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Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney ponders a presidential bid.YOU REMEMBER, OR PERHAPS you don't, Sen. Orrin Hatch's 2000 presidential campaign. The senator talks about it in soft inflections, recalling this event and that debate. But especially he talks about what motivated him to run. Hatch, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, cites polling data from 1999 suggesting that 17 percent of Americans wouldn't vote for a Mormon for president under any circumstances. "One reason I ran was to knock down the prejudicial wall that exists" against Mormons, he says. "I wanted to make it easier for...

I have created a public register of "bump lists" here on Free Republic. I define a bump list as a name listed in the "To" field used to index articles. Free Republic Bump List Register

President Gordon B. Hickley just addressed the entire church in a General Conference. I heard his speech, he said we have an obligation to fight tyrants and cited examples in LDS scripture of wars to preserve freedom and liberty that were justifed in God's eyes. He also told the members of the church to NOT engage in any civil disobedience and to respect the law of the nation they live in. A transcript of his speech will be online later and I'll post it then (unless someone beats me to it)

What was supposed to be a routine court order in the Main Street Plaza case has turned into anything but. After the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in October that speech and behavior restrictions on the plaza are unconstitutional because of the city's easement, the Denver-based court ordered U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart to enter a judgment essentially telling the city to apply the decision. Stewart has not yet issued the judgment and the city and LDS Church are trying to delay it. To the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah, that means the city is trying to...

The American Civil Liberties Union for Utah may attempt to force the LDS Church to put a fence around the Main Street Plaza. "The irony is — depending on how this goes — that we might be the ones pressing them to put up gates and make this thing look like it's more private and actually have less public access," said Dani Eyer, executive director for the ACLU for Utah. And in another plaza twist, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints could be required to spend several hundred thousand dollars, in addition to the 2.1 acres of land...

Salt Lake City Council members seem ready to approve Mayor Rocky Anderson's land-swap proposal to resolve the Main Street Plaza controversy. Travis Bird addresses the Salt Lake City Council during a public hearing to discuss the Main Street Plaza issue on Tuesday night.Keith Johnson, Deseret News The plan would give the city two acres of LDS Church-owned land on the city's west side in exchange for the city's easement through the plaza. The swap would allow the church, which bought a block of Main Street from the city three years ago and turned it into a pedestrian plaza, to restrict...

The Salt Lake City Council has decided to hire another outside attorney, this one to examine Mayor Rocky Anderson's recently released "time, place and manner" restrictions for Main Street Plaza. Former Salt Lake Mayor Deedee Corradini testifies at hearing that she knew little about the specifics of the Main Street Plaza deal. Tom Smart, Deseret News The council wants to discover if an independent lawyer thinks the restrictions are too rigid to be constitutional or if the rules could be even more stringent. Following its much-hyped Main Street Plaza "fact-finding" hearing, the council decided to allocate $4,000 to $5,000 to...

As if the Salt Lake City Council hadn't had enough public comment about the Main Street Plaza — it received 2,067 telephone calls Friday and more than 2,100 Monday — 11 current and former community leaders were to testify Tuesday night at a special "fact-finding" hearing. Whoever gains control of a public easement through the plaza will also get to control speech and conduct there. Mayor Rocky Anderson wants the city to keep the easement. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which bought a block of Main Street from the city three years ago and built the pedestrian...

The worst news for Utah Democrats coming out of last month's election may not be that they lost, but that the tight bond between Mormon voters and the Republican Party would appear to guarantee Democratic frustration into the foreseeable future. Seventy-five percent of Utah voters in the Nov. 5 election were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and an overwhelming majority of them voted for Republicans, according to new exit-poll results. Pollster Dan Jones presented a bleak postmortem Thursday to a gathering of 30 or so Democratic Party insiders, and the religion-related statistics were the most...

