This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

I didn't vote for President Donald Trump. I thought I'd get that out right now given that I'm supposed to feel humbled and repentant by the fact that he won and I didn't help him do it.

According to former head of the Trump campaign in Utah, Don Peay (a Mormon), it's possible that I (also Mormon) need to look at myself in the mirror and say, "Maybe I need to show a little bit of humility and ask for forgiveness, because I was wrong."

Yeah? Well, #$%@! that. Picking the wrong candidate doesn't mean I need to ask for clemency or atone. The only thing it means is that my participation in the electoral process — which my church encourages me to engage in, regardless of which candidate I support — resulted in Trump winning. That's all.

Any guy who thinks I somehow need to seek his pardon because my choice didn't win can wait for it until his butt falls off. He's still not getting it.

Then there's the notion that winning an election automatically makes a candidate the right/correct choice. If that were true, everyone today owes Hitler an apology.

After all, the majority of Germany got behind Adolf in a democratic process. It ended in the deaths of 50 million people, but so what? He still got elected at one point. Where was the love, meekness, and pleading for absolution from those who fought an elected monster to the death?

Nope. An election proves exactly one thing — that somebody won. And given America's seemingly bottomless appetite for horse$#*t, anything with a basis dictated by popularity alone ought to make us at least a little nervous.

Note: No, I'm not going to tell you who I voted for. It's my business. Not yours, my church's, or even Brother Peay's.

Besides, there are a lot of other things for which I should seek some sort of forgiveness. It's a huge list, at the top of which are at least 150 things for which my wife deserves an apology.

I should also repent for hitting a kid named Purvis in the head with a rock when we were in second grade, for telling everyone what color Ramona's underpants were when I saw her climbing on the monkey bars, and for stealing a 50-cent piece from the Old Man.

But I don't regret those actions because they occurred before I reached "the age of accountability" (8) and had all my sins washed away in a scummy swimming pool in Spain.

Back to my wife. If I work hard enough, I might finish her part of the forgiveness list before one of us dies. The rest of the aggrieved — numbering in the thousands and possibly including you — will have to wait.

Let's forget about being sorry as a political action for the moment and focus instead on the "maybe I need to show a little humility" part of losing.

Whether we're talking religion or politics, when has humility ever been a part of the equation? Political action is the antithesis of humility. Losers denounce the winner, and the winners lord it over the losers.

Works the same way in religion. When Mormons were run out of Missouri and Illinois, did it make us humble? Hell, no. It pissed us off.

We damned everyone else for being disciples of Satan, then sang rousing trek hymns while dragging handcarts across half the continent to a place where we were the majority and have dictated the political landscape ever since — humility be damned.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.