My first impression is to find it hard to believe.
But then I have to remind myself that Hinckley inherited his position from Joseph Smith and...in turn...I have to remind myself of what we know about Joseph Smith's wild and crazy libido.
Why wouldn't Hinckley think that he could get a "revelation" telling him that whatever kinky thing he wanted to do was okay with God? Smith, Young, Taylor and Woodruff were predecessors who held the same position as Hinckley and they all had harems and were known to constantly be looking for younger and prettier girls to recruit into their harems.
It was masterful public relations that changed the image of the church leaders in the eyes of the rest of the world so much that the Mormon leaders who were just one and a half generations removed from the leaders who openly ran harems came to be viewed as conservative, fanatically monogamous family men who practiced the purest sexual purity that any puritan could ever have imagined in their purest dreams. (Say that last sentence as fast as you can 5 times.)
I still have no independent basis for knowing how true the claims made in the video are. But I also wouldn't be particularly surprised if Hinckley led a kinky double life. I always got the impression that he was quite amused by the Gospel and the fact that so many people "sustained" him as a real prophet. And he named his son "Dick".
It always felt like he was a little too intense in his "teachings" about sexual purity. Came across as a man struggling in public with his own demons and guilt.
Wally Prince Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It always felt like he was a little too intense in > his "teachings" about sexual purity. Came across > as a man struggling in public with his own demons > and guilt.
This is a bit unfair on the two of them. Please remember when Hinckley and Kimball were presidents - like most people of their generation, they would have seen the collapse of marriage, pornography starting to appear on the TV and an increase in open promiscuity, because that was what was going on in the world around them. They were not unusual in that respect at all.
Both of them come across to me as curiously asexual, but maybe that's because they were old men.