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson will release his much-awaited proposed solution for the Main Street Plaza dilemma today. While he won't divulge the proposal until 3 p.m., he acknowledged Thursday it doesn't satisfy the LDS Church, which is still calling for the city to relinquish its easement through the property and is placing its hope for a resolution with the U.S. Supreme Court or the City Council, which believes it can get rid of the easement. "We've been working to the point of exhaustion on a proposal that I believed would bring everybody together and put this matter behind...

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says a federal appeals court has trampled the church's rights to worship and protect its property, so it will go to the U.S. Supreme Court to protect those rights. Complete court ruling(1.6 meg PDF)Requires Adobe Acrobat. The LDS Church responded quickly Thursday to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals' refusal to rehear the Main Street Plaza case, announcing it would appeal its case to the nation's highest court. Among the reasons the church gave for the appeal was that its "first freedom" — the right to free religious worship — was being...

Mayor Rocky Anderson may be having a hard time turning down a free public park, lawyers for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say. And that, not public access, may be the reason for the mayor's decision not to relinquish a city easement through Main Street Plaza, church lawyers say. Without the easement, the church can't restrict speech and conduct on the one-block section of Main Street it purchased three years ago for $8.1 million. In court documents filed earlier this week, church attorneys suggested the mayor was acting more as a profiteer than a crusader for fairness....

<p>BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY, founded in 1875, stands on a foothill overlooking Utah Valley, overshadowed by the sharp peaks of the Wasatch Range. It has approximately 30,000 students, ample funding, and a keen desire to ''stand as a beacon to the world.'' The university's mission statement declares: ''The intellectual range of a BYU education is the result of an ambitious commitment to pursue truth. Members of the BYU community rigorously study academic subjects in the light of divine truth.'' In many remarkable ways, the faculty and students of BYU live up to this ideal. The devil, however - and Mormons believe in him - lies in the details. What is truth? Does its pursuit allow diverse opinions on subjects of widespread concern?</p>

LDS Church can't restrict speech on plaza, appeals court rules Associated Press       The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cannot restrict free speech on the sidewalks that run through its plaza on the city's Main Street, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled Wednesday.       The court held that the sidewalks are a traditional public forum and restrictions on free speech on those sidewalks are unconstitutional. The sidewalks that used to line the former block of Main Street currently are open to pedestrians but not open to free speech.    ...

