I was in Salt Lake City last week. That should be good for several blogs.
The chatter among the non-Mormons was about the excommunication of several Mormons; one in particular because she was leading a political battle to force the Mormon Church to ordain women.
The chattering class, which is almost entirely environmentalists, had no sense of irony or their own hypocrisy. They were positively hostile to the Mormon Church for having an excommunication procedure and for using it. They claimed that the Church suppresses opposing opinions to the dominant white male leadership.
This came within two weeks of the environmental movement excommunicating two important members of its own environmental church.
First came, Dr. Lennart Bengtsson a leading climatologist who was a writer on several of the UN climate reports. Dr. Bengtsson was put under extreme hostile pressure by the environmental community for being an advisor to the group GWPF that believes more research is necessary on global warming. Dr. Bengtsson was forced to resign his position after only a few weeks; the bile poured on him was malicious and intense. (By the way, the global warming community is almost entirely white male.)
In the same two weeks. Prof. Caleb Rossiter was fired from American University (Washington D.C.) for publishing an article that questioned the statistical validity of some of the high-end global warming computer projections. I have particular sympathy for Dr. Rossiter because he, like I, is a statistician. I know statistics don't support global warming at all.
So the environmental hypocrites have a field day patting themselves on the back about the excommunication and backwardness of the Mormon Church at the same time their own religion, environmentalism, does its excommunication with vindictive mean-spirited procedures. At the same time.