http://www.mormontimes.com/article/21056/America-and-the-meaning-of-a-Mormon-president

Snippets:

"..."The LDS Church has suffered greater religious persecution in its history than any other religious group in American history," said Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, a practicing Jew. "For a member of the LDS Church to be elected president, or honestly even just to come close, would represent in some important way a repudiation of (anti-Mormon) prejudice."

"And make no mistake about it," Feldman warned, "that prejudice is real."

Prejudice against Mormons began when their founding prophet and president, Joseph Smith, claimed heavenly visions in upstate New York. Subsequently, he and his followers were driven from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois. After Smith's violent death in Illinois, more persecution prompted a mass exodus to the Salt Lake Valley. The flight to the Utah Territory didn't stay American prejudice; it continued with the Utah War and the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which dictated the incarceration of polygamists and the federal confiscation of Church land.

Even after Utah's incorporation as a state in 1896, the U.S. House of Representatives still refused to seat the recently elected Mormon, B.H. Roberts. In the early twentieth century American-Mormon relations began to turn a corner, but only after Reed Smoot's Congressional hearings. Reed Smoot (a Mormon Apostle) was elected to the U.S. senate in 1903, yet his seating faced a three-year-long Congressional debate that included a three-day-long interrogation of Mormon Prophet Joseph F. Smith.

Smoot's distinguished thirty-year career in the senate, along with other 20th century developments, eventually helped assuage Mormonphobia by showing Americans that the LDS Church was, by most accounts, a benign institution...."

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Mormonphobia?? I'm not sure I've ever seen it written down as a word. And oh how I wish the cancer called Mormonism was, in fact, benign.

This is the type of reporting half-truths and innuendo to distract from known facts about these events. The uninformed reader is left to his or her own imagination as to "why "there was friction in the seating of B.H. Roberts and Reed Smoot.

With the infection of Mormon apologists on Wikipedia, few casual readers would bother looking up the facts.

Here are links to the complete Smoot hearings (I think complete)

Vol1 http://www.archive.org/details/proceedingsbefor01unitrich
Vol2 http://www.archive.org/details/proceedingsbefor02unitrich
Vol3 http://www.archive.org/details/proceedingsbefor03unitrich

Anyway, there are plenty of places to see primary sources, lds rags like Mormontimes bet that most tbm's and any investigators won't have the wherewithal to google them.

I just sent the author a note reminding him that he has it 100% wrong - he's part of the religious group that's been persecuted more than any other. I doubt he'll agree. Sounds like he's brainwashed.

Below them are atheists and Muslims.

What "Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, a practicing Jew" doesn't appear to be aware of is how Momrons - especially early Mormons - treated their neighbors. They provoked and contributed to much of what caused them to be "driven from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois" and finally to SLC. They did about as much persecuting as was done to them and their attitude and religion threatened non-Mormons who preceded them in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Mormonism's version of history conveniently forgets that they were not as "friendly" as today's Mormons like to believe.

I haven't seen any mormons getting gassed...

I personally see the Mormons exodus from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois and finally SLC as punishment for practicing plural marriage. In this way it is similar to the Children of Isreal wandering in the desert as punishment for idol worshipping.

Mormons would like you to believe they were persecuted and they certainly were because that is the consequence of mormon males preying on underage girls and married women whose husbands are still living.