The "No Solicitors" sign at my front door doesn't always work. So I have a new scheme that does.

[hunter]

23. I just talk to them and they never come back.

The Mormons have never knocked on my door. Perhaps our family is blacklisted.

The only religion my Wild West great grandparents had in common was that they were "Not Mormons," even those who started that way. One of my ancestors was a mail order bride to Salt Lake City from Scandinavia. The church recruited her and paid her passage. She didn't like sharing a husband with another woman so she ran off with a monogamous Army surveyor who was passing through town and they established a homestead. The Federal government was encouraging that sort of thing attempting to dilute the growing political power of the Latter Day Saints in the region.

That's just one of stories. One of my great grandmothers hated the Mormons with a fierce passion and was very outspoken about it, possibly to the point of encouraging the persecution of them. She did not want them in Montana.

My mom was baptized Lutheran but heavily influenced by the rest of her "Not Mormon" family and community she was converting to Catholicism when she encountered a hard drinking, chain smoking, and worst of all, a leering Priest who sent her flailing wildly into the arms of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

I was raised as a Witness until the fourth grade when my mom got kicked out of their Kingdom Hall because she couldn't stay out of politics. She was a pacifist, as the Witnesses are, but she liked participating in anti-war protests and didn't mind if she was on television or in the newspapers. Then we were Quakers. My mom was a huge fan of Daniel Berrigan.

One of my extended family's favorite pastimes is fighting about religion and we always come back for more. If you can't stand that kind of heat don't knock on my door.

I have no problem telling other solicitors to go away and never come back. Why would I hide behind a sign?

The most recent plague of solicitors was the solar salesmen. I've had to be quite harsh with some of them, even the idealistic young newbies who may not yet know how sketchy the companies they work for are.