By Ralph Sheffield

ay to go Democrats!” the sign read, followed by a litany of the scandalous acts of a recent President, who debased his office to an unprecedented degree, yet escaped conviction through the sheer lust for power of his political party. The man holding the sign was, I later learned, a former Democrat—like me. “There must be millions of us now,” I reflected, “people who, in good conscience, can no longer vote Democrat.” Perhaps we might be called “provisional Republicans”—citizens who, though firmly devoted to social justice, are equally committed to the hallowed principles of freedom, faith, and honor upon which our incredible Founders built this American nation. Does heart-felt patriotism make one a “right-winger?” “Not hardly!”as John Wayne put it. Neither was the brave (and brilliant) Patrick Henry, who observed that “this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.” Did someone just squeal an inane platitude about all religions being equal? So, then, are all professions, right?—policeman and pickpocket, bank teller and bank robber, pastor and pornographer, housewife and whore. No, true religion is of divine dispensation, but scripture warns that false ones also abound—“for some are of men, and others of devils:”¹ Quaint ones, weird ones—we’re even seeing bloody ones. These latter are the manifest scions of the same iniquitous spirit that once bedeviled followers of cannibalic religion in certain parts of the world to eat living persons, supposing that they, themselves, would thereby live on and on. Cases are recorded where men of a particular tribe would ambush someone (say, a missionary carrying food, spelling books and medicines to another tribe), slash his abdomen with a bamboo knife, and devour his intestines until the moment of agonized death. (The fact that these grisly slayers grew old and died off like everyone else was apparently lost on the mentality that would credit such abomination in the first place.) All religions are the same…yeah, sure.

Since it required no lesser light than Judeo-Christian religion to nurture the glorious tree of American liberty, we are aghast to see machinations by a major political party that will inevitably extinguish that light. The Democrats’ arrant refusal to confirm judicial appointments not of their own ilk betrays a sinister intent—wishing to rule us, not by the statutory will of the people (bequeathed at immense cost by the “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” of our predecessors), but seeking to rule us by lawsuit and judicial decree, government by unelected lawyer-elitists, a government of men, and not of laws! Didn’t we have an American Revolution about this? Jesus’ fierce rebuke of lawyers who use their know-ledge of law to undermine the law resounds with still-chilling significance.²

Likewise, to Republicans, a warning: If you are, indeed, embracing the equanimity and fairness of Lincoln, and not just his name, then we accept your compassionate conservatism. But do not take us for granted. Yes, the Democrats have crowded out solid citizens in favor of sensualists flaunting dead children as “choice,” a control-mad ACLU, an avaricious Trial Lawyers Association, crime-tinctured big union- ism, flagrant news and entertainment bias, pseudo-educational nepotism, and decadent homosexual and marijuana coteries pushing country-killing initiatives. And, yes, the Democratic party has become the least democratic. (Who dares question the party line?) But if the Republicans become as subverted by plutocracy as the Democrats are by putrescence, we, who join you provisionally, may leave you summarily and establish our own political party—not a Wallace-Perot-Nader-type party built on factional gripes, but a major political movement, composed of citizens with both the right and left sides of the brain functioning—people who understand and will fight to preserve the American dream for themselves, but are equally determined that others shall have the same opportunity.

1. Doctrine & Covenants 46:7
2. Luke 11:52

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