How to Improve Your LDS-dar, In One Easy Lesson

A photo of the Strack family, whose parents and three youngest members were recently deceased. The photo was published in the Deseret News.
A photo of the Strack family, whose parents and three youngest members were recently deceased. The photo was published in the Deseret News.

Mitt Romney’s thinking of running for president again. That means it’s time for the mainstream media to sweep the truth about how zingy Mormonism is under the rug.

Here’s how you know “legitimate journalists” are talking about Mormons.

They use words like “Utah family,” as in this headline from CNN: “Utah Family, Fearing Apocalypse, Fatally Drugged Children, Themselves, Police Say.”

Here’s another clue. Religious beliefs are the focus of the story, yet there is no reference to which religion the subject(s) ascribe to. (And they live in Utah.)

According to a statement released by J. Scott Finlayson, chief of police for Springville, the parents had bought into “a concern about a pending apocalypse.”

From interviews with friends and relatives of the Strack family, the statement said, “it became fairly apparent that the topic of ‘leaving’ this world was a fairly common theme.”

Another clue? Anyone in the story is named Zion. (Even if they don’t live in Utah. But if they’re named Zion, they probably live in Utah.)

The children, Benson, 14, Emery, 12, and Zion, 11, all died of a lethal cocktail of diphenhydramine and methadone.

Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, which originates from Ground Zero in the Mormon Universe, posted the longer story that CNN edited, and included this little detail about the reasons for the deaths.

Among them was a possible connection between Kristi Strack and one of Utah’s most notorious killers, Dan Lafferty.

Kristi Strack was a friend of a daughter of Lafferty, and they often visited him in prison. Sometime later, police say both Ben and Kristi Strack visited Lafferty at the prison. While investigators believe the Stracks hadn’t seen or had contact with Lafferty since 2008, they still had some type of bond with him. Lafferty had wanted the Stracks to take care of his remains when he died.

Dan Lafferty is the Mormon zealot who, with his brother, Ron, killed their sister-in-law and baby niece in the early ’80s. They became, along with Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the religion itself, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s meticulously documented book, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. If you’re not familiar with the history and continuing tenets of Mormonism, you should read it.

Especially if Mitt Romney could someday be our president. With outlets like CNN already complicit in hiding any suggestion that Mormonism is a factor in the suicides of “Utah families” who are “convinced of a coming apocalypse,” don’t think it couldn’t happen.

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