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At least you can SPRAY for COCKROACHES . . .

At least you can SPRAY for COCKROACHES . . .

Last updated on: March 23, 2026 at 7:42 pm by Dan Peterson

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At least you can SPRAY for COCKROACHES . . . 2026-03-23T19:42:35-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Facsimile 2 from the Book of Abraham (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Newly posted on the completely stagnant and unchanging website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Approaching Eternal Life: Temple Elements by the Numbers in Facsimile 2,” Abraham and His Family in Scripture, History, and Tradition, written by John W. Welch and Michael D. Rhodes:

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Abraham and His Family in Scripture, History, and Tradition, edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, John S. Thompson, Matthew L. Bowen, and David R. Seely. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/abraham-and-his-family.

“In this presentation, we hope to add new insights into Joseph Smith’s inspired understanding of the sequence and of several of the details in the temple ordinance that Latter-day Saints refer to as the endowment. We propose to demonstrate that Joseph drew insights in structuring the performance of the endowment from several identifiable sources.”

Sidney Rigdon (Joseph Carlson), Emma Smith (Camrey Bagley Fox), and Joseph Smith (Paul Wuthrich), just prior to enacting a scene from the 2024 Interpreter Foundation theatrical film Six Days in August. The still photo was taken by James G. Jordan.

Episode 8 of Becoming Brigham went up this past Monday and is available for you to view and to share with others. The trailer for Episode 9 is also now available. (It’s just slightly less than a minute long.) And all prior installments of the series remain easily accessible online and at no charge, at becomingbrigham.com.

Do the members of your Relief Society, your priesthood quorum, your Sunday School class, and your ward know about Becoming Brigham? Do others in your family know about it? Do your neighbors? Are you aware of still others who might benefit by watching it, or who would be interested in seeing it? Can you help to spread the word?

An illustration, dating to 1892 or before, of Alexander Hamilton writing the first draft of the Constitution for the United States in 1787. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Edited to add: CMKirkland says that Nick Shirley doesn’t own or control the “Nick Shirley” site to which I refer below.

For the record, I don’t actually care who owns or controls the site. My issue is with some of the content on the site, and I’ve never actually criticized Nick Shirley, here or anywhere else.

It seems, though, that Nick Shirley may not own or control the site.

I’ve just spent a few very dispiriting minutes scanning through an online site belonging to Nick Shirley, the YouTuber (and young Latter-day Saint returned missionary) who famously called attention a couple of months ago to alleged fraud and corruption in Somali-run “learing centers” in Minnesota.

I was troubled and deeply saddened by much of what I saw on Brother Shirley’s site. It turns out that the lamentable Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) is far from alone: “GOP congressman says ‘Muslims don’t belong in American society’”

I read scores of comments there opposing the imposition of Islamic shari‘a on American citizens — a danger that, in my view, ranks right up there with the threat of the state legislators of Utah adopting traditional Mongol law or the Supreme Court of the United States determining, from now on, to base its decisions on the Code of Hammurabi. There were even more comments declaring that no Muslim should be permitted to hold public office in the United States. Many of the commenters said that Muslim officials should be thrown out of office and even altogether out of the United States. And one or two of those who commented advocated extending that principle of exclusion to naturalized citizens and, stunningly, to Jews.

I thought, in this context, of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. For those who may not remember that quaint old document — a group that sometimes seems to include a growing portion of American citizens — the First Amendment is the initial portion of what is commonly called “The Bill of Rights.” It was ratified in 1791, as part of the overall process that approved our Constitution. It reads as follows, with my highlighting of certain phrases that are directly germane to what I want to discuss here:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

As can easily be seen, religious freedom is enshrined as the first element in the first portion of the Bill of Rights. Which suggests that it’s pretty fundamentally important. In fact, it has been called “The First Freedom.” For those who may still care about the Constitution of the United States, there is no constitutional basis in our republic for requiring religious tests for political office.

Article Two, Section 1, Clause 5, of the Constitution is also relevant here. I’ve italicized the important portion of it for this discussion:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Also apropos is the last sentence of the Twelfth Amendment, which was ratified in 1804:

No person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

There may be other offices for which naturalized citizens of the United States are ineligible but, off hand, I’m unaware of any.

And this portion of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted just after the Civil War, in 1868, is essential to keep in mind:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Naturalized citizens are fully citizens. There is no constitutional provision for relegating people to second-class citizenship or designating them as ineligible for public office because they aren’t white, because they aren’t Christian, because they are naturalized, because their roots are in countries of which MAGA disapproves, or because they don’t have roots on both sides back to the Mayflower. There is no constitutional basis for what, I understand, some are now touting as “heritage citizenship.” There is no “premium citizenship” to be contrasted with second-tier “economy class” citizenship.

Please don’t forget the actions to which such propaganda and such attitudes led. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I also saw, on the Nick Shirley site, a meme asking whether, if presented with the choice, readers would choose dogs in their neighborhoods or Muslims. Scores of respondents answered, without hesitation, that they would prefer dogs. If there were any dissenting voices, I didn’t see them.

