Pro-social justice, pro-environment, pro-Mormon
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I am a regular subscriber and practical environmentalist. I am also a practicing, if not entirely orthodox, Mormon. HCN seems to miss few opportunities to rant on my fellow Mormons, as if we were somehow a monolithic group of ultra-conservative Tea Party real estate developers. This is not the case. Were you to substitute "Jew" for "Mormon" in some of the subtle and not-so-subtle stories and comments you print, you might see the prejudice of your otherwise-laudable journal.
One can be an entirely orthodox Mormon (or Catholic or Jew or Muslim, for that matter), and still be very much in favor of policies and situations that preserve the environment and advance Western issues. I may not be on the same page with my church on many issues. But I belong to and participate in a church that is very much a "social justice" church, and many of its leaders have spoken out in favor of environmental issues. I see absolutely no recognition of this in either the mainstream media or in HCN.
If you really want to preserve and protect the West, why not try to enlist the formidable support of the Mormon people in this laudable cause? Open your minds to all of us who share a love for the West and stop insulting those of us who might not fit into your neat categories.
Patrick N. Naylor
Boise, Idaho
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Thanks for the submission. I just wanted to explain (from a non-mormon point of view) how the categorization of people of the Mormon religion may have started. I feel that the "neat categories" concerning environmental issues are little more concrete in the Mormon religion than you make them sound. I have a large number of Mormon family members and I can easily place them into 2 categories: Pro-environment and Not-Pro-Environment. Because of certain religious views that each person holds, I feel that a middle-ground is very rare. I know that I am making an assumption on a small group of Mormons, but I feel that the categories have been developed because of a majority of non-weighted viewpoints. I mean no disrespect, and I hope that this was taken as a neutral observation and nothing negative.
Kody