Back when the Tabernacle on Temple Square was one of the few large auditoriums in the city, it was the venue for speeches by visiting presidents, including John F. Kennedy a few days before his last trip to Texas, and later Lyndon Baines Johnson (which I attended with a group from my jr. high school government class).

ON the story about the objections to the new LDS meetinghouse in Washington, DC: I am amazed that the residents were willing to display their religious prejudice so blatantly. One LDS building in a string of 45 is about the proportion of Mormons in the country and in the DC area (where I used to live). LDS meetinghouse steeples echo the tall, narrow steeples of New England and upstate New York, where the founding generation of Mormons grew up. They are not gothic towers with battlements and bells like the cathedrals of Europe. It will in no way dominate the skyline. As to the “noise” of people going and coming to church, since Mormons don’t smoke, they are not going to be standing around outside the building for nicotine breaks. How the neighbors will be able to distinguish the “noise” of Mormons’ cars driving to and from the meeting house from the cars that pass by the site on busy 16th Street is undoubtedly due to a miracle of aural acuity bestowed on the local residents. I guess it is possible that some of the sound of hymns praising Christ may penetrate from the chapel’s inner doors and again through the doors of the entry hall and then the doors to the outside, but I hope they don’t mind a little Mendelsohn and John Newton with their Sunday Morning coffee and Washington Post.

Finally, the threat of sanctions against Californians who in any way criticize gay marriage is a very real prospect. We need only remember the many ways in which the Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender lobby has prevailed on local governments throughout California to anathematize the Boy Scouts of America after the Supreme Court affirmed its legal right to exclude over homosexuals from being in charge of 12 to 17 year old boys. At one point, the California State Bar proposed requiring all judges to take an oath that they did not support the Boy Scouts because of that “sexual discrimination”. I am sure that the proposal will be renewed and extended to all public servants and all members of juries, and who knows, even to people registering to vote. After all, in the eyes of “progressives everywhere”, if it’s the right thing to do, there is no harm in forcing everyone to do it. The entire panoply of exemptions from property and income taxes for churches and church-affiliated schools and charitable institutions will also be placed on the table, to exact a massive financial penalty on any church that insists on preaching what its own scriptures say about sexual morality. The same will go for tax deductions for contributions to those churches. The planning and zoning laws will also be employed to penalize all denominations with a traditional view of sexual morality. California is liable to set up a very direct confrontation between the primacy of the First Amendment freedoms against the primacy of sexual freedoms, with a very real prospect of setting society on the path toward Huxley’s Brave New World of sexually libertine, political totalitarianism.