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Voight's New Movie May Cause Trouble for Romney

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'September Dawn' may force a 150-year-old massacre into the 2008 presidential race.

By Garrett M. Graff Published Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Actor Jon Voight signs a photo for Teatro chef Fabrizio Aielli after last night's dinner.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre may have happened 150 years ago, but there are still important lessons we can learn about it today, actor Jon Voight explained last night. During an intimate dinner in the back room of Teatro Goldoni, Voight held forth on religious fanaticism in the past and present—and why we must disavow both.

As he and a small group of journalists and Washington power players dined on a special dinner of rockfish and lobster risotto prepared by Teatro chef Fabrizio Aielli, Voight talked passionately about his new movie, September Dawn, which chronicles the 1857 massacre in southern Utah of more than 100 Westward-bound Christian settlers by members of the Mormon Church who posed as Indians. It's still under dispute whether Mormon leader Brigham Young had any complicity in the attack, although Voight says his research led him to believe that Young was involved.

There's a lot we can learn from the movie about the critical need to combat religious fanaticism and its dangers everywhere in the world, Voight said, drawing a direct comparison between the ideology that led the Mormons to kill the Christian settlers in 1857 and the breed of radical and deadly Islam that the western world is confronting now.

While acknowledging that the Mormon Church today is far different than it was in 1857, Voight said that he believed that it was important for the Church to recognize the horrors committed in its name at Mountain Meadows and come clean, as some nations have apologized for their past involvement in the slave trade and Germany has made war reparations. "This is important stuff," he said.

The movie comes at an awkward time for the 2008 presidential race, as former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the first Mormon to run for President, tries to educate voters about about his religion and its history and tries to win the support of Christian evangelicals. The only major pop culture Mormon reference point right now is the HBO series Big Love, which chronicles the daily lives of a modern fundamentalist polygamist family in Utah. Voight said that he hopes to get the opportunity to discuss his movie and the massacre with the candidate.

In Washington as part of the round-the-world filming of the sequel to National Treasure, Voight said he's been keeping busy with the movie, meetings, and casual meals, and said he hopes to get a chance to visit the National Archives, which played a major role in the original National Treasure. He attended the Radio/TV Correspondents Association dinner last week, where he met President Bush and was particularly touched to talk with the daughters of the late NBC correspondent David Bloom, who died while covering the war in Iraq in 2003. The Catholic actor also visited with religious scholar George Weigel, whose biography of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope, was a big influence on Voight's portrayal of the pontiff in the TV movie Pope John Paul II.

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In1857 a Mormon missionary named Parley Pratt was sent to Arkansas to try and convert people. While in Arkansas Parley Pratt took a plural wife. This new wife he brought into his polygamist family was already married to another man. Her real husband killed Parley Pratt. The wagon train involved in the Mountain Meadow Massacre was from Arkansas and was traveling through Utah, after Parley Pratt's death. Was the massacre in retaliation?

Parley Pratt is the great great grandfather of MITT ROMNEY.

This is a link where you can read more about the massacre:

http://www.utlm.org/newsletters/no98.htm

Posted by: Jerry,

Jerry you have a few facts wrong. Hector McLean and his wife were living in San Francisco when Pratt met his wife and began his seduction. She left Hector and her children and moved to Utah to be with her lover, Parley Pratt. Hector sent his children to live with his wifes parents for a time. They lived in Louisiana. Mrs. McLain and her lover decided to kidnap the children. Mrs. McLain succeeded temporarily by getting the children away from her parents, but her parents wrote to Hector and he came and rescued the children. After returning the children to Mrs. McLains parents, he set out after his wifes lover and his wife who were together in the indian territories trying to get back to Utah. He caught them, and they were sent to arkansas for trial, but he was unable to charge them with kidnapping under the law in the territories and they were both released after being tried for theft of the childrens clothes. It was after all this that he killed Pratt, presumably for fear Pratt would agin try and kidnap his children.

Mrs. McLean never again attempted to take the children, or ever even contact them again, she lived the rest of her life in Utah as a schoolteacher for the children of Pratts eleven other wives.

Posted by: Low Key,

Just a clarification. Romney is not the first Mormon to run for President. His father ran in the 60's and Orrin Hatch ran against Bush in '00. Both Mormons. Romney is just the first candidate where his Mormon beliefs have become such a huge talking point. Maybe it is because he actually has a chance of winning.

Posted by: Joe Haroldsen,

Reporting that Romney is the first Mormon to run for president is incorrect. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism made a try for the office. Mitt's father George Romney tried in 1968. And more recently, Orrin Hatch in 2000. Just FYI.

Posted by: ABQ Reader,

Mitt Romney should Transfer (1) the political risk, (2) the public relations risk, and the burden of persuasion risk of explaining polygamy to a (A) National, (B) Regional, (C) Interstate, or (D) Local Corridor of Living Museum(s) of Polygamy-Secular History. Conceptual http://mspt.org

Copyright (c) 1995-2007 All Rights Reserved

Posted by: DEBATER,

It is ridiculous to think that something that happened 150 years ago should affect a run for the presidency today. Hopefully the American people will not be so naive to allow this film to have any impact whatsoever on the election or their opinions of Romney. It would be nice if the film could depict how the governor of Missouri ordered a Genocide of the mormons for political reasons. How they were harrassed and driven by mobs in several states, and how Joseph and his brother Hyrum were murderd in cold blood by a mob. Those who were killed at Mountain Meadows went all the way through Utah harrassing the mormons and claiming they were the ones who had killed Joseph Smith. If Brigham Young really wanted the people killed, why wouldn't he have done it when they were closer to Salt Lake, why wait? Mountain Meadows was nothing more than a skurmish between the locals (who happened to be mormons, albeit maybe not very good ones) and the caravan going through. It would be like saying the entire Catholic Church is fanatic because some people who happened to be Catholic killed some people.

