Some speculate that Schanze's growing mistrust led him to cast all non-Mormon employees as de facto thieves, because they couldn't "talk to God," as he often said.

Within a week of hiring on in 2000 [Cameron] Landies said he was subjected to an audit of sorts to determine "if I had my spiritual s-t together." It was around 11 p.m. at the downtown store. Landies recalls he'd been working off the clock since 8, when Schanze plopped him down on a monitor box to inquire of Landies' religious leanings -- specifically, whether he was LDS, which he is not.

"You don't got it," Landies recalls the diagnosis, which freaked him out and left him fearing for his job. "Something's wrong with you."

Self-described Jack Mormon and former Totally Awesome store manager Jeremy Whipple quit the company in disgust in 2002. He said he got the same treatment as Landies that night, albeit with a more encouraging verdict. "You're close, man. You almost got it. You just need to be going to church more."

Derek Nielsen is convinced he fell afoul of Schanze's spiritual prerequisite soon after his swift rise to general manager and wunderkind salesman by 1999. A one-time LDS missionary, Nielsen still considers himself a devout Christian, but he's also taken up shamanism. His beliefs include the use of certain hallucinogens -- he mentioned peyote and cannabis -- which he believes enhance spiritual understanding.

At one time the boss's right-hand man, an "idiotic joke" outed Nielsen as a "Satan worshiper." Or, at least that's how he says Schanze referred to him after Nielsen's cousin, who worked at another of Schanze's stores, decided to send hiim a marijuana plant via the company courier. Even though Nielsen says he had no part in the prank, Schanze demoted him, docked his pay, and scrapped his bonuses, upon which Nielsen quit.

Schanze ultimately refused to accept the resignation but, according to Nielsen's deposition, Schanze told him he was "following Satan," "didn't have the flow of God," and could no longer be trusted to run the company. The demotion stood, but Schanze restored Nielsen's pay, telling him the only reason he wasn't fired is because he was the best salesman in the company.

"It is his religion to smoke weed ... and I didn't fire him!" Schanze exclaimed. "Why? Because he was doing a good job; I don't discriminate against people."

"He didn't fire me," Nielsen conceded, "but he closed the door for me and ultimately pushed me out of the company," another alleged victim of the forced heathen exodus. (Salt Lake City Weekly, August 4, 2005; page 23)

"Hey! This is SuperDell at Totally Awesome Computers! Did you hear about the stupid gay rodeo? Whatever, dude! And then people are like talking about, 'Oh, gay marriage.' Freak! Gay marriage? What next, schizophrenics marrying themselves? I guess. Ha, ha. I'm sorry, if you think you're a Tinkerbell, you might want to get yourself fixed. Whoa, ha, ha, ha, ha!

"Tell ya what, for being rude and abusive to homosexuals, if you're, if you're a faggot, come on in and buy a computer. I'll give you a hundred bucks off -- you'll need it for a psychological evaluation. OK, ha, ha, I don't know if I can finish this commercial. I think they're going to kick this one off the air.

"Come to Totally Awesome Computers, where, ah, we're straight! I mean, we got, I mean we got the straight-up deal. And you can just get, you know, US Robotics modem, Creative Lab sound card, rippin' video card, Asus motherboard, all the cool stuff, he, Totally Awesome."

"Brother Pokere is the branch president."

"Brother Pokere's personal experiences are an inspiration to his children."

"He has passed on many of the lessons he learned in rugby to his children. One of these is the importance of preparing themselves to achieve their dreams. "A lot goes into preparation that fans aren't aware of. You're out there slogging your heart out in practice. Your lungs are popping while everyone else is inside next to the fire. It's the price of success. And once you reach the top, it doesn't give you the right to remain there. It's a continuous thing that you have to keep working on.""

"The representative midfield back - remembered as much for his religious beliefs as his silky skills - was sentenced in Auckland District Court on September 30 to 2Н years' jail."

"Pokere, 47, and the women - all Mormons - were directors of the failed investment company FF Traders, which was struck off and placed in liquidation in 2003, about three years after it was formed."

"At the time it had taken about $4 million, mainly from family and friends - fellow Mormons - of which just $900,000 was actually invested. Of this, just $500,000 was returned to investors. They had been promised returns as high as 100 per cent over four months"

Pop star-turned-doll maker MARIE OSMOND has launched a personal crusade to clean up the Internet after learning her two teenage daughters have been posting sexually explicit correspondence on their MySpace.com websites.

The PAPER ROSES singer felt compelled to give a statement to US tabloid National Enquirer after the publication uncovered outrageous content on her daughters JESSICA and RACHAEL's blogs. On her site, 18-year-old Jessica, who was adopted by Osmond as an infant, claims she is a bi-sexual who craves sex "as many times as possible," while her 16-year-old sister describes herself as a "slut" and a "whore" in correspondence and opened up about her dreams of having sex with DAVID BOWIE.

