Salt Lake Crawler

 The Washington Post's "On Faith" explores Proposition 8, Mormons and karma. Joel Engardio says religious groups ought to think again about the precedent that has been set before celebrating the ban on gay marriage.

Prop 8 has made it a lot easier in California for a simple majority of voters to strip away the rights of an unpopular minority. What happens when it's your time to be the unpopular minority?

History is unkind and too often repeats itself. Members of the Mormon Church, who were major supporters of Prop 8, have ancestors who experienced some of the worst religious discrimination ever faced in the United States.

There is freedom of religion in America for good reason. But that and other freedoms have been watered down in California thanks to Prop 8. The court now has less power to fulfill the purpose for which it was created: keep the tyranny of the majority from trampling the rights of the minority. Anyone can be a minority if enough people don't like the way you live, worship or think.

Engardio suggests (this will go over well with Mormons) that the LDS Church follow the example of the Jehovah's Witnesses, who also annoy their neighbors by proselytizing door to door and are called a "cult" by critics.

But the choice to accept or not ends at the front door for the Witnesses. They don't amend the constitution to force everyone to live their way. State laws are not needed to legitimize their moral views. Witnesses don't see the state as an enforcer of a moral code. That's the Bible's job, they say.

The Deseret News includes an op-ed column today that argues that the president's climate policy — despised by conservatives — is consistent with Mormon beliefs. John Kateel points out:

President Barack Obama is taking steps to bring the nation closer to core LDS values.  . . . The strength of Utah derives from the philosophical reasoning of the Prophet Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. They believed that the strong and able should work with industry and diligence to create a functional community based upon thrift and community service, yet strangely devoid of the excesses that marked 19th-century life. . . .

Where the founding prophets and Obama converge is in realizing that externalities like pollution do have cost that is borne by the community without compensation. They both agree that the producer does have the right to a profit, yet this profit must not come at the uncompensated expense of the community as a whole.

Kateel really pushes his luck when he argues Utah's 19th-century collectivism is very similar to Obama's evil socialism.

It doesn't take a PhD in environomental science to surmise that diverting 30,000 acre feet of water from the Green River to slack the thirst of a nuclear power plant would threaten endangered fish species and other life forms.

But the Center for Biological Diversity made it official by filing a study with the State Engineer's Office. How much difference this and the concerns of other environmental groups will make to the project is hard to say.

The Kane County Water Conservancy District that wants to provide the water is run by Rep. Mike "Rough-ridin' " Noel. The N-power plant's developer is former Rep. Aaron Tilton.

If somebody creates an international prize for common sense, I've got the guy you can name it after: Copper Hills High School Principal Todd Quarnberg.

Students at his school produced a literary journal dripping profanity, darkness, sex, morbidity and macabre art — the required components of teen-age angst. (The title of the magazine, predictably, is Chasms—apparently Hell Hole was already taken.) Quarnberg, naturally, risked being seen by students and his staff as a Visigoth when he halted distribution of the magazine.

Keep in mind that had a group of parents melted down over the magazine, the school board would have paraded Quarnberg and his English and art teachers' heads on sticks.

Quarnberg cleverly shifted responsiblity back to where it belongs. After discussion with students on what they had wrought (a teachable moment!) he has allowed Chasms to be distributed, provided the student buyers get their folks to sign off on it:

I certainly don't want kids damaged, but I also want the high-quality art that is out there to be released.

You would have thought Mayor Ralph would have touched a few bases before he launched his plan to build a police and fire security center on Library Square. Maybe consulted with the Library Board or emailed the architects who designed and built the library.

It turns out they don't like Ralph's plan much.

Moshe Safdie, who designed the award-winning Main Library, says putting a police station on downtown's cultural block a "fundamental transformation for the worse."

. . . a police station and emergency operations center is hardly a complementary use to the public life of the park.

Safdie, above, and the other architects who worked on the library say that even putting a cop shop on an adjacent block needs further study.

The Library Board says a security and surveillance command center is philosophically incompatible with the city's art and culture center. Board member John Becker explains:

It's not just an architectural issue. It's the compatibility of what that block is all about, and that's intellectual freedom.

Meanwhile, the mayor's office issued a point-by-point response to concerns posed by the Library's project manager Ken Ament, who fears the site has seismic risks and other challenges that would make construction expensive.

David Everitt, Ralph's chief of staff, says the site likely has no problems worse than what was met in construction of the Main Library. Nor, Everitt says, will the cop shop hurt Library Square's esthetics.

The aesthetics and massing of the Public Safety Complex and Emergency Operations Center are scaled and configured so that the Library will maintain its iconic presence within the Library Block and the design will not compete or detract from the elegant design or the sightlines to and from the new Library.