tsujigiri

The editorial comments of Chris and James, covering the news, science, religion, politics and culture.

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Thursday, January 05, 2006

What is wrong with the IRS?

I have been trying since July to complete a "Request for Residency Certification Form" with the IRS. If I successfully fill out the form, the IRS will send me a Certification that I live in the US. They keep sending the fucking thing back to me saying "we need additional information." What is the necessary additional information? They want a statement, signed under penalty of perjury, that I live in the US. In other words, they want me to certify that I live in the US, after which they will certify that I live in the US. I have sent them this signed statement repeatedly, but they keep sending it back saying they need the signed statement. I don't know what the fuck they want.

I don't know how I can fill out this fucking form again using any words other than "fuck." Name: Dr. Fuck Fuck Fuck. Address: Fuck, Fuck, FU CKFUCK-FUCK. SSN: FUC-KF-UCK.

Does the IRS recruit its employees from group homes for the mentally disabled?

Monday, January 02, 2006

LoveSac: it is a damn bean bag.

Summary: Much of Utah's neighborhoods, culture and businesses are effectively segregated along religious boundaries. Home-grown companies are sometimes overwhelmingly Mormon and create a hostile, sometimes humiliating environment for non-members of the Mormon church. Though cases of discrimination are often recounted in conversation, formal complaints are almost never filed. The bizarre LoveSac corporation provides an example of Mormon market and business environments, and is the target of a rare lawsuit for religious discrimination.

I've been trying to track down quantitative data on what I believe is a problem of religious segeregation in Utah. Anecdotal evidence is abundant: Mormons like to work around other Mormons, and few non-Mormons can handle the stress of working in a Mormon environment. The problem seems to exist mostly in home-grown firms and businesses. National corporations tend, I think, to import a more mainstream American business culture when they set up shop in Utah. Unfortunately, I haven't found any formal studies on this topic. It is probably an academic taboo. One conspicuous issue is the lack of religious discrimination claims in Utah. Religious tension is so thick that I hear constant complaints of religious discrimination, but evidently these are almost never made formal.

My research into religious discrimination led me to another frustrating Utah anomaly: The LoveSac. The LoveSac website proclaims that "it's not a damn bean bag;" I beg to differ. I was present at the University of Utah when the LoveSac was first unveiled. Since that time, I have always wondered, "What the hell is so great about this stupid bean bag?" The agressive, blonde, missionary-like LoveSac salesmen drew crowds to sit on their giant foam-stuffed crap bags.

The LoveSac fad, I assumed, appeared with the help of someone's overindulgent family member(s). Such a stupid product surely cannot sustain itself, and I expected it to vanish once the family lost interest in propping it up. Then again, this is Utah, a world hub for pointless products and pyramid schemes that range from NuSkin to herbal remedies to home water-purification systems.

LoveSac encountered some lucky turns, according to the brief history on the company's web site. They got their start with a small order from Red Bull. LoveSac's young founder, Shawn Nelson, had sufficient credit access to acquire loans to build a "factory," where his "employees" (friends who worked for free) stuffed large bags with shredded foam. Brilliant. Oddly enough, no major retailers wanted to carry this ridiculous non-product, and LoveSac nearly died.

Fortunately for Nelson and friends, pre-Olympic construction created a lean period for downtown retail. The newly opened Gateway Mall (which was utterly dead when it first opened) gave LoveSac a temporary lease for its own retail space. Somehow, people wanted to buy their product, and the company found success. I can only attribute this success to the Mormon community's tendency to act in concert, especially when supporting a home-grown enterprise. It certainly didn't hurt that LoveSac was basically a Mormon company.

What does it mean to be a Mormon company? This is difficult to quantify, but many who have grown up in Utah can recognize the qualitative difference between a normal workplace and a Mormon one: the Mormon environment feels like being in church. That's how former employee Daniel Alix describes the work environment at LoveSac.

According to an article in the Salt Lake City Weekly, Alix filed suit against LoveSac alleging he was terminated for (1) drinking during a vacation to Tijuana, and (2) refusing to act as a "prayer leader" at a company meeting. Alix's attorney, Ralph Chamness, says that “[Alix’s complaint] is unusual, because you actually have someone fired because of a refusal to pray."

Alix's description of the LoveSac work environment sounds familiar for Utah. According to the City Weekly article:

CEO Shawn D. Nelson, scolded Alix’s apparent bad behavior and handed him the “0 percent award,” for “drinking enough for all of the Mormons in the company.” The award, a statuette of a pig with wings, was typically given to employees who had screwed up on the job. Soon thereafter, Alix was fired from his job as a logistics manager, he alleges, for his indulgence on vacation.
It is, in my experience, a common complaint that Mormon co-workers or superiors scrutinize aspects of the private lives of non-Mormon employees, sometimes offering lectures with clear religious overtones.

