demanded that policies be enacted to prevent CRT from being taught in schools, even though it was not being taught in schools. It also became a focus for white Republicans who used it as an excuse to claim that they were actually the victims of racism. How choice is that? But white grievance has taken hold of the GOP.

We could also ask which party was upset about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, even to the point of trying to somehow create an equivalence between the BLM protests over unwarranted police brutality and the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol Building, which was stoked by the lies of a desperately fragile ego who couldn’t bear the thought of losing an election. Some responded to the BLM protests with the weak “All Lives Matter.” Of course all lives matter, but all lives have not been treated equally by law enforcement and other elements of our legal and government and business establishment. Do whites really have any reason to rise up in protest about how the police treat them differently than other races?

I suppose my point here is to question LDS Republicans about why they still vote to put a party in power that has in recent years honed a harder edge on its history of soft racism. Are you finding ways to excuse the inexcusable? Are you really worried that your child might learn something in school about the history of racism in America that might make him or her feel guilty by association or just feel bad? Are your privileged children that fragile? Maybe this is why we still have a significant racism problem at BYU, in Utah school districts, and in the Church in general. Regardless, it’s one more in a growing list of reasons why any believing Latter-day Saint should not be a Republican.

_____________

1. To read the questions and the breakdown of answers, see “Creating More Inclusive Public Spaces: Structural Racism, Confederate Memorials, and Building for the Future,” September 28, 2022, https://www.prri.org/research/creating-more-inclusive-public-spaces-structural-racism-confederate-memorials-and-building-for-the-future/.

2. The Compact can be found on the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce website at https://slchamber.com/public-policy/initiatives/utah-compact/.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 4

 

The Anti-democratic Party

There was a time when the Republican Party was the anti-Democratic party. They opposed pretty much everything the Democrats stood for. But with their devotion to Trump and his unceasing attempts to unravel our democratic institutions, the GOP has become the anti-democratic party. Small “d.” But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what outcast Republican Liz Cheney said recently about two election deniers who are running for governor in swing states, Kari Lake of Arizona and Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania.

Cheney warned voters to “do your part to make sure that people who believe in what the election deniers are saying, the people who would tear the republic down, don’t get power.” Lake she called “dangerous.” Both have made it clear that they would approve the fake elector scheme that Trump failed at in 2020 because certain Republican officials refused to break their oaths of office. Speaking of her resounding defeat in Wyoming, Cheney said, “I think it also tells you that large portions of our party, including the leadership of our party, both at the state level in Wyoming, as well as on a national level with the RNC, is very sick.”

But the most frightening thing about the Republican Party right now is what they are doing to undermine democracy at the local level. In short, they learned from their mistakes in 2020 and are putting in place all the pieces they will need next time around to overthrow a free and fair election. Instead of trying to explain all this here, let me instead point you to a short film that documents what is happening across the country without hardly anyone noticing. After you have viewed this, ask yourself if this is the sort of party you want to belong to. Here’s the link.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 3

 

Global Warming

In Salt Lake City, since temperatures have been recorded, there have been only three 100-degree days in September, ever. But as I write, on September 7, we have just experienced a string of 100-degree days that stretch from late August to today. Today the temperature was 107, tying the all-time record for Salt Lake City. The previous record came in June and July. Not August. Not September. Yesterday was 106. That means we have had more than twice as many 100-degree days this September as have occurred in that month since the Mormon pioneers began keeping records. By itself, this may be nothing more than an anomaly. But we all know it isn’t.

My wife’s family has made an annual trek to Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border for decades. But no longer. The water is too low. The lake is only 24 percent full. For years, we have camped on Lone Rock Beach. It used to be a fairly long waverunner ride from the beach to Lone Rock, a monolith that rose from the middle of the lake like a massive rock dropped from heaven. Now it is a long hike. And this too is not an anomaly. A decade or more ago, a friend of mine who works for the Bureau of Reclamation as regional director for the Upper Colorado Basin told me that it didn’t matter what the climate-change doubters said. “We’re dealing with it now on the Colorado River.” He knew what was coming if the weather patterns did not change. They did not. They got worse. And now the government is requiring the states in the upper and lower basins to cut back their water usage from the Colorado River. The cuts may not matter. Lake Powell and Lake Mead may both dry up. As may the Great Salt Lake. What will we then call Salt Lake City? Dry Lake Bed City? The West is experiencing the worst drought in 1,200 years.

