This is truly outrageous.   Why can’t people see organized labor as a foe of immigration reform?  Keeping wages high for guest workers and excluding skilled workers means only one thing, and that is that employers will be forced to select union members rather than immigrants for jobs.  And, hence, aliens will be forced to work in a black market pool of labor.  What a crock.

What is needed is Reagan-style amnesty.

Today, March 7, 2013, was a great day to run. It was a wet snow, above freezing, so it was like running in the rain except much colder. Being a weekday and a snowy day, there were only a few runners on the 6 mile loop. I laugh at the typical New Yorkers, one yelling at me in a thick Bronx accent to get out of the way when I stopped to adjust my iphone arm-band. You’d think that with the complete absence of runners he could simply run around me.

I got lost today. I couldn’t tell where I was on the loop, and still thought I was heading north to Harlem when I was really around the top and heading back south. There was so much snow in the air that I couldn’t make out the buildings along the edge of the park.

I ran in sunny and dry conditions the next day with hundreds of runners to keep me motivated. There’s always somebody to pass or who passes.

The objective in a timed race is to see how far one can run.   I completed 102.88 miles.  I came in tied for third overall (conflicting reports make it tied for fourth overall), against about 142 other runners, almost all of them who were younger than I was.

The difficulty in a race like this is not the race itself, but the hours of preparation.   I ran many long, lonely miles along California’s roads and trails.   

The race began at 9:00 a.m. and ended the next day at the same time.   My first 26 miles was at my customary marathon pace, and I thought I was going to collapse.  But, dialing things down at mile 28 somewhat let me continue on at a brisk trot.   At mile 70 or so I started developing stress in my knees and my back (I suffer from kidney stones), which brought me largely to a walk at about mile 95.   But, it happened and I finished.   

My next races are two 50-mile races two weeks apart in April 2013.   One is along the American River in Sacramento.  The other is on the Pacific Crest Trail in the hills about 20 miles north of my home, the Leona Divide 50, one of the nation’s oldest 50s.

Second bucket list item: Denali. But to hire the guide I need requires me to spend a week of winter training on Mt. Rainier. Not my idea of fun, having climbed it previously.

It is a total waste of time to pass legislation for background checks. I mean, we have a rule in California that felons can’t have guns, and felons have them all the time. The state and local cops almost never do bust-in sweeps to check on felons (who have given up some of their constitutional rights), because there’s no money to do that. background checks wouldn’t have stopped the Newton, Colorado theater or Giffords shooting, or John Hinkley Jr. That won’t make a dent.

Proposition 8, as you may recall, stripped gays of the right to marry, a civil right granted them by the California Supreme Court.  (There has been much debate as to whether marriage is a civil right, and whether the California Supreme Court could have granted a civil right that heterosexuals never had, but I find these arguments specious.  Gays had a civil right; Proposition 8 took it away.)  A federal court then invalidated Proposition 8, citing the role religion played in getting it passed.   Should legislation be invalid because religious folk backed it?

I’m a second cousin, once removed, of Mitt Romney, but I will most likely be voting for Barack Obama.  I’ve supported the Democratic Party most of my life and don’t intend to change now.   But, Mr. Twede has only a superficial understanding of the Church’s involvement in politics to suggest that a conspiracy is afoot to thwart opposition to Mitt Romney.

The Church’s position is that it has the right to speak out on political issues, although it will do so only rarely.   Examples of involvement that come to mind include active local lobbying to oppose passage of the Twenty-First Amendment (repeal of Prohibition).  When Utah became the state which was the last state necessary to ensure the Amendment’s passage, the First Presidency issued an editorial condemning Utah’s role in its passage.

In my lifetime, the Church was intimately involved in opposing the Reagan-era MX Missile.  That project was widely popular in most Republican Utah circles.  It would bring jobs and prosperity to an impoverished section of Utah.   It was proposed as a second-strike missile defense.   ICBM missiles would be transported on rail in large circles in Southern Utah deserts.   One voice in Salt Lake City stood out against it, University of Utah Law School’s Ed Firmage.   When President Kimball came out against the MX Missile with a carefully-prepared statement, the statement used much of the very same language that Firmage had been using, and I suspect that he was used to draft the statement.

Also in President Kimball’s administration, the Church opposed the pending ERA Amendment.   Washington State hosted in the International Year of the Woman conference in central Washington.   Local LDS Church groups got their Relief Society sisters out to the conference to vote down proposed planks for women’s equality.   That event led to very hard feelings amongst business and legal leaders in Seattle, such all major law firms stopped recruiting at the J. Reuben Clark Law School.   A notorious flap occurred around 1980 when a senior partner at Bogle & Gates (the Gates being Bill Gate’s father) told a J. Reuben Clark law student about that agreement among local firms.   (This would be repeated on a larger scale after Proposition 8.)

As to the Church’s influence in the election of particular individuals, the Church has been studiously neutral.   Key exceptions to this neutrality can be seen in the Missouri and Nauvoo periods, when the Church members were asked to vote in bloc for particular candidates.   In those days, elections were not secret ballot affairs. Voters would be given the day off of work.   Voting would occur in the town square and was lubricated with lots of grog.  Joseph Smith, and the later Brigham Young in the Nauvoo period, would pledge the Church bloc to whomever would appear to be the least likely to afflict the Church.

This sort of Church voting came to an end in the territorial period where federal officials were appointees.   Instead, the Church relied upon political lobbyists in Washington to influence legislation and presidential relations, to the extent possible.   Early Church lobbyists included Dr. John Milton Berhnisel (also a territorial representative to the House), Thomas L. Kane and Almon Babbitt (Judge W.W. Drummond told the Attorney General that Babbitt had been murdered on the high plains on the orders of Brigham Young as Babbitt was returning from Washington City).

