More Prophesying about Salt Lake City

As a person who is quite interested in what I term "latter-latter-day developments" and who is writing a novel set in near-future times, I have some more thinking that I'd like to float out there and see if it could be plausible. Personally, I find it quite therapeutic to turn to literature—both reading it and trying to write it—to parse complex problems.

Regardless of what a person feels about individual gay situations, it's clear that we have some intense gay activists out there who may no more represent the outlook of most gays than terrorists represent most Muslims or polygamists represent most Mormons. Nevertheless, I'm not the only one who thinks this gay activism could lead somewhere quite dark quite fast. Here's an interesting article in which Newt Gingrich says, "I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion."

I have spoken before about the future fate of Salt Lake City. Since I was quite young, I have always felt that when some new form of evil arose in the latter days, it would make Salt Lake its world headquarters. I used to think it would be some kind of new drug or occult power somehow tied to Salt Lake, but now I have another idea. There is some spiritual logic to this: If Salt Lake is the headquarters of God's kingdom, wouldn't Satan be working as hard as he could to counterfeit and counterbalance that?

Now, I am not saying that being homosexual is innately evil. However, like most human impulses and institutions, the gay movement is surely subject to temptations and the influence of the devil—heck, even Mormonism is at times, if you look at things like the Mountain Meadows Massacre. So I'm not singling out gays due to homophobia or something, just focusing my attention on them right now because of recent events. Homosexuality itself is not the "new evil" I'm talking about, but certain elements of the modern-day gay movement—the fascist anti-religion elements—could represent that new evil.

Here's what I think is going to happen both in real life and in my novel: militant gays will take over Salt Lake City.

I'm not talking about uniformed gay armies marching into Salt Lake with guns on their shoulders. I'm talking about a cultural takeover of the city. As I noted earlier, Salt Lake City proper is already fast moving away from Mormonism and swiftly moving toward the most liberal, progressive "worldly" values and outlooks. I'm not saying those values and outlooks are necessarily or 100% bad, but this process is creating a vacuum in Salt Lake proper as the old Mormon hegemony sloughs off and something else arises to take its place. When the pendulum has been as far right as it historically has been in Salt Lake, it's natural that, once loosened, it would swing way over to the left.

Salt Lake City is already known for having a surprisingly large and active gay population, and I think we will see more gays flocking here, especially those who are militant against Mormonism. It will become the ultimate "we're here, we're queer" trend to move into the shadow of the Salt Lake Temple and practice their alternative lifestyle. I think we'll see a gay mayor of Salt Lake within a decade. And it will be all the more fun for the participants knowing that the city is a gay doughnut hole surrounded by suburbs where the Mormons are cowering. "You take our rights, we'll take your city." Church HQ itself will become, essentially, a fortress in the midst of it all.

The momentum is already moving toward Salt Lake City becoming the main focal point of the national gay activist agenda. For instance, there's a huge nationwide march on Salt Lake being planned for this next March. Check out this article from Salt Lake City Weekly about other plans and outlooks gay activists have regarding Salt Lake.

Wickedest city the world has ever known? If you get a critical mass of people who are openly fighting against God's kingdom and true church and doing a lot of willfull, in-your-face glorying in lifestyles opposed by the prophets, then yeah, I could see where Salt Lake could become a real pressure cooker of wickedness and depravity on a scale not seen before, not just sodomy but other carnalities too. Again, I don't think all gays are wicked and depraved, but if you get enough of the kind who are wicked and depraved together, you could have a real party. Heteros can be just as wicked and depraved as gays, of course, but gay activists have another factor focusing them and galvanizing them and contributing to their momentum: a so-called civil rights movement.

So anyway, in my novel I'm going to have those who refuse to renounce Mormonism be driven out of portions of the West Coast where the gay agenda has succeeded in taking over the culture and the government, with all church property destroyed or confiscated within those zones (including some temples). And at the same time I'm going to have gay activists successfully establish a Utah beachhead by taking over Salt Lake City culture and government, and one of the key places of friction and conflict will be the Church's new billion-dollar shopping center downtown, which the gay activists will gleefully attempt to co-opt.

I'm working on it as fiction, but I think things are going to play out at least somewhat along these lines in real life, too. Anyway, the way I have it right now in the novel I'm working on, all this stuff happened before the novel even opens, along with the New Depression. My novel opens after biological warfare from the China-led Asian Union has already wiped out 90% of the population of the western United States, which due to the Chinese-engineered hypervirus is quarantined from the eastern U.S. at the Mississippi. (And yes, my reasoning follows the Book of Mormon pattern; due to the West Coast's wickedness and rejection of the Saints, God has withdrawn his protections and permitted the Lamanites—er, the Asians—to make drastic inroads and humble the nation; and by the way, in my story the eastern U.S. does not persecute the Mormons as much or expell them, and it is preserved from the hypervirus by the quick, inspired action of the White House to throw up the firewall at the Mississippi).

Also by the time my novel opens, Latino survivors from Central and South America—where the hypervirus spread unchecked—have banded together and marched north to take over several depopulated western U.S. cities, including Salt Lake (however, the Latinos did not win the battle of Denver, and that's where the LDS Church headquarters is now hunkered down). My novel revolves around a group of Mormons who have turned the Provo missionary training center into a fortress against the two gangs running rampant in the area, and then Cain himself rears his head and enters the picture...