Helen:
You are correct that Marriott is big time LDS connected, but
The company is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and has approximately 153,000 employees. In fiscal year 2000, Marriott International reported systemwide sales of $19.8 billion.
J. Willard Marriott started out with a root-beer stand in DC and parlayed it into a multinational corporation. He contributed heavily and regularly to the Republican Party and was a close personal friend of Dick Nixon's (though it's hard to imagine Dick having any close friends and some people honestly believe that Nixon was Nixon's only friend and not a very good one at that.)
Marriott contributed most of the costs of building the Mormon Temple that's right off the DC beltway in Maryland. You cannot believe that place! The best way to view it is to go counterclockwise on the beltway at night. As you come around a curve it looms into sight, looking like a cross between a cathedral and a fairy-tale castle, all white stone with tall spires pierced by white stone windows (about which more below). Here's a picture:
http://www.lofthouse.com/design/photo/above.html I called it Disneyland on the Beltway.
Prior to its dedication, the temple was open to Gentiles, which includes our Jewish brethren, and I took the tour (this would have been 1974 I guess.) The opulence is breathtaking. In the main sanctuary there's a baptismal font (baptism by immersion I assume) that is mounted on the backs of eight bigger-than-life statues of oxen, all covered in gold leaf. There are circular staircases up into the towers, which from the outside appear to glow from within. When you are on the stairs you can see why. The windows in the towers are glazed with the same stone as was used for the skin of the temple, only cut so thin that light from within shines outward so the temple appears to glow. During the day sunlight filters through the marble, though I know this only from reading about it. I took the tour at night.
One of the precepts of the Mormon religion is that you can save your ancestors by marrying them to make them part of the church. This is the primary reason for the Mormons' deep interest in genealogy. You can't marry your great-grandfather if you don't know his name. I'm not clear on whether males can marry their male predecessors or whether you still have to cross gender lines, but marry their ancestors they do.
Only confirmed LDS members may enter the temple after it has been dedicated, and then only with special permission from the president of your stake, if memory serves me correctly. And when you do get in, you must be dressed entirely in white. At the temple in DC, there are changing rooms (locker rooms actually) that are just immense, with lockers for perhaps 5000 or more for each sex. The temple provides the clothes, in support of which there is a huge laundry area. Believe it or not, they had front-loading washing machines that were big enough to hold a couple of VW bugs! So big the doors were opened and closed hydraulically.
All in all I came away with a feeling that a gret deal of money had been spent on this building that could have been better spent on helping the unfortunate throughout the world.
I've also been through the temple here in the Denver area (again just before it was dedicated.) Same opulence on a much smaller scale. What I remember of that one was the silk flower arrangements. I could have retired off that contract!
And yes, I agree with you about the hypocrisy; perhaps the most noted example is what happened to the official LDS stance on polygamy. The Mormon community in what is now Utah wanted to come into the Union. Congress decreed that admission was incumbent on changing the name from the religious name Deseret in favor of the secular name Utah. They also said that the Utah constitution would have to specifically forbid polygamy.
The president of the church soon thereafter revealed that God had come to him in a dream and told him that it was OK for the Mormons not to practice polygamy any more.
Similarly, there was a big flap involving the Boy Scouts. A young black man in Utah wanted to be a senior patrol leader, but could not because the Mormons required that only bishops in the church could be SPLs, and blacks were not allowed to be bishops. Being a bishop in LDS is more or less like being confirmed in other religions, as I understand and remember it. There was a monstrous foofaraw and the President of the church had a dream. You guessed it; it was suddenly OK for black kids to become bishops.
I've always wondered why a black person would even want to be a part of a church that specifically said you were second-class because of the color of your skin. Whatever trips your trigger, I guess.
TEd (who, as you may have guessed, is NOT a Mormon)
