As if Mitt did not have enough problems lately, here is a story on Fox News Latino about Hispanic Mormons speaking out against his policy on immigration. I found this especially interesting:

While stressing the Mormon faith’s historic connection to converting immigrants, Latino Mormons point directly to immigration stories in the Book of Mormon and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ recent statements against policies targeting immigrants. They also view Romney’s stance against proposals giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship as hypocritical since Romney’s great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, who had five wives and 30 children, sought refuge in Mexico after passage of an 1882 law that barred polygamy.

“We view immigration as a God event,” said Ignacio García, a history professor at Brigham Young University and a Sunday school teacher at his Mormon ward. “The book says no one comes to the Land unless they are brought by God.”

Those stories in the Book of Mormon, Garcia said, give Hispanic Mormons a powerful religious argument to use, especially since most believe they are descendants of the Lamanites, an indigenous group in the Americas described in the Mormon sacred text. According to the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites lived in the present-day American Southwest, traveled south and face years of hardship, and are prophesized to eventually return to the Promised Land.

Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2012/02/20/latino-mormons-speaking-out-against-romney/#ixzz1mvzlVEv8

Perhaps these are among the reasons the Church has taken a relatively moderate position on immigration?

I have made two huge paradigm shifts in my life — one gradual and one sudden. The first was a change from college liberal to where I am today, a libertarian-leaning promoter of personal freedom. The other was when I joined the Church, and this was very sudden. I wanted to share my personal stories with you because I believe we should be open to changing our worldviews as new information becomes available. As a convert, I believe this open-mindedness seems central to accepting the Gospel as well.

In the early 1980s, I went to a large university in California where standard liberal viewpoints held sway. When I was in class, I was constantly told that the only intelligent position was that of the liberal wing of the Democratic party. When I worked on the college newspaper, liberals outnumbered conservatives 35 to 2 (at least). I became a product of my environment and went forth with politically correct righteousness.

A year after I graduated I got an opportunity to work as a free-lance journalist living in Nicaragua. As you may know, in 1986 (when I moved there) Nicaragua was in the middle of a civil war. On one side was the leftist Sandinista government, which had taken control of Nicaragua after ousting dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. On the other side were US-backed rebels called the Contras. When I moved to Nicaragua, the politically correct left-wing position was “power to the people,” meaning that the Sandinistas were all sweetness and light protecting the rights of the poor and the Contras were evil tyrants. Like anything else, the truth was much more complicated.

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Anybody who knows anything about Michael Bloomberg knows he thinks he can tell you what to do with your life. He wants you to eat only the foods he approves of, and he wants you to stop smoking, even if your smoking does not affect anybody else. He also is on a crusade against the 2nd amendment, which clearly spells out a right to gun ownership, a right that is routinely violated in New York.

Now Mr. Nanny State is criticizing the Church because of its ownership of the for-profit company KSL. KSL has an on-line classified section. Think of Craig’s list or Ebay. Among the hundreds of items listed is a section of “Firearms and Hunting.” If you visit, there are several thousand guns listed for sale. There are many more items for recreational vehicles and furniture, so firearms is not central to KSL’s classifieds, but like a Wal-Mart and many other retail operations, they also sell firearms.

Bloomberg claims KSL is the third-largest source of on-line firearms sales. This is impossible to confirm, but let’s just assume it is true. My point is: so what?

It may be shocking to latte-sipping New Yorkers, but people in the West have guns. I know, hard to believe, right? And sometimes when you have a gun, or want a gun, you want to sell it or buy another one. You can go to a pawn shop, but the prices are high — that’s how pawn shops stay in business. Many other places will also buy and sell your used gun (I bought one from Wal-Mart in Colorado), but you can usually get a better price if you sell directly to somebody else.

Let’s be clear: KSL is simply providing an information service putting together willing buyers and sellers. It is just like this web site. Or this web site. If you search, there are dozens of large web sites where people can buy and sell guns.

