Thinking about becoming a U.S. citizen? The application for naturalization has basically normal questions. One, however, caught my eye. In the section to determine if the applicant is “of good moral character”, the question is asked, “Have you ever persecuted (either directly or indirectly) any person because of race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group or political opinion?”

According to the application instructions this and the other questions in the section (mostly about taxes and plans to overthrow the government) will be used “to determine your eligibility for citizenship.”

So how bad of an anti-Mormon do you have to be before you can’t be a U.S. citizen?

Bryce’s post about playing the piano brought several comments bemoaning the lack of pianists in wards and branches. I find myself wondering if someone in my bishopric reads this blog because today in Sacrament Meeting a new Sunday school class was announced. During Sunday school, any who are interested are to meet the Relief Society room for piano lessons. We have very few pianists in my ward, and those few spend Sunday being shuffled from piano to piano, and the bishopric would like to add more people to the mix. Thus, this new class is being created to hopefully get some more people up to the level of playing the simplified hymns and/or a set of Primary songs.

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An article in yesterday’s USA Today contains results of a religion survey. The finding they found most findworthy? 91.8% of those surveyed say they believe in God, a higher power, or a cosmic force, but they had four distinct views of God’s personality and engagement in human affairs: Authoritarian, Benevolent, Critical or Distant.

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I used to like Harry Reid. I really did. Lately his rhetoric has been quite over the top, but I figured “well, he’s just pandering to his base. Bush does that all the time.”

But now, now he has threatened censorship over a “docudrama” (no one expects docudramas to be 100% historically accurate, so the claim that some events in the movie didn’t really happen don’t work, since that’s an expected part of the genre).

What is going on?

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