Almon Babbitt

Church relations with Washington City politicians were rocky during the Brigham Young period.   President Young condemned James Buchanan to hell.   The Republican Party declared as one of its national planks the abolition of polygamy) (the “twin pillars of barbarism”).  After Brigham Young, the Republican Party took up the cudgel against the Saints, sponsoring several pieces of legislation against the Church.  One of the Supreme Court justices in the Reynolds case, Justice William Strong, was the President of the American Tract Society, the American Sunday-School Union (ardent anti-Mormons) and also of a group promoting a constitutional amendment to declare the United States a Christian nation which would have excluded the Mormon faith.

It is well-known that Joseph Smith campaigned as an independent for the office of President for the 1844 election, in which Democratic candidate James K. Polk beat Whig nominee Henry Clay.   Joseph Smith’s key planks included selling public lands to raise money to free the slaves; he proposed decreasing the size and salary of Congress; he proposed the annexation of Texas, Oregon and parts of Canada; he proposed a number of free-trade items and the re-establishment of the national bank (thus, aligning himself somewhat with the Whigs).

Around 1890, as part of its forced settlement with the U.S. Government (after almost all of the Church’s assets were forfeited and its members disenfranchised with a test oath), the Church instructed its members to disband the Peoples Party (basically, an anti-government party) and to align themselves with the national parties.  Because most members wanted to align themselves with the Democrats due to decades of Republican persecution, the Church had to assign some members to join the Republican Party.

The next major Church authority to run for office was Apostle Moses Thatcher.  He accepted Utah’s Democratic Party’s nomination as a candidate for the Senate. He was already somewhat out of harmony with the Twelve.   His nomination led to the Twelve’s creation of a political manifesto which would declare Church neutrality in politics as well as require permission from the Twelve before a member of its body could run for public office.   Thatcher refused to sign.

Moses Thatcher

He was eventually dropped from the Quorum and then excommunicated, but his problems were much deeper than that of disharmony with the Twelve as he became caught up with the national craze known as “Spiritualism.”

B.H. Roberts also refused to sign the Twelve’s political manifesto of 1895 and found himself somewhat more out of harmony with the presiding Quorum of the Twelve as he accused them of trying to influence the election.   Apparently, Roberts temporarily lost his ecclesiastical position in the Seventy until he capitulated and apologized.  Thereafter, Roberts was elected to the House of Representatives but that body refused to seat him because he was a polygamist.

Reed Smoot was in his 30s when he served as Provo’s mayor and was thereafter elected as a Republican to the U.S. Senate in 1902.  He was swept out of office in 1932 with the Roosevelt revolution.   He, too, had his moments with the leadership of the Twelve as they originally opposed an Apostle’s full-time participation in politics.   They eventually relented.  The Church was then forced into responding to subpoenas when the Republican Party (principally, Senator William Borah of Idaho) challenged the right of Smoot to be seated.  At that time, President Joseph F. Smith determined to do what it took to support Smoot in Senator Borah’s hearings, leading to the ouster of two members of the Twelve who either refused to respond to the subpoenas or evaded them.  Church leaders closed ranks around Reed Smoot as they tried to deal with subpoenas seeking intimate details of Church leaders’ lives, of Church doctrine and procedure (repeated questions about how revelation is actually received) and of the text of the Mormon temple ceremonies.

Senator William Borah, Church Nemesis

Young Reed Smoot

Smoot was a rather inactive Apostle until he was voted out of office.  His main tasks seemed limited to presiding over the Washington D.C. branch of the Church (where he did not see things eye-to-eye with branch member J. Reuben Clark) and an occasional address in Utah.  He saw his ouster from politics as guidance to return to full-time Church service.  But, Smoot had his role and perhaps indirectly influenced the growth of the Church in the modern world more than any other twentieth-century Apostle.  A very competent politician, he permitted other well-qualified and competent world leaders to see a Mormon as somebody other than a Thomas Nast cartoon character.

No ranking General Authority thereafter sought elected public office, although a number of them have served as appointed political officers, including Elder Ezra Taft Benson (Eisenhower administration) and Elder Steven E. Snow (Obama administration).  Although in modern history, members of the Church have gravitated to the Republican Party, due in part to Reed Smoot’s influence as well as platform planks more consistent with the Church’s moral position, many prominent members of the Church have been Democrats.   These include past First Presidency member James E. Faust, current Church Historian Steven E. Snow (former chair of the state Democratic party), and past Church Historian Marlin K. Jensen.

But, the Church as an institution since Reed Smoot (and all the Church did there was to try and help keep him in office once elected) has remained steadfast for over a hundred years that it will not support a particular candidate.  The Church encourages participation in the political process and urges its members to vote for good men and women.  The Church involves itself in political issues, including such matters as immigration, marriage and family rights, liquor-by-the-drink legislation and, as mentioned above, the MX missile.  It has never pretended to be neutral as to political issues.  When the Church says that it is “neutral” it means only that it is neutral with respect to political candidates, a position founded in the 1895 Political Manifesto.  Most major Church organizations in the United States have political views and lobbyists in Washington, including the Catholic Church which pressures Catholic politicians to oppose death penalty legislation.

Edited to add: After this post the website changed its position on this topic. I don’t claim that it was in response to this post.

I started wearing my Timex GPS again to see if I could improve my pace. It helps a little.  

But what is really cool is that I uploaded the file to MapMyRun.com and they have a Google flyover of the entire run.   It is dizzying to watch at times.  And it accelerates in a rather cool fashion in the portions of my run where I forgot to turn the watch back on after a water break.

Link to overhead video of today’s run: Twenty Miles