Can I get a witness?

Ah, Arizona: the only place in the world where Easter means some sick combination of Mormons, celebrations and legal citations.\nNothing unusual was happening inside the church when the congregation of an Arizona Mormon temple amassed at their yearly Easter pageant Tuesday night. \nOutside, though, proved a different story.\n“They’re here every year,” a Latter-day Saints churchgoer reported exasperatedly as he saved seats for family members.\nThe “they” is a belligerent group of evangelical street preachers, congregating outside the temple walls every Easter under the frighteningly charismatic leadership of Lonnie Pursifull, 42. They labor and toil year after year in attempts to save the Mormons from eternal damnation.\nFolks generally don’t mess with the likes of Lonnie Pursifull – he’s got souls to save.\nBut this year, one woman just wanted to enjoy her Easter pageant in peace. So much, in fact, that in the end, the elderly, wheelchair-bound Mormon lady got slapped with a citation of disorderly conduct for fighting.\nSixty-four-year-old Anne Carlisle charged the head of the street preacher flock in her electric wheelchair. Pursifull suffered bruised shins and bruised dignity.\n“She definitely was an aggressor. She came out and was yelling at me the whole time, and she was not just giving me a love tap,” an indignant Pursifull told reporters and police as his fellow evangelical friends continued to scream damnation to the Mormon Easter pageant attendees.\n“The woman could’ve killed somebody with her wheelchair.”\nIt’s like a microcosmic Crusade. \nThe conflict has been going on for decades but has only recently gotten out of control, with the arrival of Pursifull and his particular brigade of interlocutors, based out of the Wilderness Bible Baptist Church in a rural Utah township. The heat of the conflict can be inferred from the town’s closeness to Salt Lake City, the most prominent Mormon area in the country.\nIn years before this group’s arrival, a more civil engagement had taken place between conservative Baptists and Mormons outside the temple, with leaflets and energetic quotes from the Lord’s Prayer skirting the extent to which matters got out of hand. The new Baptist group has driven old visitors on to calmer waters. Leaflets have turned into signs with antagonistic phrases. “Inside voices” gave “outsides voices” a miss and went straight on into “Game day voices.”\nAnd that winning goal was scored by a 64-year-old woman in a wheelchair.\nPursifull, a real man’s man who lays carpet for a living, certainly shook things up a bit.\nBut he didn’t shake them up Mormon-style.\n“It was an attack with a weapon, literally with a weapon.”\nI just hope Soundgarden was playing somewhere in the background and she was wearing aviators when this happened. \nTacit coexistence among religions may never be fully attained – but at least we’ve evolved from charging the infidels on horses to charging the infidels on a Hoveround. Truly, a show of human progress at its finest.\nWe’re clearly making great strides: Bring on Mormon Easter 2K8.