<p>SALT LAKE CITY — Nearly a century and a half after California-bound pioneers were slaughtered by Mormon settlers and their Indian allies, a new book blaming the massacre on church leader Brigham Young is causing a sensation in the Mormon community. Church historians vehemently disagree with the premise of "Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows." But author Will Bagley says circumstantial evidence points to Young's involvement. "Claiming that Brigham Young had nothing to do with Mountain Meadows is akin to arguing that Abraham Lincoln had nothing to do with the Civil War," Mr. Bagley writes. "His own words reveal that both before and after the massacre, Brigham Young recognized the likely results of his acts." On the shelves since late August, Mr. Bagley's book is a best seller in Salt Lake City, headquarters of the Mormon Church. Sam Weller's Books, which specializes in Western and Mormon history, has sold more than 400 copies, said store manager Dennis Evans. "I have not seen anything quite like it in terms of [Mormon] history," Mr. Evans said. On the heels of Mr. Bagley's work, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now is planning to publish its own book on the killings. This comes after years of church leaders insisting that the Sept. 11, 1857, massacre should be a closed chapter in Utah history. Author Richard Turley, the church's chief historian, said his book will make clear that Brigham Young did not plan the murders. The victims of the Mountain Meadows massacre were a group of men, women and children on their way from Arkansas to California. Mr. Young at the time was the church's prophet and president, its second, and the man who brought the faith's headquarters to the West in 1847 after founder Joseph Smith was murdered in Illinois. Under Young's leadership, the territory that would become Utah operated as a "theo-democracy." Ten years after the Mormons arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, however, the Army was preparing to squelch Utah's resistance to federal control and its practice of polygamy, Mr. Bagley writes. As troops drew closer, Utah trained its own military and stockpiled guns, ammunition and food. In the midst of growing war hysteria, wagon trains continued to move through the territory on the way to California, including the pioneers from northwest Arkansas. About the same time, tales also began to spread about the death of a Mormon leader, Parley Pratt, in Arkansas. Rumors made their way around Utah that members of the Arkansas wagon train were involved. Mr. Bagley, who writes a state history column for the Salt Lake Tribune, said this coincidence helped seal the pioneers' fates. "Brigham Young considered this a righteous act of vengeance," said Mr. Bagley. But he said Young also wanted to send a message to the United States that he controlled the road to California. Mr. Bagley said the massacre was planned and organized before the Arkansas group — traveling through Utah from north to south — reached the southern part of the territory. The Mormon settlers and Indians ambushed the wagon train of 40 men, 30 women and 70 children. The pioneers circled their wagons and dug in, surrendering days later when the Mormon settlers promised them safety if they disarmed. Instead, the Mormon militia and Indians killed them. Seventeen children under the age of 7 were spared and adopted into the community. It wasn't until two decades after the murders that anyone was held accountable for the slaughter: John D. Lee, whom Mr. Bagley and many others believe was the Mormon Church's scapegoat. Moments before a firing squad executed Mr. Lee, the condemned man sat on the edge of his coffin and denounced Young. "'I studied to make this man's will my pleasure for 30 years. See, now, what I have come to this day! I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner,'" Mr. Bagley quotes Mr. Lee as saying. Mr. Turley announced in May he was writing his own chronicle of the massacre. His book, to be titled "Tragedy at Mountain Meadows," is tentatively set for publication in 2003 by the Oxford University Press. Mr. Turley maintains Young had no part in the massacre, calling it an independent plan by an isolated group of settlers. Those in southwest Utah had heard stories about the bad behavior of the approaching wagon train. The community, however, was divided about what to do with the travelers, and decided to send a message to Salt Lake City and ask Brigham Young for guidance, Mr. Turley said. But before the messenger could leave, the emigrants were ambushed.</p>

PROVO - Here's the mission, if you choose to accept it: Track the clean-cut student quietly living in Provo, preparing for a linchpin post in national security. Code name: Cougar. Sound far-fetched? Brigham Young University doesn't mind. BYU pays scant attention to protests by some scholars over an initiative by an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense to use colleges as training grounds for future federal workers who can court international diplomats or crack foreign military codes. The university eagerly embraces its new role as one of four "flagship" schools to lead education initiatives in languages considered critical to...

<p>The FBI, in the midst of a massive reorganization in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, yesterday hired the top information and communications official of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as its new chief information officer.</p>

NAUVOO, Ill. — Memorializing the sacrifices of early Latter-day Saints and their martyred leaders, President Gordon B. Hinckley presided Thursday at what many believe will be the largest dedication ceremony ever held for one of the faith's temples. Crowds line up for the Nauvoo Temple's first dedication session Thursday afternoon. Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News With a worldwide audience of faithful members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 72 nations joining via satellite, the first of 13 dedicatory sessions was held Thursday at the approximate hour that church founder Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were...

One of the most successful broadcast advertising campaigns has never paid for a minute of commercial airtime. It's never used celebrity pitchmen, sexy models, catchy jingles or bawdy humor. No Madison Avenue ad agencies, focus groups or test markets. Yet since 1972, a series of sentimental vignettes promoting family togetherness produced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has defied programmers' inherent reluctance to give a religious group free airtime as part of television and radio stations' public service obligation. The campaign has beat out such powerhouses as Coke and Nike for national advertising awards and become a...

A bogus claim is becoming a main weapon to fight selling the federally owned Martin's Cove - the Wyoming site where many Mormon handcart pioneers froze and died in 1856 - to the LDS Church. The misleading claim is: The sale would create precedent to allow Indians or other religious groups also to obtain federal lands they consider sacred. Some environmental and preservation groups worry aloud that it could lead to the sale of Devil's Tower or Medicine Wheel in Wyoming to tribes that consider them sacred, much as Mormons consider Martin's Cove sacred. That worries many Wyoming groups and...