In her statement, shocked Marie, a devout Mormon, says, "I am saddened by some of the choices that two of our children have made. "The insidious potential for harm from adolescent Internet sites like MySpace.com only exacerbates these kinds of problems. "If my being a celebrity figure is good for anything, let it be as a voice of warning to other parents that no matter how protective we think we may have been with our children in the past, we need to become more knowledgeable and even more vigilant now in order to protect them."

In the 1990s, the devout Mormon played JOSEPH in the North American tour of the ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER musical JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOUR DREAMCOAT.

But rather than part with his costume, Osmond decided to hold onto it - even though he couldn't.

He tells BLENDER magazine, "After I did Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, they wouldn't let me keep the coat so I stole it. It's probably worth $5,000."

But Osmond insists his rebellious antics don't end there, adding, "When I was 14, I clogged the toilet, turned the beds upside-down and put shaving cream everywhere. My dad found out and it wasn't pretty."

Howard Hughes, as rather generously reimagined by Scorsese, is not at all the real life red baiting McCarthyites union buster and destroyer of lives during the Hollywood Blacklist. In the cleaned up version of "Hughes the playboy and first billionaire," you will find none of that. And if he's tormented by demons that precipitate a slow descent into obsessive-compulsive madness, guess who gets all the blame? None other than one of those notorious shrewish movie moms.

That Hughes' mental disintegration was in fact caused by syphillis is nowhere to be found in this doctored narrative . . .

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. singer and television personality Marie Osmond said on Friday that she and her husband of more than 20 years were getting divorced.

Osmond, 47, the only daughter in the famous musical Mormon family from Utah, scored her first country music hit with "Paper Roses" at age 13 and began performing with her older siblings, the Osmond Brothers, in the 1970s.

"Apparently, devout Mormon Marie Osmond has been keeping a little secret - here oldest daughter, Jessica, is a lesbian!"

"...Beck's version of American history relies on lessons from his own acknowledged inspiration, the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, and also restates charges made by the Birch Society's founder, Robert Welch....

...Still, the most outlandish of the era's right-wing anti-Communists was not Welch but Willard Cleon Skousen. A transplanted Canadian who served as a Mormon missionary in his teens, Skousen was considered so radical in the early nineteen-sixties that even J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. watched him closely; one 1962 memo in his extensive F.B.I. file noted that "during the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes." Skousen was himself employed by the F.B.I., from 1935 until 1951, much of that time as a special agent working chiefly in administration. These desk jobs, he claimed implausibly, gave him access to confidential domestic intelligence about Communism. Skousen also maintained that he had served as Hoover's administrative assistant; Hoover informed inquirers that there was no such position.

Skousen taught for years in the speech and religion departments at Brigham Young University, interrupted by a stint, from 1956 to 1960, as the police chief of Salt Lake City. His time in office was contentious, and after he raided a friendly card game attended by the city's right-wing mayor, J. Bracken Lee, he was promptly fired. Lee called Skousen "a master of half truths" and said that he ran the police department "like a Gestapo"; Skousen's supporters placed burning crosses on the Mayor's lawn...."

On his first day back from vacation, Glenn Beck addressed the earthquake in Japan, and said he thinks that it could be a "message [is] being sent" by God.

Speaking on his radio show Monday, Beck said, "I'm not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes," before quickly adding, "I'm not not saying that either."

He then said that whatever one called God, "there's a message being sent. And that is, 'Hey, you know that stuff we're doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.' I'm just saying."

"There's no need to legalize gay marriage. I have plenty of gay friends who are committed couples; some of them call themselves married, some don't, but their friends treat them as married. Anybody who doesn't like it just doesn't hang out with them.

It's just like heterosexual couples who are living together without marriage. Their friends still treat them like married couples, inviting them places together; they're a social unit. Those who strongly disapprove leave them alone.

There are no laws left standing that discriminate against gay couples. They can visit each other in the hospital. They can benefit from each other's insurance.

No, legalizing gay marriage is not about making it possible for gay people to become couples.

It's about giving the left the power to force anti-religious values on our children. Once they legalize gay marriage, it will be the bludgeon they use to make sure that it becomes illegal to teach traditional values in the schools."

"If there were even a shred of science behind the absurd claims about gender and sexuality coming from the left, there might be a case for allowing this to happen. But there is no science behind it.

In fact, the scientific evidence we have points in the opposite direction: Same-sex attraction is not a strait jacket; people's desires change over time; gay people still have choices; a reproductive dysfunction like same-sex attraction is not a death sentence for your DNA or for your desire to have a family in which children grow up with male and female parents to model appropriate gender roles.

Heterosexual pair-bonding has been at the heart of human evolution from the time we divided off from the chimps. Normalizing a dysfunction will only make ours into a society that corrodes any loyalty to it, as parents see that our laws and institutions now work against the reproductive success (not to mention happiness) of the next generation."