Utah's Moral Compass: Wither will it turn? Part 1

In addition to choosing a president, Utahns have a choice to make very soon regarding who they will elect for U.S. Senator. As in any other state, the person they pick will be a clear reflection of their moral values and the example they would like to set for the U.S. and world.

 

This is the first of several short articles discussing this choice. There are five candidates running for Senator Orrin Hatch's position. Hatch is again running and has occupied this office since 1976.

 

My hope is to present a sprinkling of what I see as significant issues that I believe Utahns should ponder before entering the voting booth. I believe it is fair to say that these issues go to the heart of the candidates' values. All candidates have their own website and can be studied individually in more depth. 

 

Incumbent Republican, Senator Hatch, loudly beat the drums for entering the Iraq War. Being on the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was in a unique position to learn what was going on in that country, prior to the second U.S. invasion. Hatch assured the citizens of Utah, and anyone listening, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. He claimed to have clear evidence of this, but claimed he could not reveal the sources because doing so might endanger them. Hatch has yet to reveal these sources and why they were not taken to task, given that there were no WMDs in Iraq.  As a result of Hatch and Co. beating the war drums: 1) the U.S. spent over $800 billion tax dollars to date (a conservative estimate from costofwar.com); 2) over a million human beings were killed, maimed, or tortured in your name, most of them completely innocent; and 3) your taxes were used to set an industrialized country virtually back to the stone ages. This, in spite of ten million people around the world marching to protest the war (many in front of Hatch's office) and in spite of U.N. inspectors assuring us there was no evidence of WMDs in that oil rich country.

 

Democrat Scott Howell spends most of his campaign time attacking the alleged short-comings of Hatch, while offering vague and fuzzy notions of what he would actually do if elected to the Senate. He makes much noise of not sending U.S. jobs overseas, yet also boasts of working for 30 years for IBM, often in managerial positions--while that very company sent untold thousands of jobs overseas, as it continues to do. Howell justifies this action (and his own inaction) by pointing to tax loopholes that made this downsizing of America "economically feasible." Translated simply, Scott Howell puts money ahead of people, while at the same time proclaiming that residing on the U.S. Senate is "a sacred position."

 

The Constitution Party is represented by Shaun McClausland. In his own words, Shaun: "simply loves our country and the US Constitution. He believes that the Constitution contains the answers to the problems that our country faces."  

Bill Barron, running as an independent, "believes that there needs to be a political revolution that is not driven by partisanship but rather our morality and humanity." And that "[t]here is an opportunity to unite as citizens and address the urgency to which we must change course as a country to protect our natural world and defend the air we breathe and the water that sustains us."

 

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