And yet another meme featured an image of cockroaches and, below it, an image of Muslims, helpfully pointing out that it’s possible to get rid of cockroaches by spraying them with poison.

Here, I was reminded of the fact that the propaganda of the Third Reich often portrayed people persecuted by the regime as vermin, a bacillus, parasites, or diseases. (Rats, lice, cockroaches, foxes, and vultures were among the animals with whom Jews were commonly compared.) Nazi ideology described Jews, political opponents, and others as parasites that threatened the overall health of the so-called “national community” or “Volksgemeinschaft.” Such dehumanizing propaganda prepared the way for — and helped to justify — the Holocaust. (See this news story from April 2018: “3 Kansas Men Who Plotted To Kill Muslim ‘Cockroaches’ Convicted.”)

At least one of the comments on Nick Shirley’s site describes Muslims as, by nature, dirty and unclean. This is paralleled in the poster shown above, in which Jews are called lice and blamed for spreading typhus. (The Nazis had crammed Jewish populations into overly dense ghettos, as in Warsaw, where outbreaks of typhus occurred, and then they blamed those outbreaks on supposedly characteristic Jewish filthiness rather than on deliberately chosen Nazi policy.)

Edited to add: CMKirkland says that Nick Shirley doesn’t own or control the “Nick Shirley” site to which I refer above.

It seems, though, that Nick Shirley may not own or control the site.

Ottoman Sultan Abdül Hamid II peeks out from his harem in Istanbul in this 1904 cartoon. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Any Latter-day Saint who is inclined to join in a crusade to exclude Muslims from American citizenship needs to take a few minutes for reflection.

There can be, and have been, debates about the reasons for it, but the indisputable fact remains that we American Latter-day Saints are widely unpopular among our fellow countrymen. (See, for example, Jana Riess, “Why Are Mormons the Third-Most-Hated Religious Group in America?” I don’t share her explanation, by the way.) Even if only for the sake of prudence and self-interest, no Latter-day Saint should align himself or herself with movements to marginalize American religious minorities. “An appeaser,” said Winston Churchill, “is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

In this 1870s cartoon by Thomas Nast, the inscription on the dome of the United States Capitol says “Religious liberty is guaranteed but can we allow foreign reptiles to crawl all over US?” The alligator on the left is labeled “Roman Church,” while the snapping turtle on the right bears the title “Mormon Church.” (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Consider this passage from a report submitted to the U.S. Senate after a visit to Utah Territory in the 1860s by a military doctor named Roberts Bartholow. (It apparently went on to wider publication thereafter, as a contribution to “science.”) Mormons, Dr. Bartholow wrote, wear

an expression of countenance and a style of feature, which may be styled the Mormon expression and style; an expression compounded of sensuality, cunning, suspicion, and smirking self-conceit. . . . The yellow, sunken, cadaverous visage; the greenish-colored eyes; the thick, protuberant lips; the low forehead; the light, yellowish hair; and the lank, angular person, constitute an appearance so characteristic of the new race, the production of polygamy, as to distinguish them at a glance.

The racial “othering” is absolutely clear. And it isn’t far from that to vermin, lice, rats, vultures, bacilli, expulsion, and even extermination camps.

The massacre at Haun’s Mill, depicted here in a nineteenth-century painting by C. C. A. Christensen, occurred on 30 October 1838, three days after Governor Lilburn W. Boggs issued Missouri Executive Order 44, the so-called “Extermination Order,” in which he declared that “”the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.” (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Or consider this, from the brutal Haun’s Mill Massacre of 30 October 1838, in Missouri: Among the seventeen Latter-day Saint dead were ten-year-old Sardius Smith, who was shot in the head, and nine-year-old Charles Merrick, who was killed by another member of the mob. “Nits make lice” was a phrase used to justify the murder of the children, implying that children would grow up to be . . . well, adult Latter-dsy Saints.

No member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should come anywhere near the attitudes that I encountered today. Not only out of a healthy regard for self preservation but as a matter of principle. Please see my recent blog entry “A firmly scriptural “No” to Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN)” and also, perhaps “Encroaching Sharia Law In US: ‘Serious Issue.’”

Finally: To forestall irrelevant attacks on me and on what I’ve said above, let me announce for the record that

I’m completely opposed to fraud and corruption and to people who perpetrate it, whether they’re Somalis or not. They should be punished to the full extent of the law. So should those government officials who may have turned a blind eye to such abuse.
I favor the incarceration and/or deportation of criminals who are illegal aliens.
As a free-market, limited-government, strict-constructionist conservative, I would never vote for either Ilhan Omar or Zohran Mamdani.
CMKirkland says that Nick Shirley doesn’t own or control the “Nick Shirley” site to which I refer above. For the record, I don’t actually care who owns or controls the site. My issue is with some of the content on the site, and I’ve never actually criticized Nick Shirley, here or anywhere else. It seems, though, that Nick Shirley may not own or control the site.

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