Other areas are experiencing thousand-year floods, devastating heat waves, colossal wildfires. Extreme weather events are happening all across the globe. This week, for instance, one-third of Pakistan is underwater. Earlier in the year, Pakistan suffered a brutal heat wave that sent temperatures above 120 degrees. In the United States, an early summer heat wave affected 100 million people. A heat wave and drought has dried up rivers in China, disabling hydroelectric dams. Europe saw record temperatures this summer, including 104 degrees in England, of all places. Wildfires in Europe have burned nearly three times as much land this year as the average year between 2006 and 2021. Heavy rainfall caused floods and mudslides in South Africa, killing at least 45 people. These examples are just a few highlights and don’t even mention the steady melting of glaciers and ice sheets, which will raise sea levels, increase flooding, and put even more water in the atmosphere. Some people are referring to what we are seeing as the “new normal.” But Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society begs to disagree. “It’s very much getting worse,” says Cobb. Normal is now a moving target. William Coglan, who studies ice sheets, warns that we can’t rely on predictions: “Every study has bigger numbers than the last. It’s always faster than forecast.”

All of these weather-related disasters are the result of global warming, and global warming is caused by humans putting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. No one can seriously deny human-caused global warming anymore. Not even Republicans. Many of them in the past have refused to admit that global warming was real, perhaps partly because they didn’t want to be seen agreeing with Al Gore. But if they want to be that petty, so be it. At least now they can claim Al Gore was indeed wrong. He was far too conservative in his alarmism. And so were all the climate scientists who have been making dire predictions for years. I have also seen what Coglan does: every new study finds that the scientists were wrong. Global warming is happening much faster than they had predicted.

This is a much greater crisis than any mere political trouble. Even the undermining of democracy, which the Republican Party is determined to pursue, pales in comparison to global warming. We are talking about the planet, our only planet, becoming uninhabitable for the number of people we seem to think it should sustain. This is indeed a case of not being able to have our cake and eat it too. We can’t continue burning fossil fuels at the current pace and expect it to have no effect on the world we inhabit.

But the Republican Party still pretends that this is not a crisis. There is history behind this pretense that we ought to consider. When the Senate passed the Clean Air Act of 1970, the vote was 73-0. The amendment to this act addressing acid rain, urban smog, and ozone was passed in 1990 by bipartisan majorities in the House (401-21) and the Senate (89-11). But this year, the Inflation Reduction Act, which, as Paul Krugman puts it, is “mainly a climate bill with a side helping of health reform,” passed the Senate without a single Republican vote. Today Republicans would never vote for any serious attempt to address global warming, which is a far greater peril to humanity than acid rain or smog.

Such was not the case as recently as 2008, when John McCain ran ads about sounding the alarm on global warming. So, what changed in the past 14 years? A New York Times article in 2017 claimed it is “a story of big political money.” Much of that money came from the Koch brothers, who had a huge monetary interest in keeping fossil fuels flowing, and it resulted in what was called the “No Climate Tax” pledge, drafted by Americans for Prosperity, a political organization funded by the Koch brothers. The pledge was a single sentence that read: “I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.” It attracted only 14 signatures initially, but then Mike Pence took up the cause and recruited his fellow Republicans to support the pledge. It quickly became Republican dogma, and according to Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist quoted by the 2017 New York Times article, global warming has “become yet another of the long list of litmus test issues that determine whether or not you’re a good Republican.”

Under Donald Trump, it may have been a litmus test, but in the short time since his defeat, climate crises have become more frequent and more severe, so it isn’t really feasible to deny the science anymore. But for some reason, even though Republican politicians don’t deny climate change much anymore, they have found new methods to prevent America from doing anything about it. Now the game is delay rather than deny, but they still do the bidding of their fossil-fuel donors. As Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) put it, “I don’t want to be lectured about what we need to do to destroy our economy in the name of climate change,” even though clean energy will provide far more high-paying and safe jobs than, say coal, which is not only dirty but dangerous to both miners and the environment, or even oil. In 2018, there were 2.4 million jobs in clean energy and energy efficiency, compared to half as many in fossil energy, and the gap will only grow as clean energy becomes more prevalent and cheaper.