It is always the refuge of the tyrant to blame the platform for people’s private actions. Being in the telecom business, I remember when people blamed the phone companies for 1-900 numbers. Sorry, telephones were just the platform. Today there are still people blaming the internet for porn or gambling. Sorry, porn and gambling existed long before the internet. KSL is just the platform for providing information for people to do things they would do otherwise, ie buy and sell guns.

Again, shocking information for New Yorkers, but guns make the world safer. I highly recommend that skeptics of this statement read John Lott’s book “More Guns, Less Crime.” He shows without a shadow of a doubt that states with more guns have lower crime rates. As he says: “Concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime for two reasons. First, they reduce the number of attempted crimes because criminals are uncertain which potential victims can defend themselves. Second, victims who have guns are in a much better position to defend themselves.” The causation is clear: when gun control laws were instituted in the 1970s and 1980s, crime went up. As gun control has decreased, crime has plummeted.

I would not be surprised to see KSL back down and take out its “Firearms and Hunting” section. Many newspapers do not allow classifieds for guns because they are run by nanny state liberals who do not know the First or Second Amendments (among other reasons). Same thing with Craig’s List. That would be a shame. Guns will still be bought and sold. The KSL ban will do nothing to prevent that. Let the market work, I say.

By the very fact that you were born and are reading this, you have three natural rights. You have the right to your life (nobody should kill you), your liberty (nobody should enslave you) and your property (nobody should take away the fruits of your labor and the things you own). A close reading of the scriptures clearly shows that you were indeed born with these rights, and in fact the Bible and modern-day revelation all reflect the fact of natural rights.

The great heroes of the scriptures are the defenders of natural rights. The greatest tyrants are those who undermine natural rights.

Let’s start from the beginning. Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden and begin to til the Earth. Who owns the Earth? God does, but he allows Adam and Eve to “own” a portion of it during their lifetimes. Is the Earth common property, owned by all? No, people are given ownership during their lifetimes based on their work of the land. Adam and Eve do not own the entire Earth — they own the portions they can work. It would be ludicrous for them to claim they own mountains and plains hundreds of miles from where they first worked, but it would be equally ludicrous to question the fact that they own the very fields they first worked on and subsequent fields planted by them.

Adam and Eve are “given” (by the Lord) flocks of animals. Who owns the flocks? Well, at the beginning they are owned by the Lord, but He gives ownership to Adam and Eve during their lifetimes. The flocks become “owned” by Adam and Eve because of their labor. They work with the flocks, they presumably discover how to get milk and animal skins.

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Take a gander at this great, concise article by Nate Oman.

Here are the key graphs:

In 1902, Utah elected Reed Smoot to be its U.S. senator. Unlike Romney, who temporarily occupied positions of local church leadership in Boston, Smoot was a Mormon apostle, a life-long member of the church’s second-highest governing council. Activists and journalists insisted that Mormon theocracy was again rearing its head and that Smoot would take political orders from church leaders.

The result was a four-year congressional investigation of Mormonism. Ultimately, church President Joseph F. Smith appeared before the Senate. He disclaimed any theocratic agenda; he insisted that Mormons were loyal citizens of the U.S., and he pledged that the church would not direct or seek to dominate Mormons elected to political office.

We now have more than a century of experience with that pledge. While the church occasionally acts politically — as do all American denominations — it has abided by Smith’s promise. Robert Bennett, for example, a former three-term Republican senator from Utah and a practicing Mormon, insists that in 18 years in office, church leaders never instructed him on how to vote on a single issue. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate and a Mormon, says the same thing.

Prior to the Vatican II council of the 1960s, the Catholic Church was formally opposed to many of the core features of liberal democracy, such as religious freedom. Given historical experience, however, it’s ridiculous to imagine a believing Catholic like Joe Biden as part of a subversive Roman agenda.

Seeing Romney’s candidacy as a Mormon plot is equally outlandish. We now have twice as much experience with post-Smoot Mormonism as we have with post-Vatican II Catholicism

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/mormon-plot-wasn-t-article-1.1014874#ixzz1l9U2cd3u