Team Shelton-Est. 2001

It all started when my sister sent me a link to an article from "The Voice" a Christian news magazine entitled: "Obama Youth Brigade: Church Attendance Forbidden." Apparently this "news" source is terrified the bill entitled "Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education" would "require anyone receiving school loans and others to serve at last three months" as part of their payback.

However, volunteering for "religious instruction or worship, constructing or operating facilities devoted to religious instruction or worship, maintaining facilities primarily or inherently devoted to religious instruction or worship, or engaging in any form of religious proselytization" would NOT count towards their service requirement. This is not a joke but in the very next sentence the article's author lamented, "This has serious Nazi Germany overtones to it." Aside from this guy really needing a history lesson the crazy part is this brain donor was 100% serious!

Normally I don't give these nut jobs the time of day but this one got to me for two reasons. First, why is it so shocking that this bill maintained the separation of church and state? But more importantly, I wanted to debunk this article to show my sister who's the boss! My historian instincts kicked in and I immediately went after the source.

As I thought about this I wondered what such an evangelical organization thought about my own faith. Typically these groups are not big fans of Mormons and I thought if I could find an article published by "The Voice" on Mormons it would not be flattering or accurate. I hoped this would show my sister that her source was unreliable. So I went to their search engine and this is where it gets weird. I typed in "Mormon," "LDS," and "Latter-day Saints" and do you know how many hits I got? Not a single one. That's strange, it seems odd that an American religious news source has never mentioned Mormons?

Perhaps I was not giving "The Voice" enough credit and they did not report on other faiths but to make sure I typed in numerous other faiths into the search engine. Apparently they do not hesitate expressing their opinions on other faiths as when I typed in Presbyterian there were 2 hits, Methodists, 3, Baptist 20, Catholic 12, Pentecostal 11, Evangelical 38, and oddly enough some of the most hits were non-Christian groups including 28 hits for Muslims, 36 for Jews, and 8 for atheists.

So how could there be nothing on Mormons...I mean come on, were such easy targets! For crying out loud we wear sacred clothing, read non-Biblical scripture, believe in living prophets, and practiced plural marriage for nearly a century! We are so easy to make fun of yet this magazine that regularly degrades every other faith has nothing to say about the religious equivalent of a black sheep?

I kept asking myself why until my brilliant wife Heidi suggested I type in "The Voice Magazine" and "Mormon" in Google and see what happens. Well, I did and there were multiple hits. The links took me to the same online journal and though I only looked at the first couple articles I was right, they don't like us. The first article was, "Exposing the Mormon Mirage," hmm, what do you think they had to say there? The second was, "Evangelicals Not Keen On Romney," can you guess one of the biggest reasons they don't like Romney?


Now kicks in my conspiracy theory instincts. First of all why do so many members of my Mormon faith constantly associate themselves with these types of groups?! We are a religious minority and these people typically aren't too crazy about any minority groups.

But the bigger question is why can I not access these articles through "The Voice's" search engine? It is almost as if they intentionally removed the ability to find anything negative they had written about us. Why would this ultra-conservative, religious-right, politically active organization attempt to hide their disdain for Mormons? Maybe I have a persecution complex as do many Mormons (with good cause) but in this case I'm more freaked out because I couldn't find anything bad. Or perhaps I just don't know how search engine work. Either way something is going on here.

Well, I have a theory of what is going on here but now way to prove it. How about you?