Some comments:
16 posted on 12/22/2013 11:05:29 PM by Grandma Conservative: “The people of Utah should be demanding heads over this. Utah of all places. If it can happen there it can happen anywhere.”
You are absolutely right on this. Utah is one of the reddest of the red states, due in large measure to the Mormons, and if the federal courts can impose their will on an angrily protesting majority of Mormons in Utah, they can and will get away with it anywhere.
However, it looks like this is being done with more than a little local liberal support. If I understand correctly, the mayor of Salt Lake City was one of the people who presided at these newly authorized “homosexual marriages?” If that's true, it's clear this isn't just a few kooks but some people with **MAJOR** influence right in the heart of LDS territory.
Jeff Head, as one of our key local Mormon Freepers, can you help educate us non-Mormons on how this could possibly be happening in a part of the world which most of us conservatives thought was safe territory for conservative pro-family views? What can you tell us about this mayor, and what can you tell us about church and secular plans to take back Utah from this sort of wickedness? This must be sending shock waves through your Mormon world.
For better or for worse, this is going to have to be a Mormon battle. There aren't enough evangelical Protestants and traditional Roman Catholics in Utah to make a meaningful political difference, so in this case I don't see a realistic role for us outsiders beyond sitting on the sidelines and hoping that conservative Mormons win the fight against homosexual marriage in their state.
19 posted on 12/22/2013 11:33:33 PM by justiceseeker93: “The dateline of the Reuters story is New York, which could not possibly be the location where a federal circuit court taking an appeal from Utah District Court would sit.”
I agree with you that the article leads to confusion. However, I think it is probably unintentional.
The standards for selecting datelines are no longer as firm and fixed as they once were, but the older standard was that the dateline was to be the place where the reporter wrote the story, not necessarily where the story took place. The argument was that a reporter should not use a dateline of a city where he or at least an assistant was not physically present, because it could cause people to wrongly think the reporter had “boots on the ground” when the reporter was not there.
In the modern age of telecommunications and internet, stories are more and more often reported by a staff writer making phone calls and sending emails from someplace nowhere near where the story took place. I don't know the current style of Reuters on datelines, but one of my former editors had previously been a Reuters bureau chief, and datelining a Utah story from where the reporter wrote the story — in this case probably New York City — would be consistent with Reuters practice back when he was working for Reuters.
Hope this helps!
(And Jeff, I'd **REALLY** like to hear from you on this. Most of us in the Freeper world know very little about the internal dynamics of the LDS, and I, for one, value your internal knowledge of these issues.)
OK, so the reporters of the original Reuters article may have written their story from New York and followed the journalistic standard for datelines. But that in itself is a problem, because not only are New York and Salt Lake City 2,000 miles apart geographically, they are widely different culturally, especially with respect to the subject at hand. I would go so far as to suggest that Reuters' New York writers were chosen to do the initial story because it would be much more gay marriage friendly. So there were no "boots on the ground" for the original Reuters story, which is a major reason why it turned out as biased, inaccurate, and deceptive as it did.