Slate has a good article about Utah and the Mormon church.
What’s the matter with Utah? The most Republican state in the nation is drifting to the left. In the last few months, Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican and a practicing Mormon, has come out in favor of civil unions for gays and repeated his support for government action on global warming. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled state legislature has liberalized Utah’s notoriously arcane alcohol laws. The punishment for this apostasy has been record-high approval ratings—for both governor and legislature.
What is the matter? Maybe science.
Part of the reason for the LDS Church’s reticence may be that with an approval rating of 84 percent, Huntsman is the most popular Mormon politician in the country. His name has been floated as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, and David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, has named him as a potentially formidable opponent. He’s recently struck moderate positions on immigration (he spoke approvingly of Reagan’s 1987 amnesty for illegal immigrants) and climate change (“We cannot become the anti-science party and succeed,” he told Politico), and he joined a cap-and-trade initiative that has him teamed up with four Canadian provinces to help reduce emissions.
One of the issues for the Mormons is the veracity of their scriptures. The Book of the Mormon, which is supposed to be treated as historically accurate, is being shown to have a lot of problems with that accuracy. The book describes the movement of people that we know from genetics to not possibly be true. See also this link.
Maybe there is a generation of LDS members who like the church, but want it to reflect better the times in which they live. Democracy in action, baby.