When Gayle Ruzicka rounds the Point of the Mountain and gazes upon Salt Lake Valley, she says it feels like she's entering another state.
All of the worldly and wicked behavior she shuns is laid out before her, not unlike Sodom and Gommorah. To hear her tell it, it's easy to think she might be a little reluctant to gaze too long in the rearview mirror on the drive home for fear she'll turn into a pillar of salt right there on I-15.Ruzicka is back in her comfort zone when she passes Draper and drops toward Lehi, the northernmost outpost of Utah County, where even conservative Utah politics swerves hard to the right.
"When I go into a restaurant in Provo, the people in the booths around me are talking about church. We don't have a grocery store or convenience store that even thinks about selling a Playboy." Even coffee is hard to come by, said Ruzicka, who runs the archconservative Utah Eagle Forum from her modest home in High-land.
"It's less about politics than it is about lifestyle," she said.
Oh, but it's about politics to the politicians. Especially - and ironically - the Republicans, whose conservative bona fides are never held to such scrutiny elsewhere in the Beehive State.
Utah County, whose populous votes nearly 90 percent Republican, might seem like GOP heaven. But with its bend to the radical right, party leaders occasionally think it resembles that other, warmer place.
"No question, it can be a headache," said one high-placed party insider, speaking only on condition of anonymity.
The county is fertile recruiting ground for the Eagle Forum and the John Birch Society and is home to Cleon Skousen's ultraconservative think tank, the Center for Constitutional Studies, formerly known as the Freemen Institute.
Utah County delegates to the state GOP convention held in Orem this year are being blamed in Republican circles for pushing 3rd District Rep. Chris Cannon, unchallenged by a Democrat, into an embarrassing primary with Jeremy Friedbaum, a Skousen disciple who says his candidacy sprang from divine personal revelation.
Moreover, the far-right has embraced the brash candidacy for county sheriff of Richard Mack, a one-time Democrat who as sheriff of Graham County, Ariz., challenged the constitutionality of the "Brady Bill" gun legislation, ultimately prevailing in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mack - who still calls himself "sheriff" - is a big draw on the militia and gun-show circuit and has co-authored a pair of books. One deals with the Second Amendment - titled "My Cold Dead Fingers" - and the other, "Government, God and Freedom" explains, according to a posting on the Internet, that "the issue of freedom has always been about religion, and the issue of religion has always been about freedom."
Both Mack and Friedbaum are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the "lifestyle" that Ruzicka is convinced drives Utah County conservatism is inescapably linked to the LDS Church. Recent attempts by church authorities to put some distance between the church and the Grand Old Party have sputtered in Utah County.
"Certainly, part of the reason I did so well at the convention is that the 3rd District is a very enlightened district," Friedbaum said.
How so? "Well, people here believe the Constitution is divinely inspired," he said flatly, referring to an LDS belief.
Utah County voted 86 percent Republican in the last general election and the most recent demographic study shows it is 89.9 percent LDS.
With that kind of homogeneity, said one state Republican Party insider, it's no wonder the party tends to turn on itself. Such was the case in 1990 when a vicious primary between John Harmer - another Skousen acolyte - and Karl Snow helped boost Democrat Bill Orton into Congress. Snow, on an LDS Church mission to the United Nations in New York, wasn't aware of the Friedbaum-Cannon primary until told by a reporter.
His response?
"Business as usual," he sighed. "The right wing is at it again."
Snow's response is typical among party leaders, if you can get them to talk about it. Most bite their tongues or invoke Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment: Thou shalt speak no ill of another Republican.
Given an opportunity to talk anonymously, however, they're more candid.
"It's fair to call it disturbing," said the state party insider, who acknowledged that party leaders had doubled the number of delegates this year to 5,000 in hopes of diluting the conservative influence. The right wing responded by flooding the March caucuses and getting elected as delegates.
"(The plan) had the opposite effect," acknowledged Utah County Republican chairman Rod Fudge, who said the conservatives are generally far more motivated and involved than the more moderate party members he believes make up the quiet, if not quite silent, majority of Republicans in Utah Valley.