Mormons

The third woman to die in Iraq, Army Specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, from Flagstaff, Arizona, was reported as having died from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.” A reporter who dug further, Kevin Elston, found that she committed suicide on September 15, 2003, after becoming distraught from working in an interrogation unit known as “the cage.” Peterson, a devout Mormon who was working as an Arabic translator, was upset by the methods of interrogation being used on Iraqi prisoners. After two days in the unit, she refused to participate further, was reassigned, and was sent to suicide prevention training. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques that Peterson objected to, and say that all records of them have been destroyed. ...

The Leavitt family gave $443,500 to the Dixie and Anne Leavitt Foundation, which gave it to the Southern Utah Foundation, which gave the money to Southern Utah University (along with another $135,000 from Leavitt Land and Investment), which gave the money to students in the form of scholarships that could only be used for housing at apartments owned by the Leavitt family. The Leavitt’s Cedar Development Company got $578,000 from the student rent payments. The Leavitts specifically asked the Southern Utah Foundation (whose board member Steven Bennion was also president of Southern Utah University) for the arrangement. The really interesting part? One member of the Leavitt family involved in these decisions is Mike Leavitt, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration (and former Governor of Utah). The Leavitt Foundation had already been under scrutiny because the Leavitt family had made large donations but the Foundation had paid out little to charity until last year. The IRS is investigating. The Leavitts, the foundation administrators, and the university say they see nothing wrong with the arrangement, and a Leavitt spokeswoman says that the Senate Finance Committee reviewed this arrangement as part of Leavitt’s confirmation last year. This kind of arrangement is not surprising to me given what I’ve heard about other Mormon business arrangements, which commonly use family-owned companies and partnerships to do business with each other in order to gain tax advantages. (Hat tip to Trent Stamp at Charity Navigator.) ...

Via Deep Thoughts, here’s a short (six minutes or so) animated film about Mormon theology as made in the 1970s by a Christian group designed to debunk the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I find the South Park episode more entertaining (on YouTube in three parts: one two three). There’s a description of this episode (712, “All About the Mormons”) at the website Rethinking Mormonism.