At the downtown Hilton Hotel restaurant, bartenders pour cocktails and fine wine while Nathan Tanner deals with his usual good-business-versus-moral-code conflict.
A self-described faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the restaurant manager and Hilton executive says he believes in all of his church's doctrines and teachings. "I served a mission and I loved it," Tanner said. "I believe in proselytizing."
Tanner also believes in the value of theocracy, the rule of God on Earth, an ideal his faith promises will come with Christ's return. "It's part of my religion," he said. "There is a time and place for it, in a perfect society where everyone is LDS."
Obviously, everyone isn't.
And Tanner, a fifth-generation member of the LDS Church, says he's often uncomfortable with his church's role in such secular tasks as helping to craft state liquor laws because it stokes chronic complaints that church and state in Utah are too chummy, too often.
The enduring perception of Utah as a state run by the LDS Church also is a constant frustration for church leaders, who say they wish forever to erase the perception that traces of its 19th-century theocracy persist today.
Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, 93, who has worked since 1935 to dispel unwanted images of the church, would not talk to The Associated Press on the subject, despite repeated interview requests.
"Many groups have to endure stereotypical images. Claims of church involvement in politics here is just another stereotype," said church spokesman Bruce Olsen. "But it isn't true, and I think that perception is changing."
Maybe. But vestiges of Utah's peculiar theocratic past haunt even its recent history, and in the eyes of many, its tendencies will remain for the foreseeable future.
Utah isn't a literal theocracy, which is rule by a divinity through prophets on Earth.
It hasn't been since President James Buchanan in 1857 declared the territory of Utah in open rebellion against the United States and replaced the LDS Church's prophet and president Brigham Young with the first of a series of interim territorial governors.
"It's impossible for a theocratic form of rule to exist in a democratic government without conflict," said historian David Bigler, author of the 1996 book "Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West".
And because vestiges remain, he said, "that tension still exists. It leads to a cultural divide."
With 70 percent of Utah residents at least nominally LDS Church members, that is, on church rolls but not necessarily active, church influence on politics and society are a matter of demographics, Olsen said.
State and local government office holders are overwhelmingly LDS. Only a tiny fraction of Utah legislators aren't. The governor is, as are all five members of the state's congressional delegation. Four of the state Supreme Court's justices are LDS, including the chief justice. All seven Salt Lake City Council members are LDS or have LDS backgrounds.
Such strong LDS influence, critics say, means the state operates as a de facto or quasi-theocracy, with such results:
In 1974, Democratic Gov. Calvin Rampton's statewide land-use planning proposal had the support of 28 of the state's 29 county commissions, state health authorities, environmentalists, garden clubs, the Salt Lake Area Chamber of Commerce, Sens. Frank Moss and Wallace F. Bennett and federal agencies in charge of most of Utah's land. But Ezra Taft Benson, then an apostle in the church's Quorum of the Twelve and a former Cabinet member under U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who would later become president of the church, endorsed the right-wing American Party's opposition, saying it was established on divine principles. These principles, he said, followed his own and that of his "own church people." The referendum was crushed at the polls by a margin of more than 60 percent. Only Carbon County, a Democratic stronghold, passed it.
In autumn of 1974, the daily Deseret News, owned by the church, reported that a poll of Utah residents showed 65 percent supported the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. But two days before the January 1975 opening of the Legislature, an unsigned editorial in the newspaper's weekly insert, Church News, argued the ERA "was not the way" because God had created gender differences for good reason. Lawmakers didn't ratify the proposed amendment and the church mounted a nationwide campaign against it, calling it a "moral issue".
During debate on an anti-abortion resolution, legislators in 2002 recited on the House floor the church's position on the procedure from the official Church Handbook.
Some public school districts canceled Monday night activities after President Hinckley during last October's General Conference urged them to do so in favor of traditional Mormon family time at home.
Republican Speaker of the House Marty Stephens in January opened the 2003 Legislative General Session with an obvious paraphrase — unconsciously, Stephens said — of the signature LDS hymn, "We Thank Thee Oh God for a Prophet."
The free-speech conflict on a block of Main Street that started with a questionable property sales contract between the church and the city in 1999 erupted in October when a federal appeals court ruled the church couldn't regulate behavior on the public part of the pedestrian plaza the church built. A proposal by Mayor Rocky Anderson — an inactive LDS Church member — to swap empty church-owned land elsewhere in the city for the Main Street public easement has only worsened bitterness over church dominance, and promises even more divisive legal actions.
Latter-day Saints tend to be conservative, and they don't compartmentalize their beliefs because they are taught to honor their faith in all places.
Interpretations of that tenet, though, have fed Utah's cultural and political conflict.
In particular, church leaders have publicly expressed dismay at the state's one-party rule and sought from the pulpit to dispel the widely held notion that it's impossible to be a good LDS person and a Democrat. Before every election, the church issues advisories to be read during church meetings that it doesn't endorse any political party, platform or candidate.
Still, with only a few notable exceptions, Republicans prevail.
Trisha Beck, a Mormon Democrat who in November lost a particularly vicious race to retake her Utah House seat, said it's as if LDS voters believe their leaders have told them how to vote via coded messages to heed their own values when choosing a candidate.
"There is a portion of the electorate who aren't really politically active (but) somehow consider it their religious responsibility to vote," she said. "The church has tried so hard to get the people to pay attention."
Indeed, LDS officials point to founder Joseph Smith's oft-cited maxim: "I teach correct principles and the people govern themselves."
