Editor:
Your coverage of Mayor Anderson’s forum on “Bridging the religeous divide” is bland and one sided. Was the writer not encouraged to interview other religeous leaders on campus besides the director of the Institute? Where is your journalistic value of fair and balanced reporting? Religeous tension doesn’t just exist between individual Mormans and non-Mormans. The ideology and values of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints permeate the very culture of our state. It exists in full force in the political system, real estate, the corporate culture, the public education system … our street addresses are even centered around the Morman temple! The Morman ideology affects what we can drink at a bar or restaurant or whether we can shop on Sundays. Gary Poll’s invitation for students to come to the Institute to learn about “other” religons is insulting. What better way to perpetrate an ever-present, underlying adgenda to convert non-Mormans into the religon than in the center for Morman studies? Whatever a student would learn about “other” faiths in the Insitute would certainly be tainted with bias.Do the Catholic, Baptist, Unitarian or Buddist leaders have nothing to say? Were they even interviewed by your reporter? I suspect that they, too, have a vested interest in these public forums. There’s more to fixing the religeous tension in this state than Poll’s simple solution to learn about and understand different faiths. I would hope that Utah’s future journalists would have better insight and conviction to uncover why this tension continues to plague our state, why people are unhappy, why the mayor feels compelled to hold public forums about it, and what other religeous experts have to say.
S. McLean, 2002 University of Utah alumna