Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: September 14, 2022 09:30PM
I know a lot of people dislike Dehlin, but I am a qualified fan. He has created an immense record of the church's crimes and lies and of their effects on members. "Qualified" in the sense of permanently annoyed at his inability to say anything succinctly or to edit his videos, thereby driving at least a few aggravated viewers to throw their laptops at household pets.
Anyway, on rare occasion I watch one of Dehlin's productions, including most recently the interview with Lynn Packer about Paul Dunn. I have known for decades that Dunn lied about his wartime experiences and his sports career, things which left him in my estimation an overly enthusiastic buffoon.
It transpires, however, that Dunn was much worse than that. He lent his name to several financial endeavors--ponzi schemes of a sort that seem routine for today's observers of Mormondom--and when those went south, his highest priority was getting his money out and letting the little people incur the losses. Even worse, when the Affleck fraud became public he forged a document saying he had severed his connection to the business three years previously. At another juncture he manufactured a receipt stating that he had received payment from one of the Kansas City Royals's farm teams. The forgeries were often disguised by fuzzy photocopying, but there is a limit to what that can do to hide the differences between radically different signature styles.
As Packer remarked, Dunn was a sociopath. And the church tolerated, nay celebrated, his exploits until his military and athletic lies were uncovered. Yet in the final analysis what is more important: false claims about the size of the fish a man caught or the life-destroying effects of financial fraud?
This history leaves me with a rather ominous sense that there are probably a lot of sociopaths among the GAs, again tolerated and in some cases celebrated. How clear is the line between an amateur forger and thief like Dunn and an expert forger and thief like Hofmann? Sure, the latter finally killed some people and that distinguished him, but before then the two men were not dissimilar. The only obvious difference is that Dunn was already inside the tent and Hofmann was not.
How different is a man like Gordon Hinckley, with his Truth Restored propaganda, his decades-long campaign against gay people, and his lies about LDS doctrine?