The common Republican argument now is not that fossil fuels don’t create greenhouse gases and warm the planet. The argument is that the transition to clean energy will harm the economy. As this argument becomes untenable, one must wonder what the Republicans will come up with next.

Perhaps a small group of House Republicans, who dub themselves the House Conservative Climate Caucus, represents the party’s immediate future. They discuss solutions that Republicans can support, but when they recently met with business executives to talk about the climate crisis, “the gathering was dominated by talk of more oil and gas drilling,” according to a July 27, 2022, New York Times article, and when Kevin McCarthy unveiled the Republican plan to address climate change, the plan called for increased fossil fuel production. This, of course, is the exact opposite of the steps we need to take.

If the Republicans gain control of Congress, we can be sure that whatever laws are passed, they will be woefully inadequate to slow the crisis that is consistently exceeding scientists’ more dire predictions.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just greenhouse gases that Republicans are indifferent to. When given the opportunity, they also ease pollution regulations and prefer to allow corporations to self-regulate.

Latter-day Saints believe that the earth is given to us by a loving God who trusts us to care for this great gift wisely. This belief seems wildly inconsistent with what Republicans have said and done in the past 14 years and in the present. Lying to appease fossil-fuel companies and delaying action for both monetary and political gain represent the sort of behavior Latter-day Saints should never condone. Yes, there are legitimate discussions we need to have about how we should tackle this existential crisis, but denial, delay, and deflection should not be part of these discussions.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 2

The Party of Disinformation

Politics doesn’t have a reputation for honesty. Even when political parties are trying to dispense accurate information, they inevitably put some spin on the facts to strengthen their position, especially with their own base. This is unfortunate, but it is the reality we live in. What has happened in recent years, however, is that one party has stayed more or less tethered to facts and is attempting to solve real-world problems, while the other party has become a factory of disinformation, outright lies, conspiracy theories, and invented crises intended to stoke anger and foment senseless culture wars.

Some might lay all the blame at the feet of Donald Trump, but although he has certainly pushed the GOP further into the realm of fantasy and paranoia, the Republican Party was well on its way to this destination long before Trump hit the disinformation gas pedal. I was a Republican until sometime during George W. Bush’s first term. What drove me away from the GOP was the lies. Leading the country to war in Iraq with intentionally false claims was something I could not stomach, but the bigger issue for me was the bald-faced Republican lies about the effects of tax cuts. Tax cuts do not pay for themselves. They never have and never will. But this was the argument Bush and his congressional co-conspirators expected Americans to swallow. As is almost always the case with tax cuts, the Bush tax scheme was just a thinly veiled attempt to allow the wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. The result was twofold: first, the debt ballooned, which was entirely predictable; and second, income inequality accelerating, placing a greater burden on the middle class and the poor.

This, of course, was just the beginning. The rise of Fox News gave the Republican Party a very loud propaganda machine that has produced a fact-free zone protected to a large degree by the First Amendment, although the limits of that protection are now being tested by Dominion Voting Systems. It is instructive to compare the current situation on the right with the propaganda of Nazi Germany. The German citizens were pretty much a captive audience. Hitler controlled the media, and the only way they could hear a more accurate account of what was happening in their country was to break the law and listen to BBC broadcasts, as young Latter-day Saint Helmuth Hübener did. Helmuth didn’t stop at listening, though. He felt he needed to spread the truth he was learning. Before long, however, he was caught and executed. In contrast to the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s, Republicans of today have captivated themselves inside a right-wing media bubble that feeds their confirmation bias to such a degree that some 70 percent of Republicans still believe Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election. If statistics don’t lie, this means a substantial percentage of Latter-day Saints also believe this lie and others.

