July 12, 2006 J. Max Wilson

The last few weeks have been incredibly busy

I apologize for the recent lack of posts.

The last week of June I was working extra hours (most days until 4:30 in the morning) to get the web-based application we have been writing at work for the last 8 months finished and released by July 3rd. I worked Sunday July 2nd from 2:00 in the afternoon straight through to 7:30 the next morning. It was exhausting, but we did get the beast into production.

I then took vacation from July 3rd through the 7th to decompress and spend time with my family. My parents and all of my siblings were in town for Independence Day (which happens to also be my mother’s birthday). In addition, we had basically three extended family reunions in the course of about 4 days. It was great to see not only my immediate family, but so many of my cousins, uncles, aunts, and even second and third cousins and uncles and aunts once and twice removed whom I had never met before.

We went to the zoo. We performed a puppet show at the local library. My parents bought us a new lawn mower and I finally mowed our long neglected lawn. Now I’m back at work and furiously trying to fix bugs in the web application we released before my vacation.

It has been an incredibly busy few weeks (and I have left a lot out). I’ll post some more very soon. Hope you all had a wonderful Independence Day!

In the mean time, if you are interested in some fascinating posts to read, check out the recent travels of my good friend and former college roommate, David Evans. He recently visited Uganda, where he had some incredible experiences (including having his hotel maid mistake his letters written for his wife for love letters directed to her, and being drugged by a mugger on the public transportation system!). I’m glad he made it back safe and relatively sound.

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June 23, 2006 J. Max Wilson

Primary Candidate Debate Videos Online

At Citizens Resource, we have released web video of the candidate debates we held during our Primary Candidate Expo at UVSC on June 10th. The videos are available through Google Video service and so they can be easily embeded into any web page or blog without concerns about the need for bandwidth or file space.

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June 19, 2006 J. Max Wilson

Alan Keyes @ the Provo Library June 21st 6:30pm

Nationally recognized conservative thinker and politician Alan Keyes will be speaking this Wednesday, June 21st, in the Grand Ballroom at the Public Library in Provo, Utah from 6:30 to 9:00pm on the subject of immigration and border control.

Alan Keyes is an electrifying orator and an excellent thinker. He was the first politician I ever heard speak that I actually had to go home and look up a word he used in his speech in the dictionary (He described a certain policy as a political Nostrum ).

Whatever your position on illegal immigration and border control, go hear him speak this Wednesday. If my past experience is representative, you will come away from it with a new perspective and an elevated level of debate on the issue.

Personally, I’d like to see both congressional incumbent Chris Cannon and his challenger in the upcoming primary election, John Jacob, present at the event, as well as state representative incumbent Jim Ferrin and his challenger Steve Sandstrom. It would be great if these candidates would be there to speak with people about the issue in the context of Mr. Keyes speech.

Don’t miss it!

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June 1, 2006 J. Max Wilson

The Consistency of the LDS Church’s Position Regarding Legislating Marriage

On May 26th, the prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and his two counselors sent a letter to be read in all of the LDS congregations in the United States urging members to contact their Senators to support proposed amendments to the Constitution that would define marriage as only between a man and a woman to prevent the establishment of legal, homosexual marriage in the United States.

Since the release of this letter of counsel to the members, I have heard of several critics of the church, internal and external, who try to discredit the Church’s position against homosexual marriage as hypocritical in light of the Church’s own struggle against the United States government’s prohibition of the former LDS practice of Polygamy in the late 19th century.

These critics try to draw a parallel between the church’s fight to keep the government from prohibiting its religious practice of plural marriage and the modern fight by homosexuals to prevent the government from prohibiting same-sex marriage. “How can the church support government prohibition of same-sex marriage,” they ask, “when the church itself fought to prevent the government from interfering with their right to marriage in the 19th century?”

This criticism reveals a very superficial understanding of history and the church’s 19th century position in regard to congressional proscription of polygamy. Like the common comparison of the homosexual movement to the civil-rights movement, it is an effective rhetorical device with emotional appeal, but has little basis in reality. It is effective because it is superficially compelling and easily expressed in only a few words while an effective refutation of it requires a lengthy explanation.

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May 30, 2006 J. Max Wilson

Citizens’ Resource Primary Candidate Expo

In addition to being a Utah County Republican delegate, I’m a member of Citizens’ Resource, a group founded by stay-at-home mother Jessica Connors, that organized a fairly successful “Meet The Candidates” event and debates that were held at Lakeridge Jr. High School back on April 8th that many of the Utah County Delegates and Candidates attended.

I’ve been helping Citizens’ Resource organize a PRIMARY CANDIDATE EXPO, open to the general public, that will be held on June 10th at UVSC. The event will feature a debate between incumbent Representative Chris Cannon and challenger John Jacob, as well as debates between the primary candidates in the other Utah County Races. Please go to http://www.citizensresource.org for details. Then bring your friends, neighbors, and family so that they can all make an informed vote in the Primaries.

In an effort to help Citizens’ Resource become a valuable resource for Utah County, I have also created some online discussion forums for Citizens’ Resource—one for Utah County residents in general, and one for the delegates (or whatever individuals are eligible to vote in each party’s state or county conventions according to the party’s bylaws) of each political party:

Since delegates serve for two years, the Citizens’ Resource forum for Utah County GOP Delegates can be a useful place for us to converse, debate and share our experiences with the candidates in a place where the public can read and benefit from our points of view.

One advantage of the forums over email lists is that they will not fill up your email inbox. At the same time I have gone out of my way to make sure they feature tools to help you follow specific conversations by subscribing to receive email notifications when new posts have been made to a specific topic or conversation of your choice that you desire to follow.

It also features RSS Feeds so that you can subscribe to any specific topic or discussion with a feed aggregator program or service like Yahoo 360, Google Personal Homepage, or Bloglines. That way you can follow only the conversations that are pertinent or important to you while not being bogged down by those that are not.

The Citizens’ Resource website also features a public calendar to which candidates and organizations can submit upcoming events. Hopefully it can become a central calendar for candidates to let the public know about chances to meet them.

If you live in Utah County and would like to find out how to make a more informed vote, bookmark CitizensResource.org

(Some of the functionality is very new, so please report any hiccoughs directly to me)

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