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How a Mormon Spring Break Ritual Came to Include a Whole Lot of “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama”

By Spencer Dew

…y Mormon—will descend on the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple of Spanish Fork, Utah. Sponsored and led by a priest affiliated with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, (ISKCON, the so-called Hare Krishnas), the “Festival of Colors” is popularly known as “BYU’s unofficial spring break.” Last year, for the twentieth anniversary of the festival, 80,000 people were reportedly in attendance, with that crowd estimated to be about 90% Mormon….

Dark Sisters Opera Aims to Humanize Sister Wives

By Joanna Brooks

…s from the 1950s [federal raid on the polygamous community at Short Creek, Utah], but it took a couple of days for the mainstream media to look up those images and for people to remember that this kind of thing had happened before. What were your next steps? Reading. There is a finite amount of reading you can do on fundamentalist LDS communities—a couple of hundred books and websites, and even local histories. So I started by reading. Then, I fle…

FX’s ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ Adaptation Rejects Reductive Elements of Krakauer’s Book, But Confirms That ‘Mormonism Breeds Dangerous Men’

By Benjamin E. Park

…orts toward cultural assimilation, the homegrown religion headquartered in Utah could not be fully trusted. Casting the Mormons as zealots was one topic on which secular humanists, who distrusted most ecclesiastical institutions, and evangelicals, who never fully accepted the faith, could agree. That the book was published shortly after Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping at the hands of another Mormon extremist only added fuel to the fire. Scholars were…

Beck Loses the Fox Portal into America’s Living Rooms

By Joanna Brooks

…l that changed the way I saw Beck and his movement. An older Mormon man in Utah wrote to confess that as a Beck fan he had been utterly consumed by Beck’s trademark rancor. But it wore him out. And to recover his senses, the man continued, he had abandoned the Beck program entirely and taken refuge in the quiet stillness of his local Mormon temple. That’s when I realized that what appeared to be the runaway popularity of the Beck media empire woul…

LDS Church Labels Same-Sex Spouses “Apostates,” Bars Children From Baptism

By Joanna Brooks

…BT people is recognized and fully prosecuted as a hate crime. The state of Utah’s hate crimes statute does not include crimes against LGBT people; this should be changed immediately. Children are vulnerable when their parents are not protected by the law against hateful violence. Protect LGBT children and teens. Twenty to forty percent of all homeless youth are gay. Thirty-nine percent of gay homeless youth say they were kicked out of their homes….

Text of Terror: A Bill Granting LGBT Citizens Equal Rights Evokes Biblical Citation

By Nick Street

…atest threat to America going down” said Chris Buttars, a state senator in Utah who last Friday lost his seat on the judicial committee he chaired after he likened gays to radical Muslims. “The homosexual agenda is just destroying this nation,” Sally Kern, a state representative in Oklahoma, said last May. More recently Kern was one of 20 Republican members of Oklahoma’s House of Representatives who voted unsuccessfully to exclude from the chamber…

What’s Huntsman’s Game Plan?

By Joanna Brooks

…e weekend coverage, here’s a roundup of what we learned about the two-time Utah governor and Obama-appointed ambassador to China and his approach to the 2012 primaries: 1. He will not allow Utah to define him. His major executive experience is as a popular (and quite moderate) governor of a deeply red state, but Huntsman campaign headquarters will be in Orlando, Florida. 2. Moreover, he will not allow his Mormonism to define him. In his ABC interv…

Baring Their Testimonies: Mormon Women Get Naked for the Camera

By Holly Welker

…hen there’s this other expectation that I wasn’t aware of until I moved to Utah as an adult. Utah supposedly has the highest rate of plastic surgery in the country. So many women simply plan to have plastic surgery after they have children. I have a very educated, successful friend who said that in her family, that’s just what everyone does: after they have children, they get a boob job. So that’s what she did, and she’s happy with that, and mor…

Mormons, LGBT People Respond to Packer’s Talk

By Joanna Brooks

…speech be compassionate and careful? My grandmother was a daughter of the Utah pioneers. She moved to Los Angeles during the Great Depression and lived her adult life as a Mormon in the diaspora. When they found out she was a Mormon from Utah, people in Los Angeles, she recalled, would sometimes reach out to feel her head for horns. Late in her life, she and I talked about homosexuality—we talked about everything—and she recalled back in the 1950…

Romney “Walks the Line” on Immigration

By Joanna Brooks

…e LDS Church played a quiet but significant role in the development of the Utah Compact, a November 2010 agreement between Utah legislators that expressed support for federal immigration reform, a “welcoming” environment for immigrants, and opposed the “unnecessary separation of families.” The Church’s own November 2010 statement on immigration advocated a balance of “love for neighbors, family cohesion, and the observance of just and enforceable…