Bomb Iran

My ignorant and bigoted father repeatedly taught early-morning seminary, the bizarre LDS indoctrination program in which high school students were expected to go to church before school at 6 am literally every school day for classes on the LDS scriptural canon.  Even according to the LDS church, the whole point wasn't to impart any information, because the church knew it was a fraud.  My favorite example of such deception is that my high school seminary career began by our "studying" the Book of Abraham, a patently obvious mistranslation of common Egyptian funerary writings that sexual predator Joseph Smith insisted were written by the patriarch Abraham.  The church got really excited in the late 1960s when the original papyrus was rediscovered because they were confident it would validate Smith's supposed prophetic gift of translation without knowing any of the original Biblical languages.  Then even their apologists told them that Smith's fanciful fiction was an embarrassment at best, so they stopped talking about the original papyrus but kept teaching the nonsense to their gullible faithful.

Anyway, the whole point according to the church was to have impressionable young people "feel the spirit" and have positive emotional experiences that would bind them to the church and have them go to places like BYU (or Ricks for the even dumber), serve missions, get married in the temple, and give 10% of their income to the church for life.

I remember at "Seminary Graduation" at the end of a year my father bizarrely badmouthing the Ayatollah Khomeni who had recently died for some reason.  He said the callow and half-asleep suburban high schoolers in provincial Manassas had learned far more than the Ayatollah.  The whole thing was utterly bizarre given that he a) was supposed to be a civil affairs officer in an Army Reserve unit that dealt with the Middle East and presumably should have known a bit more about cultural sensitivity and b) worked for a completely discredited terror organization that had basically caused the whole problem in Iran by working to overthrown its democratically-elected government that threatened to share some of the country's vast oil wealth with its desperately poor citizens.  Oh well, I guess my father learned less in hicksville Springville than the average preschooler. 

Juneteenth Day of National Independence

When I was a kid, people in northern Virginia didn't really talk much about Juneteenth, at least that I recall.  Of course, people in our bigoted LDS ward talked about "Pioneer Day" - an obscure regional celebration of racist white fanatics being chased out of the Midwest by reasonable people for defiantly and illegally practicing polygamy with pretensions to theocracy.  These bigoted kooks then invaded Mexico and seized indigenous land, which was then bizarrely celebrated by their bigoted descendants in enclaves like Utah and southern Idaho.  I can still remember one of these Fresh off the Boat from Provo or Ricks types explaining to an even more recent arrival that Pioneer Day wasn't as big a deal with people "back East," in part because they seemed to celebrate the Fourth of July more.

You know, the actual National Day of Independence.

YBU?

The bigoted security apparatus never liked that I was reasonably embarrassed by the ethically monstrous Brigham Young University.  In addition to the obvious racism as evidenced by being named for a horrific bigot, and the rampant homophobia epitomized by physically torturing gay people, the obvious anti-intellectualism wasn't appealing.  But for some reason people found it odd that as a kid I reasonably cheered for the athletic teams of the flagship university in my home state who played in a major conference whose games were commonly televised in my area as opposed to a bunch of religious kooks from an obscure school in a minor conference 2000 miles away.

The astounding thing is that my parents didn't have the common sense to be embarrassed by their association with such a school.  For example, at my father's college commencement the paranoid kook university president delivered a diatribe against FDR's New Deal and LBJ's expansion of the social safety net.  He then recruited students to spy on liberal professors for dissent.  Oh well, I guess some people are a good fit for Oral Roberts University or Bob Jones U.