My personal instinct is that experiences like Alix's are quite common in Utah. So where are the formal complaints? The City Weekly quotes Sherry Hayashi, director of the Utah Labor Commission’s Antidiscrimination Division:

Hayashi believes Utah’s unique cultural dynamics are to blame for the state’s relative lack of religion-based complaints. She said given the long-standing tension between Mormons and non-Mormons, residents tend to brush off harassment as par for the course. “Often, people don’t come forward because they just expect those issues to naturally come across here,” Hayashi said.

It seems that most discrimination complaints have come from evangelical Christians and public school teachers. In 1997, Charles Larson (a public school teacher and an "orthodox Christian"), claimed that he was fired by the Provo school district. According to Larson's press release,

I've been contacted recently by a growing number of concerned people from various parts of the country who have heard rumors of the legal situation that I find myself currently involved in, asking for further details. For those who do not know, I was terminated from my teaching position at a high school within the Provo (Utah) City School District in June 1993 because I was (and remain) a non-Mormon. --Not "ostensibly," "supposedly," or "allegedly," but actually terminated from my career employment for the specific reason that I am not a member of the LDS Church.

Many of you who are acquainted with non-apologetic writings about Mormonism may recognize my name as the author of By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus (Institute for Religious Research, 1992). This book is a scholarly interpretation of a series of Hieratic Egyptian funerary texts used by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, to produce the LDS scripture known as the Book of Abraham. It is not an LDS apologetic work, but rather is written from a secular/ scientific perspective, with a concluding chapter reflecting my own traditional, orthodox Christian beliefs.

...

Soon after the release of my book, however, ...a copy was obtained by the husband of one of the other teachers at IHS, who then brought the book with her to school in August (just after the 1992-93 school year had begun) and allowed Principal Hudnall to see it. As he looked through the book I had written, he told this teacher that he considered the material in the book to be "anti-Mormon" and stated flatly that he was concerned about the possibility of views that might contain "an anti-Mormon slant" being taught in my classroom "as historical fact." But Hudnall expressed no intention -- then or ever -- of approaching me regarding this so-called concern in order to discuss or discover what my actual views might be, or even to try to find out whether any legitimate cause for concern even existed. Instead, he issued instructions to the teacher to "try to find some things to put in his file to validate his termination."

"Anti-Mormon" is, of course, familiar to non-Mormon Utahns as another maddening rationalization used to obscure discriminatory acts committed by Mormons, painting them as defenses of Mormon religious freedom against persecution.

Larson's case was taken on by the Utah ACLU. According to an ACLU web page, Larson's case was resolved out of court (note that Larson was represented by Ralph Chamness, the same attorney now representing Alix against LoveSac):

After a successful career as a correctional officer, Charles Larson decided he wanted to help young people, so he went back to school and became a public school teacher. In his spare time, he pursued scholarly religious studies from his traditional Christian perspective. Shortly after publishing a scholarly exegesis of the Book of Abraham, considered by LDS Church faithful to be ancient scripture, Larson was terminated from his teaching position in the Provo School District, ostensibly as part of a reduction in force. Some time later, Larson became aware of information that indicated that his termination was in fact based on religious discrimination. Upon a full investigation of his employment discrimination complaint, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission concurred. Nevertheless, the district refused to mediate or even to speak with Larson, so he approached us for help. In January 1999, the ACLU of Utah and cooperating attorneys Ralph Chamness and Jensie Anderson filed a complaint for violation of Title VII as well as the United States Constitution. Happily, by providing a copy of the complaint to the Utah Attorney General’s office and engaging in open dialogue with defense counsel, we were able to resolve Larson’s case to his satisfaction out of court.

The ACLU is a small organization in Utah, and is overloaded by the relentless onslaught of legislation and discrimination against non-Mormons. There is an interesting overview of the situation in an article at firstamendmentcenter.org:

The majority the Utah ACLU regularly faces is huge. According to recent surveys from the American Religion Data Archive and the Glenmary Research Center, Utah has the highest percentage (74%) nationwide of religiously affiliated individuals, most of them Mormons. Provo, home to Brigham Young University, has the highest percentage (90%) of religiously affiliated individuals of any metro area in the United States. In Provo, 88% of the total population and 98% of religiously affiliated individuals are Mormons. Ninety percent of the state Legislature is Mormon, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.