Not long before the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Church made a significant addition to its Handbook. Obviously, Church leaders were alarmed at what they were seeing among members, and they felt compelled to warn members about where they were getting their information. Part of the addition reads: “Many sources of information are unreliable and do not edify. Some sources seek to promote anger, contention, fear, or baseless conspiracy theories. Therefore, it is important that Church members be wise as they seek truth. Members of the Church should seek out and share only credible, reliable, and factual sources of information. They should avoid sources that are speculative or founded on rumor.”

Good advice. But many members think that their sources of information are reliable when they are not. How can we tell the difference between good and bad sources? Let me offer one answer. Look for guardrails. Pay attention to which media outlets have credible fact checkers. This is a valuable service. Shortly after the January 6 insurrection, Mitt Romney published an editorial in the Deseret News. I have never voted for Romney and probably never will. He and I disagree about most policy questions. But we inhabit the same reality most of the time and could have a rational discussion about most issues. This is not true, however, of people who inhabit a universe built on disinformation and conspiracy theories. Wrote Senator Romney: “I believe that we should watch and read, not just sources we tend to agree with but also sources we disagree with. If Fox is your regular diet, watch NBC, CNN or ABC now and then. Conversely, if MSNBC is your regular, don’t make it exclusive. We need to broaden our reading as well. I note that news organizations like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times make an effort to get the facts and when they make a mistake, they acknowledge it. Social media has no fact-checkers, no editors and often doesn’t even disclose who actually wrote a post.” I endorse Romney’s wisdom wholeheartedly, and I would add that Fox News and other purveyors of propaganda do not employ fact checkers. In fact, Fox News has even attacked the “fact-checking industry.” If you are making money by fabricating “news,” it is always more expedient to attack the fact checkers than to tell the truth.

Earlier this year, BYU Studies published a special issue on good government. One particularly helpful article was by Ed Carter, a journalist, lawyer, and professor of communications at BYU. His article is titled “‘Truth Is the Only Ground’: How Journalism Contributes to Good Government.” I would recommend the whole article highly, but one paragraph stood out because I think it expresses a truth most people don’t understand: “High-value journalism today generally requires subscription payment. For decades in the twentieth century, high-quality American journalism was largely supported by advertising revenues. Editorial content appeared to be free. With the introduction of the internet, news organizations initially made their editorial content freely available online. Some legitimate news organizations still do. However, digital advertising revenues today pale in comparison to the print advertising revenues of the previous century. While there is freely available information content via social media and other digital channels, the content produced by reputable journalists generally requires subscription revenue. So, news consumers who want to support good journalism should prepare to do so with their wallets.” I agree with Ed’s assessment. I support good journalism with my wallet. I subscribe to the Salt Lake Tribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and used to subscribe to the New Yorker magazine for in-depth reporting (I stopped because I couldn’t keep up with it all, but I still read as many free New Yorker articles each month as time will permit). My wife and I also donate money to KUER radio, Salt Lake City’s NPR host.

If you are getting all your news for free on the Internet, especially on social media, please realize that you are probably not getting much good information. What I appreciate about the two national newspapers is that, even though they tend to lean left, they publish columnists from both the right and the left, as well as some who manage to reside somewhere in the middle. These are almost all well-informed and astute observers of what is happening in the United States and the larger world. Getting views from all angles helps you understand issues with more nuance and insight. And feasting on quality journalism also helps you recognize shoddy journalism when it rears its ugly head.

Unfortunately, much of what comes from the right-wing media bubble today is not just shoddy but dishonest, intentionally misleading, and inflammatory. You can pretty well adopt this piece of advice as gospel truth: If a media source seeks to inflame rather than inform, it is likely playing fast and loose with facts.

Let me give a very current example of what I mean. Now, this quote does not come from right-wing media; it comes from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, but it serves to illustrate what I am trying to point out about where the Republican Party and its media have gone. This is what McCarthy posted to Twitter: “Do you make $75,000 or less? Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you—710,000 new audits for Americans who earn less than $75k.” This attack on a provision in the newly passed (and misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act has been repeated and expanded across right-wing media and social media. So, what is the truth? Well, PolitiFact did what they do: a fact check. Here’s a summary:

• The 87,000 figure is from a May 2021 Treasury Department assessment of how it would use $80 billion to improve IRS operations. None of this May 2021 projection is set in stone, particularly the hiring of 87,000 new employees.

