The United States of Mormonism

By Bill Maher 

Approximately 62% of Utah is Mormon, compared to less than 2% nationally. But it's one of only four religions in the US that are actually growing, and if you need to see what life will be like in the United States of Mormonism, Utah's a great place to start.

Utah is not a theocracy. It's just a place where the centralized Church has a huge amount of influence, laws are passed that reflect the Church's values, and no politician can ever do anything that would really anger the Church. But the government isn't literally run by the Church. It just trembles in its shadow.

This comes out in the liquor laws, which are about as repressive as you can get. The Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control has run the show since 1935, and the state has a monopoly on the sale of certain liquors. For instance, beer that has over 3.2% alcohol content (which includes many, many popular beers) can only be sold at State Liquor Stores. You want a Sierra Nevada? You can buy that from the government. That's right, socialism, right out in the open!

Pornography is restricted in Utah as well. According to the Attorney General's website, it is illegal to distribute, transport, transmit, produce, broadcast, or mail pornographic material. Also, all semen that results from use of pornography must be saved, tagged, registered, baptized, and then stored in a cold vault beneath the Salt Lake Temple.

Sodomy? Not in Utah, gay or otherwise, until 2003, when the federal government struck down all sodomy laws. Utah's law has it as a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1000 fine. And it's still on the books. You might say that it's an arcane regulation that hasn't been touched because it just doesn't matter anymore, but in point of fact a gay state senator named Scott McCoy tried to get it off the books in 2007 with his creatively titled "Sodomy Amendments." The bill failed without consideration.

Utah also gives married parents preference in matters of adoption. Which, because gays can't get married in Utah, nor can they get their marriages recognized, means "Sorry, homos, no baby for you!"

The bottom line is that no matter how much the LDS and Mitt Romney mouth the word "freedom," the United States of Mormonism would be a much less free place than the country we're living in now. But it would be so clean and nice that nobody would care.

New Rule: The Republican Leadership in America Must Produce Their Birth Certificates

New Rule: The Republican leadership in America must produce their birth certificates! Not because I doubt they're Americans, I just want to make sure they're not eight-years-old. I mention this because a major talking point on Fox News and hate radio these days is that, after a year and a half of Obama, it's time to bring the "adults" back into power, so they can rein in our deficit, defeat terrorism, and focus on America's real enemy: cleaning ladies in Arizona. But I must protest the premise, because conservatives are the ones who tend to believe in magical ideas, like: America is never wrong; you can defeat terrorism militarily; and lower taxes will somehow fix the deficit. And I'm not even mentioning the stuff about how Jesus used to fly around on a pterodactyl and just hated it when homos ate wedding cake.

Now, am I saying there are no adults in today's Republican Party? Absolutely not, there are -- but like a lot of parents today, the adults let their kids cow them. And silence them. And rule over them. Rush Limbaugh is a child, a primal scream of a man, but he gets his way because he's the fat bully on the playground; and Glenn Beck is the weepy kid who's always crying because he's insane and you don't know what he's going to do and who he's going to take with him.

For example: to solve our debt crisis, a bunch of Republican senators suggested a bipartisan debt commission, which is the adult thing to do. But when Obama agreed to it, immediately seven of them said no -- now they're against it. Because Obama has cooties. Democrats have cooties, so you can't vote with them, or work with them, and compromise is treason. Compare this to England, where they just had an election two weeks ago and, power changed hands -- but the party that lost is working WITH the part that won -- they are not accusing them of being Bolshevik Zulus out to destroy the Magna Carta. Because the English are grown ups, including their conservatives who enjoy a wonderful luxury that conservatives on this side of the pond do not. They're allowed to be sane. They don't have to pander to creationists and anti-intellectuals. Only in this dumb country do liberals and conservatives argue over things like "evolution" and "climate change" and whether "sick people should be left to die in the street."

The conservative who won in England, David Cameron, was asked if he's religious, and he said, "I don't feel I have a direct line." That's right, he distanced himself from God. If Obama did that we wouldn't see him again until neighbors called the cops about the smell. Conservatives in England don't care about the 3 Gs -- God, guns and gays -- that tilt so many elections in America. And they don't get their policy ideas from TV shows, like 24. You never hear a Brit say, "I'm for torture because it worked on The Avengers."

The Washington Post said David Cameron won by running as a sort of "anti-Sarah Palin." Let those words settle in: "anti-Sarah Palin." They feel so good coming out of my mouth it's like I bit into a refreshing burst of civilization.

Finally, one hallmark of not being adult is a tendency to exaggerate. Like this week when Newt Gingrich said "the Obama administration represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did." Which is basically saying Obama is a billion times worse than any president ever! No, he's infinity times worse!

And it made me think: were we this deranged when Bush was in office? I don't think so -- and Bush merited it: We once did a sketch on this show where we sold George Bush fuck-up collector plates, which included: starting and mismanaging the Iraq War, not catching Bin Laden, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, transforming a budgetary surplus into a giant debt, not doing anything about global warming, sitting on his ass on 9/11, outing Valerie Plame, firing federal prosecutors for political reasons, nominating Harriet Miers, Terri Schiavo, trying to sell the ports to the Arabs...I mean, giant, tangible horrific fuckups that Obama could never equal.

Although with the way he's solving this oil spill, he's off to a good start.