Richards v. Shurtleff

Not long after the Shurtleff/Swallow arrest stories started exploding across the headlines, Paul Rolly wrote one of the best pieces I've seen in a long time about the unholy union of politics and religion in Utah.  You'd have missed the story entirely if you confined yourself to reading the Deseret News.  Rolly framed the facts perfectly: While Mark Shurtleff was being arrested for corruption, facing over twenty felony counts, his former Democratic opponent, Reed Richards, was being set apart as a member of the Ogden Temple Presidency.

I've had some small interaction with Reed Richards, actually.  He was gracious enough to invite my Dad and my brothers and me to go fishing in the Wind Rivers with him a few years ago, around the time, in fact, that he ran for Utah Attorney General.  My father, of course, has known Reed for a long time.  We proudly planted a campaign sign for him on our front lawn and were more than a little disillusioned by his loss to an incompetent hypocrite.

The fact of the matter is that Reed Richards is a good man, a better man, by far, than his former opponent, a man who has finally been revealed as the sanctimonious crook he is.  There used to be a time in Utah when we were able to regard men and women as good, whether they were Democrats or Republicans.  Jan Graham won as a Democrat.  Wayne Owens won as a Democrat.  James Faust won as a Democrat.  Cal Rampton won as a Democrat.  In pockets, it's still true that we elect good Democrats.  Sim Gill is a clear example.  Brian King is another.

Yet the pool of elected Democrats is shrinking. I have little faith that the sight of Mark Shurtleff in handcuffs will cause any of his supporters from 2000, who declined to vote for the better man back then, to reconsider their views.  Here in Utah, in my lifetime, since, in fact, I've been able to vote, we've become entrenched in the view that the only good men and women who run for elected office are Republicans.

It's part of a national trend, certainly, in which highly conservative, highly religious states are increasingly becoming single-party Republican/Conservative Christian entities.  And they're using religion as a pretext for the shift, pleasuring their egos with the belief that somehow their politics are a reflection of their religion (or vice versa, because it the union is so tight at this point you can hardly disentangle the two).  As Rolly put it, "[V]oters saw Shurtleff as the better candidate because he was a Republican. That also made him a better Mormon, which helped the future accused criminal defeat the future member of a temple presidency by 136,000 votes."

By foreclosing the possibility that candidates like Reed Richards exist, that a Democratic candidate may actually be a more honest, trustworthy, competent public servant than his or her Republican opponent, our communities suffer.  We suffer from the lack of integrity in elected office.  It's almost axiomatic that no good person runs for office, that all the politicians are crooks.  Reed Richards proves otherwise.  Our failure then and now to carefully, and with insight, choose the better candidate, to believe that one can actually exist, will result in more acts of corruption, more Shurtleffs, and fewer Shurtleffs held to account.  Meanwhile, the Richards will stand in holy places, as we stand without.