Finally, lets not forget fanaticism of secularists and atheists, 30 MILLION DEAD under communist rule in Russia in the 1920's, 30's, and 40's. That is much more recent than the Mountain Meadows skurmish, and many atheists and secularists in American were communist apologists!!!

Posted by: Hector,

Once again, "liberal thinkers" are showing their hypocracy with extreme prejudicial behavior. In reality when Brigham Young heard of the potential confrontation, he sent messengers on horseback, a ride that took days to complete, to try and stop it. He was devastated when he got the news. This was wrong under any circumstance and had nothing to do with Mormonism. It was an individual act of stupidity and ignorance no different than your typical and insane gang retribution found in todays American inner cities. I don't hear any public outcry over these heinous criminals' religious background, even though you can be sure their mothers took most of them to "church" as children. It's as wrong to make this a religious issue as it was for Mel Gibson to blame the world's troubles on any one ethnic group. When mankind forgets he will be held accountable for his actions, great nations fall. Let's all pray that we figure it out before its too late.

Posted by: Eric Towner,

Hector's comment is an alloy of special pleading and dishonest revisionism.

First of all there was no "skirmish" at Mountain Meadows on 9/11/1857; there was a premeditated massacre carried out by Mormon priesthood leaders through calculated deception. The Fancher Party did NOTHING to provoke or molest the Mormons; they would have been insane to do so. That self-serving Mormon myth was mortally wounded decades ago, and put out of its misery in Will Bagley's magisterial study "Blood of the Prophets" (which is the best single volume treatment of this entire affair).

Yes, totalitarian atheism has rolled up an incomparably huge body count (something north of 100 million victims, and perhaps as many as 300 million, according to Professor Rudy Rummel). I would eagerly welcome dramatic treatments of this unparalleled human tragedy. But that hardly means there isn't a place for a capably produced expose of the consequences of sectarian totalitarianism as well, which is why "September Dawn" should be welcomed by anyone who shares Jefferson's determination to battle "every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

Governor Lilburn Boggs has much to answer for, but ordering the "genocide" of the Mormons in Missouri is not on the indictment. He did issue an expulsion order using the word "exterminate" -- but this came months after Mormon leader Sidney Rigdon used a July 4 address to threaten a "war of extermination" against both non-Mormons and apostates from within the Mormon community. Boggs issued that order, furthermore, after Mormons ambushed Missouri militiamen at Crooked River. Stephen LeSeur's book "The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri" is probably the definitive study of that tragic period.

Mormons were indisputably the victims of religious persecution, much of it conducted under the color of state authority. But too often their sufferings were a case of innocent but misguided people getting the worst of fights their self-serving leaders had started.

And when the early Mormons were a majority and political authority was exercised by their leaders, they were sometimes found on the delivering end of such persecution. Witness, for example, the illegal suppression of the Nauvoo Expositor by a mob organized by Joseph Smith, acting as Mayor of Nauvoo, in 1844, just shortly before he and his brother Hyrum were arrested and sent to Carthage where they were, indeed, murdered in cold blood. The murder of Joseph and Hyrum was a horrible crime -- but he deserved to be in jail.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre -- the original September 11 terrorist attack by a desert-dwelling theocracy -- cannot be ignored today, because the Mormon leadership has NEVER come clean about the complicity of its leadership, including Brigham Young, in that atrocity. Nor has the church acknowledged how its doctrine of unqualified obedience -- "When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done" -- cemented by ritual temple oaths led apparently respectable Mormon lay leaders to carry out what was, until the OKC Bombing in 1995, the bloodiest terrorist atrocity in American history.

Mormonism's claim to unbroken prophetic continuity requires that Brigham's reputation be protected. The bonds of obedience that tie its adherents to the hierarchy can't be preserved if Mormons (and those being taught by Mormon missionaries) are encouraged to make a candid and thorough examination of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Posted by: William N. Grigg (WNGrigg@msn.com),

Pretty much every religion has a bloody history (and sometimes present). But people today don't connect themselves to their religion's past sins--"I'm not like that; my community isn't like that; this doesn't apply to me or us now." And they're mostly right. However, few people actually know someone who's a Mormon or know anything about the faith. Mormons are an "other." And people don't know any of their own "good Mormons" to erase the stigmas of the past.

Thus, Romney's faith is an issue in a way others' faiths aren't. It's not fair, but there you go. Romney is forced to meet a higher standard of proving his faith's legitimacy.

Posted by: mizbinkley,

Does Hollywood refer to Mafia murders as killings " by Catholics " ? Is the Catholic church or the Pope responsible for murders comitted by people who happen to be Catholic?
Blaming Brigham Young or " The Mormons " for Mountain Meadows is just as unfair. Bigotry, not common sense appear to be behind this movie.
Jon Voights comments sound suspiciously like the Nazis blaming " The Jews ". It's " The Mormons" that did it.

Posted by: Mark Geist,

Voight's New Movie May Cause Trouble for Romney

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