Caught between a rock and hard place, FTC officials have shown their cards, and their obvious anxiety to have quotes critical of Mormons, attributed to Ms. Collot Guerard, one of the Commission’s lead attorneys, be removed from the EvilFTC.com website.
In a terse e-mail to Jeremy Johnson, Mr. Dotan Wineman, a representative for the Federal Trade Commission, has requested that the statements attributed to Ms. Guerard, which mock members of the Mormon Church, be immediately removed from the website. Mr. Wineman threatened legal action if his request was not acted upon. You can read the email
here.
A spokesman for the website, EvilFTC.com, however, had this response to Mr. Wineman’s request in a recent press release:
“We have already offered to remove the statements from the website if we can simply get a statement from Ms. Guerard that she never made the anti-Mormon comments in question. However, Ms. Guerard is probably not eager to provide such a statement since she knows full well that her comments are not only accurate as to their content, but were spoken in the presence of third parties. Its ridiculous for the Government to assume that we will remove content from our website by simply making threats of legal action, when their own attorney does not even deny making the statements in the first place.”
This infatuation of the FTC with Mormons took place during a break in a legal deposition, when Ms. Guerard questioned Mr. Jeremy Johnson about how many people in Saint George, Utah are Mormon. Ms. Guerard went on to let Mr. Johnson know that she considers herself a “real Christian” and she bragged that she goes to church with some ex-Mormons, who she says now are “real Christians”. Ms. Guerard, when speaking with other people about his case, referred to Mr. Johnson as a member of the “Mormon Mafia”.
Adding more details, EvilFTC.com relates the fact that Mr. Johnson was also subjected to further questioning about his Mormon religious beliefs from the FTC’s Chairman, Jon Leibowitz, just prior to the Chairman voting to sue Mr. Johnson and put all of his companies out of business.
During the hour-long interview, Chairman Leibowitz, who was appointed to head the FTC by President Obama in 2009, continued the Government’s odd fascination with an individual’s personal religious faith, by wanting to know if Mr. Johnson and his family were actively involved with the Mormon Church and whether or not Mr. Johnson had ever served on a mission for the Mormon Church.
After getting the answers he was looking for, Chairman Leibowitz then ordered his staff to file a lawsuit against Mr. Johnson and his companies, and to freeze all of his corporate assets.
In the press release, the spokesperson for EvilFTC.com raised some important questions: “Why would a government agency be so obsessed with the Mormon religion? Why would the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission demand to know details about a person’s religious beliefs before making a decision on whether or not an agency of the Federal Government decided to sue that person? Is there a predisposed religious prejudice on the part of the FTC contributing to an obstruction of justice?”
Summing up the core issue regarding this obvious government intrusion into an individual’s right of religious liberty, Linda Goldstein, an attorney who attended the meeting with Johnson and Chairman Leibowitz, stated that, “In the many years working with the FTC on numerous cases, I have never seen an FTC Commissioner interrogate a defendant about their religious beliefs.
Ms. Goldstein added, “A person’s religion should have absolutely nothing to do with the Government’s decision to proceed with a case.”
