Behind the Zion Curtain

My inner Frenchman and I recently watched a screener of This Divided State. It's a documentary about a controversial appearance by Michael Moore at Utah Valley State College in Orem, Utah. My inner Frenchman, an affectionado of the documentary genre, loved it. He thought the director, Steven Greenstreet, put together a film as good as anything done by Errol Morris or Michael Moore. His juxtaposition of the Moore and Sean Hannity appearances at UVSC brilliantly contrasted the exclusionary demagoguery of the right with the inclusive rhetoric of the left (not that inclusion is good and exclusion is bad--I'm just passing on what my inner Frenchman said). He also thought that the film perfectly captured what life is like in a theocracy, which Utah, like some parts of the South, most certainly is.

I liked the film too. It's a peek into what our nation's future holds should Dr. Dobson and other Christian reconstructionists be successful in implementing their vision. One of the people appearing in the film, real estate broker Kay Anderson, serves as the perfect specimen of the post-reconstructionist citizen. He decries Moore's scheduled appearance, declaring that when evil is introduced to a community, children cannot help but be influenced. He has a tremendous amount of credibility on this topic, because as he notes a few minutes later in the film, he "grew up in Ely, Nevada, a town that had four whorehouses."

Although to many gentiles (even the Jews are gentiles in the Beehive State) Kay Anderson may appear to be insane, his type is thankfully common in Utah. These are men who picked up their politics at their local Mormon Church, reading and studying the words of Mormon leaders like the late prophet Ezra Taft Benson, a John Birch Society heavyweight who wrote a preface to an edition of the anti-Semitic screed, None Dare Call it Conspiracy and Cleon Skousen, author of backyard bombshelter classic, The Naked Communist . I've seen many men like Anderson rise up against things like anti-incest legislation because it was "anti-family" and the song, "This Land is Your Land, because it's author, Woody Guthrie, was a commie. These men are our nation's future.

To them, as well as myself, liberalism is more than a distasteful ideology. It's an evil against which society must be protected. People like Moore are a threat to our children. Their message of tolerance and fair play is just as dangerous as any biology textbook one might find at a library. That's why it's important that good, Godly men like Anderson step into the breach and defend us against alien ideas.

This Divided State will be available nationwide on DVD on Sept. 27th. Click here for details.