With $10 Million, The Leonardo Center Should Be Inclusive of All Utahns

The Leonardo Center in Salt Lake should not receive $10 million until they demonstrate that the science and documentary arts they spread will be inclusive of all peoples in the Salt Lake area.

For example, the trajectory of the Center's oral history section disparages the Mormon Church with pejorative stories that deprecate Mormons, and create a stereotypical monolithic story line that seeks to reveal institutional racism.

And yet, the varied nuance of human history is nowhere found in the gathered stories.

And these stories are to provide the text for all sorts of mockumentaries and docudramas
about Mormons and the Mormon Church!

Missing from Les Kelen's Missing Stories are stories of Utes, African-Americans, Jews, Chinese, Italians, Japanese, Greeks and Chicano-Hispanics who have benefitted from their association with Mormons. But according to Kelen, you would have to talk to people who have converted to Mormonism to find such stories.

And whose kind of science is to be advanced at the Leonardo?

Taxpayers recently spent some $70 million on one of the finest public libraries in the nation. Why did we need a science center, unless it was to push a certain kind of science?

The use of Gunter Hagen's plastinated real human bodies on public display illustrates the kind of science that the Leonardo says we are "hungry for" here in the backwoods of illiterate Utah!

Look for, at the Leonardo, a Logical Positivism that enshrines science as an immutable, infallible guide to human progress, while leaving issues of the human heart on the dissection table. Tellingly, it wasn't until people in the United States squawked loudly about the display of executed Chinese political prisoners did Hagen finally incinerate their bodies.

In addition, the countries which gave a warm welcome to the public display of cadavers in BodyWorld - Germany, Russia and China - are the same countries with a record of mass murders in the millions by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. That Hagen so casually displayed such bodies back East does tell something in the end.

The Leonardo Center is left-of-center in its political persuasion. It is not inclusive but highly divisive.

A staff member said: One day, we expect that visits to our center will exceed that of Temple Square. So then, it's not about science; it's about another screw-you to the Mormon Church.

You'd think that with $10 million we could purchase some common ground somewhere!

Now where have I heard that before?