A note in today's local yokel newspaper, hot off the wire, from AP: "Mormon Church offended by Coffee House T-shirt depicting Angel Moroni drinking coffee that's being poured into the horn of his trumpet." That's the statue that most famously depicts Moroni. He is playing the guitar solo in Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez... Not an easy feat on a valveless trumpet.
In the story there is talk about the Angel Moroni being a registered trademark.
Using their reasoning, an argument can be made that no drawing, caricature or graven image can be used showing the male penis because in 1979, having discovered mine, I registered a drawing of it with the United States Patent office. You can publish, or otherwise disseminate photographs of your own penis, but no image of a penis can be used in any medium without my say so, or the written permission of Major League Baseball.
That's what the Mormon Church's argument is based on... No one, ever, took a photograph of the Angel Moroni. Joseph Smith, the only human to meet Moroni face to face, never sat down with a police sketch artist. Perhaps there are Mormon artists who drew Moroni as they tried to illustrate Joseph's story. But Google Images didn't have any that look anything like the t-shirt in question. So the famous statue on top of the Salt Lake Temple is pretty much it for images of Moroni. So if the Mormon Church wanted to, they could claim that ANY image of a man holding a straight trumpet is Moroni and you can't use that image without their permission.
The whole brouhaha is really about a coffee house using the image, coffee being something that the Mormon Church says God doesn't want you to drink. If you drink coffee, I don't think you can enter a Mormon Temple. (But if you're drinking Diet Coke, you CAN enter a Mormon Temple!)
So I'm hoping that a brothel will soon open in Nevada called The Practice of Procreation, and will have a nameless statue in front of the entrance, of a robed male blowing a straight trumpet. I wouldn't even mind if they hedged their bet by having the 'angel' blowing on a trombone.
Hey, could the Catholic Church claim that it has a registered trademark on any depiction of the Virgin Mary?
2 comments:
First of all, I thought that was David's (Michelangelo) penis, but don't worry, I didn't look.
Starbuck's strategy is awesome! Think of the need for Moroni to have some caffeine after having to stay awake all the time to blow that trumpet. You figured a way into the Mormon Temple drinking Diet Coke, why not Moroni sucking down a mocha-frap?
As for the brothel/church in Nevada: not really a stretch, but a damn good idea!
I saw the Virgin Mary's image in the foam of my latte last week...
I often think of Louis Armstrong as Moroni, what with the whole trumpet thing.
I also often think that any religion that creates a name for one of its key figures that is simply "Moron" plus "i" is asking a lot of its followers.
Also, Temple Square is certainly not the only home of a giant Moroni statue - Kensington, MD has its own Temple, replete with giant Moroni statue. As a child, I called him "Macaroni."
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