• Not all the hires would be auditors or would work in enforcement. The money would go toward many things, including “hiring new specialized enforcement staff, modernizing antiquated information technology [that would enable the IRS to process your tax return faster], and investing in meaningful taxpayer service.” Some would of course go toward hiring support staff.

• Over half of the IRS workforce is close to retirement, so tens of thousands of these new hires would be replacing half of the IRS’s 80,000 employees.

• Over the past decade, the IRS has seen its funding drop by 20 percent. This has prevented it from going after tax cheats.

• The 710,000 audits figure was taken out of context. The Congressional Budget Office report that Republican Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas used to come up with this figure actually said that the audit “rate would rise for all taxpayers, but higher-income taxpayers would face the largest increase.” Brady also failed to acknowledge that the CBO estimate was based on $60 billion going toward enforcement, while the actual bill allots $46 billion.

• Brady’s projection also runs counter to stated IRS policy, laid out in an August 10 letter from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to IRS commissioner Charles Rettig: “I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels.”

And this is just the tip of the iceberg on this issue. The Republican disinformation about the IRS portion of this one bill includes fearmongering statements by, among others, Senator Chuck Grassley (Iowa) on Fox News telling viewers about “a strike force that goes in with AK-15s [sic] already loaded ready to shoot some small-business person.” Such nonsense shouldn’t even need to be debunked, but this is the sort of rhetoric that has taken over the Republican Party on issue after issue.

The Republican attack on funding the IRS is just one more step in a long fight to defund the agency. Republican presidential candidates, including Ted Cruz, have campaigned on abolishing the IRS. While that is improbable, Republicans have been very effective in negotiating budget cuts for the agency to that point it has been incapable of performing its basic function: collecting taxes from those who owe them. And now that the Democrats have restored that funding, it is not surprising that the anti-tax party is lying repeatedly in an effort to misrepresent the actual uses of that funding.

I go into this much detail on one example simply to illustrate how disinformation and propaganda work. I am not saying that the Democrats don’t also misrepresent facts, but in today’s world, the two parties are not at all equal in this regard. The flood of disinformation coming from the Republicans is overwhelming. They feel that can say just about anything, and their followers will believe them. The result is that the Republican Party has become an anti-science party, and anti-expertise party, an anti-fact party, and a party that has made the acceptance of lies a requirement for elective office in many states. This embrace of falsehood should convince any believing Latter-day Saint to, at the very least, turn away from this party or, preferably, to do as Liz Cheney is doing and fight the lies and disinformation with truth.

One final observation. If nationwide statistics reflect what LDS Republicans believe, it doesn’t say much for Latter-day Saint ability to discern truth. It’s as if the gift of the Holy Ghost is pretty much inoperative among many of our members.

Is It Possible for a Believing Latter-day Saint to Be a Republican? Part 1

 

In a newspaper interview in February 1974, Ezra Taft Benson, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, raised the question of whether a “good Mormon” could be a “liberal Democrat.” This assumed answer to this question has since been accepted as gospel truth by many Latter-day Saints. But today the shoe should be on the other foot. It is not only relevant but imperative to ask whether a believing Latter-day Saint can in good conscience be a Republican. This is the first in a series of at least 15 posts addressing this question from various angles. Today I’ll be looking at what it means to support the party of Trump

 

The Party of Trump

Some good Latter-day Saints have convinced themselves that even though Trump is the unquestioned leader of the GOP, it is possible to put up with him and vote for Republicans because of their conservative positions on issues. But the primary elections of this week should put to rest this delusion. Trump-endorsed (and Trump-endorsing) candidates fared very well. The most extreme example comes from sparsely populated Wyoming. Two years ago, Liz Cheney won her congressional primary with 73 percent of the vote. This week, she lost by a margin of nearly 40 points. This is a conservative who voted with Trump 93 percent of the time. She voted against his impeachment for withholding aid from Ukraine. The only difference between Cheney of 2020 and Cheney of 2022 is that she refused to go along with the Big Lie, that because of election fraud the Democrats “stole” the election from Trump. The Republican Party is steadily purging elected officials who refuse to embrace his election lies.

