“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”—George Washington (1732-1799) First President of the USA.
Critics of the U.S. are everywhere. But today July 4, 2011, I am not one of them. Today I am grateful for my constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of speech. This 1st Amendment right was originally limited to the federal government, but then in 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court wisely held that the due process guarantees of the 14th Amendment made the 1st Amendment applicable to state and even local governments.
I never appreciated this right until I had to use it to speak the Truth. Growing up in Utah, a Mormon theocratic state, I had never realized that the television programming, radio stations, newspapers and even what was in the school libraries and most of the book stores was censored according to LDS standards. But now the Internet has made the test for local or community standards obsolete in most cases. There are limited exceptions: for example in Davis and other conservative Utah counties, covers are used in certain grocery stores that display magazines depicting (what would be considered tasteful and not at all pornographic in most educated areas) photographs of women in bikinis or with cleavage. Thus, the local or community standard for censoring what a very conservative community might consider obscene is on its way to becoming moot; with the World Wide Web, comes a world wide-community. And so finally, Utah is losing its hold on its long-standing ability to censor.
Of course the Mormon Church guarantees no such 1st Amendment rights to its adherents. The LDS Church is a gerontocracy, led by a cadre of 105 old men. These men are self-appointed prophets, seers, apostles, seventies, ad nauseum. These men claim to speak for God. These men claim that any who do not follow them will suffer. These men are a most arrogant and deceitful group, for they do not listen to their followers—they order them. They deceive them. And then, after having lived a life dedicated to their teachings, when their followers are so malleable and dependent on their leaders that they are ready to believe anything, they tell them the only way to heaven is through the LDS Temple gates, which pathway comes only at a heavy toll—ten percent of one’s income. These men boldly admit that “everything may be sacrificed” to maintain the integrity of the essential facts which form the basis of LDS beliefs.[1]
Where do these men get such power to censor, proscribe and lead? They claim it is directly from the Lord. However, history tells us that these men get their power from a claimed restoration of priesthood authority to Joseph Smith in the 1830s, when the evidence shows that such events never occurred!
Even Mormon academic apologist and professor at Columbia, author of Rough Stone Rolling, Richard L. Bushman, has admitted the fact that Smith mentioned nothing of John the Baptist or a reception of the holy priesthood until years after the events were supposed to have occurred. Bushman writes that: “The late appearance of these accounts raises the possibility of later fabrication.”[2] In a court of law, this lack of a contemporaneous record of an event, that is the absence of evidence, can be used as evidence that the event never occurred.
But because Mormons have been told not to read anything not endorsed or approved by their leaders, many will not even peek at another point of view. So my voice, along with the voices of the other authors, non-Mormons and former Mormons who have become disenchanted and discouraged with the true facts that have been discovered and yet continue to be covered-up by the LDS leadership, write about these things, until finally there will so much information proving that Mormonism is a fraud, that there will be no need for a trial.
The court of public opinion will have before it such a long list of damaging, undisputed facts, that a summary judgment will be granted by Mormons as well as non-Mormons and the result of such a verdict will be that the LDS Church will lose any reputation it had ever painstakingly built as an institution for the good of its members and mankind as a whole. However, its reputation as a business capable of maximizing profit from the tithes received by its investors might well remain as a matter of history; for at that, it has shown incredible skill.
And so, I am thankful that I will not be shot or killed or tortured for what I say. What I say may not be pleasant, or even popular, but neither have the messages of any of those who have tested their 1st Amendment rights. None have been in conformity with the mainstream of public opinion.
Justice Louis Brandeis, in his opinion in Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375 (1927) said in part: “…the freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think,” [is] “indispensable,” and that “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.” Like many of my colleagues who are engaged in the quest to expose the evils of Mormonism, I have risen out of decades of Mormon mind-controlled inertia to speak. And having spoken, and seen that some, if not many will respond to the Truth, I will not be silenced.
Thank you, my country of birth, the United States of America for my freedom to speak.
[1] “My duty as a member of the Council of the Twelve is to protect what is most unique about the LDS church, namely the authority of priesthood, testimony regarding the restoration of the gospel, and the divine mission of the Savior. Everything may be sacrificed in order to maintain the integrity of those essential facts. Thus, if Mormon Enigma reveals information that is detrimental to the reputation of Joseph Smith, then it is necessary to try to limit its influence and that of its authors.” [Emphasis Added] Statement by Dallin H. Oaks to the female author, Linda King Newell, who along with Valeen Tippetts Avery, wrote Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith, 2nd Ed. , 1994 (Urbana: Univ. of Ill. Press/Doubleday) as noted in, Robert D. Anderson, Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith, 1999 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books) xiii, n. 28.
[2] Richard Lyman, Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, 2007 (New York: Vintage Books) 75.
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