For no particular reason I've just recently been studying the body of work that has been brought over here from Taverner and stumbled upon this thread. It interested me so I checked the DU link and found the below.
Taverner (1000+ posts)
Mon Oct-10-11 05:34 PM
Response to Reply #4
8. I get the feeling they stay real quiet in Utah
I met a bunch in the Peace Corps though. Most of them wanted to do a "mission" without cramming religion down others throats.
Met a bunch in California too...
But yeah, Utah gets real conservative and Republican. Ironic, since part of the original Republican platform was Anti-Mormonism.
I have heard of anti-Mormonism before but I don't think I had ever heard it tied specifically to the Republican Party. I'm pretty certain that I have never heard that it was part of the original Republican platform so I did an internet search on Yahoo using "Anti-Mormon" and "Republican". The first result on the list was a wikipedia
link that said:
in the second half of the century when the practice of polygamy in Utah was widely considered by the U.S. Republican Party as one of the "twin relics of barbarism" along with slavery.So apparently, Taverner was correct.
Then I noticed how the wiki statement also basically says that the Republican Party was against slavery. I began to wonder if the Republican Party was the party AGAINST slavery which party was the party FOR slavery? The first answer would naturally be the Democrat Party. When you take into account the fight that the dems put up against the various early Civil Rights measures the thought of the Democrat Party being the party FOR slavery seems even more logical. Even today with the Democrat Party telling people of color that they can't succeed without government handouts and government help like Affirmative Action it almost sounds as if the Democrat Party is still the party FOR slavery.
After all of that, I thought: isn't it ironic that so many people of color vote Democrat since the Democrat Party was (still is?) the party FOR slavery.
Finally, I reread Taverner's post and realized that he brought about all of that thought with just 6 simple sentences (including the title). He does brilliant work.