The is just further proof that the Republican Party has become a personality cult. In 2020, the GOP did not even produce a platform. The de facto platform was simply to support Donald Trump’s every whim—and every lie. And that is a frightening thought, because Trump is a narcissist with authoritarian instincts and a disdain for the law. Throughout his life—in his marriages, in his business dealings, and in politics—he has never believed that rules or laws applied to him. He cheated on three wives; his unethical business practices are myriad; and as president, he presided over a daily parade of scandals that was as exhausting as it was alarming. Because of Republican leaders’ spineless surrender to this corrupt man, the Republican Party has devolved from an anti-Democratic party to an anti-democratic party.

Some Republican leaders have rationalized their support of Trump by saying (or at least thinking) that if they don’t stay in office, then someone worse will replace them. That may happen, but the only way to reform the Republican Party is not to stay on board and keep it afloat while it does as much damage as possible. The only way to save the Republican Party is for both leaders and voters to officially leave it and refuse to vote for Republican candidates, resulting in massive defeats at the polls. This is the only way to get rid of Trump and Trumpism. Then, when he is gone, true conservatives will have a gargantuan task of rebuilding a political party from scratch on true conservative principles, such as they are (which I’ll discuss in future posts).

I probably do not agree with Liz Cheney on any traditional political issues. But I agree with her completely about the danger our country faces right now. Donald Trump represents the greatest danger this country has faced since the Civil War. I also agree with the conservative Washington Examiner: “Trump is unfit to be anywhere near power ever again.”

Latter-day Saint scripture gives good advice on what sort of political leaders they should support. Doctrine and Covenants 98:10 says: “Wherefore, honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently, and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold.” Honest, wise, and good are not adjectives that describe Donald Trump. He corrupts everything and everyone he touches. Consider all the prominent Republicans, including Mike Lee, who warned in 2016 about what sort of man Donald Trump is and how disastrous it would be to elect him president. But most of them changed their tune when Republican power suddenly became tied to supporting this odious man. Mike Lee even converted so far as to make the ludicrous comparison of Trump to Book of Mormon hero Captain Moroni. Trump actually resembles Moroni’s nemesis, Amalickiah, far more closely. Amalickiah, for instance, refused to accept the results of an election he lost. He then went to work attacking the very government he sought to lead.

A CNN.com article listed what the author, Marshall Cohen, considered Trump’s 10 worst abuses of power. There are other similar lists, but Cohen’s summary is indicative of what sort of man Republicans have embraced:

1. Subverting the 2020 election

2. Inciting an insurrection

3. Abusing the bully pulpit

4. Politicizing the Justice Department

5. Obstructing the Mueller investigation

6. Abusing the pardon power

7. The Ukraine affair and cover-up

8. Loyalty oaths and personalizing government

9. Firing whistleblowers and truth-tellers

10. Profiting off the presidency

Any one of these would be enough to discourage an honest voter from supporting such a candidate. But the list is actually a lot longer than 10. It includes a documented 30,573 false or misleading claims made during the four years of his presidency. This is a man who simply cannot tell the truth. And since Cohen’s list was compiled, we have learned that the former president illegally took top secret documents to his home in Florida and refused to relinquish them, resulting in a raid by the FBI, all of which has caused his deluded followers to both defend his behavior and threaten the FBI.

If it had not been crystal clear after four years of Trump’s corruption and incompetence that he is unfit to hold any elected office, the January 6 commission’s hearings have left Republicans with no credible excuse for supporting this man. But the primary elections of 2022 have revealed a frightening possibility that state officials who support the election lies will be willing to overturn the will of the people and change election results simply because they do not like the outcome. I listened to an interview recently with presidential historian Jon Meacham. He warned that if a fair election is overturned by partisan officials who claim fraud without evidence, the Constitution will then be gone, and once it is, it will be almost impossible to restore. That is the danger we face, and that is one reason among many why Latter-day Saints should refuse to support either Donald Trump or any candidates who would do his bidding.