With a large and loyal base and an emphasis on tithing, the Mormon church is also a financial titan that wields significant influence. Although the LDS (Latter-day Saints) church does not reveal its finances, even to members, Time magazine put the church’s assets at $30 billion in 1997. “If it were a corporation,” Time reported, “its estimated $5.9 billion in annual gross income would place it midway through the FORTUNE 500, a little below Union Carbide and the Paine Webber Group but bigger than Nike and the Gap.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the ACLU of Utah, with its two full-time and four part-time employees, often feels like David battling the Mormon Goliath. Although it enlists the aid of “cooperating attorneys” frequently, the ACLU of Utah must choose its battles — something it has had moderate success with in the last few years.

The biggest showdown between the Utah ACLU and the Mormons in recent years has been a free-speech case in Salt Lake City’s Main Street Plaza. The conflict arose in 1999 when Salt Lake City sold part of Main Street Plaza to the Mormon church, which then imposed speech restrictions for the area.

Two cases emerged from this situation. The first (First Unitarian Church v. Salt Lake City) reached the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the area was a public forum and that, accordingly, the church must allow free speech.

The second case (Utah Gospel Mission v. Salt Lake City Corporation) cropped up in 2003 when the Salt Lake City Council approved another deal with the church, which traded the Main Street area for church land in another area of town and for financial contributions. The ACLU again filed suit, only to have it dismissed by the Utah federal district court. The case is currently at the 10th Circuit.

This article indirectly hilights another taboo issue: the population of Utah is 74% religious and 55-60% Mormon. State legislators are 90% Mormon, making Mormons a strikingly over-represented group in the state of Utah. The would seem to evidence restrictive and exclusive patterns associated with the Mormon culture in Utah.

The FirstAmendmentCenter article also brings up another on-going saga of free-speech vs The Church in Utah: free speech in the vicinity of Temple Square. This issue has been simmering for years, and in 2005 the Utah legislature took it up another notch with House Bill 131, titled "Access to Health Care Facilities and Places of Worship." Perhaps as an effort to obscure the bill's focus on Temple Square, HB131 restricts speech around both churches and abortion clinics. According to an article on the evangelical Reachout Trust website,

This bill makes it a class B misdemeanor and provides for civil suit should anyone intentionally or knowingly pass “a leaflet or handbill” or display a sign within 100 feet of the door of a “place of worship” and within eight feet of a person without their consent. Among other things, oral communication without consent is also banned in this sidewalk zone.

...Republican Representative Douglas C. Aagard, who submitted this bill, acknowledges the one-sided Mormon Church benefit. The Associated Press reported that Aagard told Utah lawmakers, “the law would help establish standards for street preachers outside [the Mormon] Temple Square.” This leak endorsed a specific religion without equal footing for the other. HB 131, in effect, becomes a state-supported “endorsement” for a religion (the Mormon Church) while another religion is “prohibited” in their “free exercise” (the Christian street preachers).

The ACLU also released a statement about this bill, saying

H.B. 131 is modeled after Colorado legislation passed in 1993, which was aimed specifically at health care facilities. The Colorado legislation, upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 2000, was passed after a protracted history of volatility and conflict stemming from protests on both sides of the abortion issue. The Supreme Court was careful to examine the unique series of events that took place throughout Colorado before it upheld the legislation, which was a last resort based on the extensive record of intimidation and violence.

There is no similar history of conflict to legitimize such a restriction in Utah. The bill sponsor, Representative Aagard, indicated to the House Committee that the bill was necessary in light of events that occurred near Salt Lake City’s Temple Square about eighteen months ago. No other events were cited that would support such a sweeping restriction on free speech activities. Indeed, no events at health care facilities were cited, and the Salt Lake City incident cited was unique to the intersection of downtown Salt Lake City and the worldwide LDS Church conferences. Additionally, the incident has since been dealt with through local government action. The Salt Lake City Mayor’s Office, the ACLU of Utah, local police, and others worked diligently to create, enact, and enforce restrictions to prevent violence around this event. Importantly, Utah’s Federal District Court recently upheld these restrictions as reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, that are content-neutral and narrowly tailored to the unique circumstances. The City’s work alone makes H.B. 131 unnecessary.

The ReachoutTrust article also claims that there is no record of violence initiated by the street preachers at Temple Square, although Mormons have sometimes been arrested for attacking the protesters.

Though it was approved by the Utah House Judiciary committe by an 11/1 vote, HB 131 was withdrawn by its author in March, "due to some unresolved issues." The bill may be reintroduced in 2006.