Word: utah
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...original Mormon pioneers came to Utah under duress--their founder, Joseph Smith, was murdered in Illinois in 1844, and his followers fled westward to escape persecution. Modern-day non-Mormon settlers will come only because they want to, and the state's leaders know that. So, as if by rote, they recite the advantages of living in Utah: low crime, great mountains, those five national parks, a tech-savvy population with the nation's highest per capita ownership of computers, and 45-min. access to world-class ski resorts from the center of Salt Lake. Yet the image of Paradise...
...live in Utah is to live in a state of paradox," says Terry Tempest Williams, one of the state's best-known writers. Utah is hardly Brigham Young's Promised Land of milk and honey. It is mostly infertile desert, rock and a lake that is too salty to support even fish. Out of this apocalyptic landscape of blood-red rock and sulphur-colored plains, the pioneers hacked a difficult livelihood, struggling with biblical droughts, a plague of grasshoppers and overpowering summer heat. In other Western states such hardships bred a cantankerous individualism. In Utah the LDS church fostered...
...Mormons have always felt they are an oppressed minority in the state; Mormons feel they are an oppressed minority in the country," says Michael Zimmerman, a Salt Lake lawyer who served on Utah's Supreme Court for 16 years. "Both groups' self-images are true and false; both sides are deluding themselves." Like many long-term residents, Zimmerman sees many changes in Utah but thinks the relations between Mormons and non-Mormons remain more or less the same: "The way Utah is changing is through urbanization, rather than by the Mormons being more inclusive." A recent poll for the Salt...
Extremes create extremes. Jackie Biskupski, a state legislator and prominent member of the local gay community, says the gay scene has become so visible "partly out of need. The community here can be so oppressive, it almost creates the need for a thriving gay and lesbian community." Outsiders visiting Utah are frequently shocked by the degree of anti-Mormon sentiment that is expressed in conversation by non-Mormons, often quite openly. "People say things about Mormons that they wouldn't dream of saying about blacks or Hispanics or Jews or whatever," says Zimmerman...
...There is a strong sense in Utah of the inside [the Mormon faith] and the outside," says the writer Tempest Williams...