The church has been determined to make that known as its institutional premise at least since 1968, Olsen said, when the three-man First Presidency told members that its increasing worldwide responsibilities made it "inadvisable" for the church to get involved officially in secular community problems.
"The church as an institution seeks to remain politically neutral," he said.
Its leaders will, however, involve themselves in issues directly affecting the church, such as its Main Street Plaza purchase, and in what they consider moral issues.
Trouble comes when the church presses its version of morality on those who don't necessarily agree, such as its doctrinal ban on drinking.
Reacting to criticism of their role in the recent overhaul of state liquor laws, the church in February issued a statement saying it "makes no apology for its participation in the legislative process concerning the legal regulation of alcohol in the state of Utah."
Asserting the right to be heard, the statement continued, "The First Presidency has repeatedly declared that the regulation of alcoholic beverage consumption is a moral issue."
Olsen added that the church also is involved for public health and safety reasons and works with groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving to prevent alcohol abuse.
It's hard to argue with their point the restrictions have brought results. Only beer with 3.2 percent alcohol content can be bought at places other than state-owned liquor stores, one of many liquor laws that advocates point to when Utah is lauded for having one of the nation's lowest DUI-fatality rates.
But for those who want to imbibe responsibly, the laws can be so confusing that critics joke they could have been written only by nondrinkers. Only one member of the state's five-member liquor commission is a social drinker; the rest are teetotaling LDS.
On May 5, the first major overhaul of the laws in 12 years went into effect. Lawmakers had help from the liquor commission, the hospitality industry and the LDS Church in crafting the 275-page bill sponsors said would be more visitor-friendly.
Some of the old rules that most vexed Utah's visitors and residents alike are gone, such as the one that said a customer could have only one alcoholic beverage at a time. The rule meant diners couldn't have champagne along with their wine, say, and prompted the joke motto, "Drink faster — it's the law."
Now the rule is that no one can have more than 2.75 ounces of liquor at a time, leaving servers to calculate exactly when to bring that second drink.
Brigham Young University history professor Thomas Alexander, author of several Utah histories including the 1996 book "Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930," says the church to some degree has backed away from strict rules on alcohol.
"Church members who are in business recognize that they deal with people who are social drinkers, who drink wine with meals or have a drink occasionally," he said.
Yet last year in Draper, a Salt Lake City suburb, when the liquor commission approved a new state liquor store and wine boutique, a group of fervent anti-alcohol residents was outraged. The store is on a frontage road across the street from the Utah State Prison, away from residential areas. Still, anti-booze group leader Scott Howell declared no liquor store could be far enough away and he "would rather not have additional access to this lethal drug."
That attitude grates on Tanner because it equates drinking with drunkenness and implicates his customers who have no such behavioral problems.
"When I stand before the liquor commission, I come from a position of tolerance. I don't drink, I don't smoke. What I do is provide a safe environment where people can do that," he said. "There's too much emotion with the involvement of the church, and not enough reason."
Irritating liquor laws aside, intermittent clashes with the state and federal constitutions fueled by Utah-style public morality have caused serious trouble. Attempts to control who gets to pray at public meetings or how restaurants and bars may advertise have failed, as have moves to tighten abortion laws or to censor cable television content. Losing lawsuits over these disputes have cost the state millions of dollars.
"The church really is not able to dictate everything they would like to have," Alexander said. "It plays the role of an interest group in Utah, a very powerful one. They are able to get some things they want. But other things they cannot."
That's because competing interests often win out, Alexander said. Further, even when their leaders were still telling them how to vote, church members wouldn't always go along.
In 1933, Utah's lawmakers voted to overturn Prohibition. While other states followed, Utah's vote was the last needed for ratification. In 1936, a front-page Deseret News article opposed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's re-election and urged LDS Church members to vote for Alf Landon; Utah voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt.
In 1954, Alexander observed, the church sought to return to church control the state-run Weber, Snow and Dixie junior colleges, which the church had established only to turn them over to the state in the 1930s when it couldn't afford to run them anymore. Gov. J. Bracken Lee, who wasn't LDS, argued the state could save money by giving them back, but the voters refused to go along.
Now, the church's big fight is over controlling behavior on its Main Street Plaza, which it was guaranteed in exchange for keeping the former city sidewalks at all times open to the public.
The plaza dispute started in April 1999, when then-Mayor Deedee Corradini and President Hinckley announced the sale of one block of Main Street to the church for $8.1 million.
The church banned certain dress or conduct, including bicycling and sunbathing, and claimed the right to ban anyone who violated the rules. The city agreed to the conditions.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah sued on behalf of Salt Lake City's First Unitarian Church and others, arguing the restrictions were unconstitutional. The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in October agreed, ruling that the city could not let the church enforce its own rules on a public easement.
The church has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. "The Constitution also guarantees property owners, including churches, the right to the full enjoyment of their property," a church statement said.
Responded Stephen Clark, a consulting attorney for Utah's ACLU, "One particular religion's view of the good life can't be enshrined in public policy."
National ACLU attorney Mark Lopez says he's more than willing to fight what he sees as the tyranny of the majority in Utah. At the same time, he acknowledges the church and city have a good chance of winning any future plaza lawsuits.
Lopez argued the plaza case against the city and church before a federal court in Utah and the 10th Circuit. He likely will be the ACLU attorney who fights city efforts to sell or trade away the plaza's public easement.
"The harder the city and church work to insulate the church from critics, to get around the First Amendment, the more it looks like the city is doing it for the benefit of the church," Lopez said. "They have been admonished in very eloquent terms by the high court in that part of the country. Instead of respecting that decision, they've dug in their heels."