I thought the timing was interesting about the church deciding to announce a change in their stance on gay marriage when a big story about another abuse case was about to break. Smells like deflection.
. . . and I love it. Didn't Frank do much the same thing? He was under tons of pressure over child abuse scandals and rather than addressing that problem announced his intention to make life better for gay priests. I don't think that homophilic policy went very far, but it did change the topic for a while.
The LDS church doubtless has a number of "concessions to the world" in the oven at all times to pull out and serve whenever the media a treat. When the BBC broadcasted that embarrassing "Meet the Mormons, the church trotted out its own "Meet the Mormons" and then spent a ton of money promoting that and burying the other.
This is more of the same.
--LW, proudly disgustingly cynical since the late 20th century
Controlling the flow of media about things is half the game. It helps if you are a billionaire and can buy the media to report your preferred view of things.
I think Mormons have learned a lot from the conniving and cunning tactics of the Catholic Church. As long as Catholics get away with abuse and misogyny, Mormons can ride along using the same approaches.
Very sadly, just another example - San Diego, Arizona, West Virginia, and God knows how many other places - of how the church fails to protect victims.
From the story:
"Dordullian says the LDS Church and other religious institutions can no longer hide from failing to report sexual assaults to the police.
"Their response always is, 'we have nothing to do with it. We can't stop a perpetrator like this from doing these bad things.' That's utterly untrue, says Dordullian.
"All they had to do with all the knowledge and information they had is simply call the authorities. Or at least at a minimum, don't tell the mom not to call the authorities. Let her go and report so somebody can give Elizabeth the help that she desperately needed."
This is exactly where the church repeatedly fails.
But they will say, "look, we are requiring background checks, we put windows in classroom doors, we require two adults working with youth, we allow parents in interviews."
All small steps (which are good), but they don't address the biggest problem which is their refusal to require reporting of known abuse, which leads to cases of ongoing abuse like this one.
How many more of these will it take for LD$, Inc. to finally do the right thing?
I like to be as cynical as the next person, but LDS Inc had not much choice in when they were going to support the same-sex marriage bill. It is scheduled for a vote today. If they wanted a thumb on the scale, it was now or never.
Todays vote is procedural, not a final vote, but it is important, and could have been filibustered. Enough Rs are supporting it to defeat a filibuster, but the Rs said they could only afford to support it after the midterms, so here we are.
Brother Of Jerry Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I like to be as cynical as the next person, but > LDS Inc had not much choice in when they were > going to support the same-sex marriage bill. It is > scheduled for a vote today. If they wanted a thumb > on the scale, it was now or never.
I'm not convinced. If the church had wanted to influence the legislation, it should have gone public weeks ago. Doing it only a day or two or three before the vote will make no difference at all politically.
More importantly, the church's "thumb on the scale" is about as heavy as a gnat's eyelash (thanks, Jesus!). The church's endorsement is virtually meaningless. Which means that the motive was not a Damascene embrace of homosexuality but rather the hope to achieve some other objective.
What other objective? Getting people to talk about Mormons' shockingly sudden love and respect for gay people as opposed to something else in the news.
------------------- > Todays vote is procedural, not a final vote, but > it is important, and could have been filibustered. > Enough Rs are supporting it to defeat a > filibuster, but the Rs said they could only afford > to support it after the midterms, so here we are.
So the LDS church's announcement did not have any impact? I agree.
The church leaders also ordered Elizabeth's mother to work on the couple's relationship so that the abuse would not continue.
Obviously, she needed to work on their relationship. They probably said she wasn't meeting his needs sexually.
I don't know how I could live with a man any longer though after I found this happening.
I have said before that I worked with a girl in singles R.S. when we were age 18 and 19. She said some weird things to me about what her boyfriend said to her. He married her and moved her out of state. Later found out her father had been molesting all the girls in the family and one was impregnated. They sent her off to a family member's home to have the baby so the local people wouldn't know. One of the daughters told the bishop and he told her that her father was too good of a man, that he wouldn't do something like that.
So YEARS later, a granddaughter told her bishop what her grandfather was doing to her. Her grandfather was about to leave on a couples mission. That bishop did something. The man went to prison for about 20 years. He is no longer able to go to the town that all of it happened in and most of his kids live.
It always comes down to they don't care about the people at all. They only care about how the church looks to the outside world.
I asked my Mom the other night what she would have done had I reported a situation where the LDS scout master was in my tent and my underwear was removed from my body. In other words, had I reported something improper to her and the bishop about being molested. I wanted to know if she would have believed me, supported me and fought for justice and punishment.
There was a lot of silence on the other end of the line. Finally, she said- Well, I can see why that would be a problem.
My Dad would have been furious. He not only would have gone to the police, but he would have taken the law into his own hands to defend my honor (He may have gone to jail for invoking vigilante justice).
Back to my Mom. She would have believed that no priesthood holder could do such harm. She would have sided with the church :(
I hate that that happened to you, messygoop. I assume that your mother believes you now.
My TBM SiL bragged for years that my brother "worked with the scouts" (she probably still brags about it, but they're shunning us).
I don't know how to describe the feeling I get -- not a premonition, just a bad vibe -- but it always makes me uneasy, because he was never a scout himself, and he has no sons to be in scouts. So I don't get his interest in scouts.
I can't help but wonder if the same "bishops" who stand by and allow children to be victimized like this, aren't warning their own children to stay away from the victims (lest they wind up with a licked cupcake).
Most Mormons lead sheltered lives. They cannot believe the evil that exists in this world until it happens to them. True evil comes as a wolf in sheep's clothing. Mormons imagine they can spot the wolf but they can't. Nobody can, that's why they are the wolf. Their fealty to the church gives them a false sense of security they are loathe to give up.
So due diligence really falls on the church. Making it harder for predators to have access is a step in the right direction. I think the policy changes are CYA. Do you think the church will teach that discernment doesn't do jack?
The only thing the Mormon church understands is money. When church leaders have to start paying out huge chunks of the $100 billion dollar trust fund to abuse survivors, they will start to understand.
I bet that if they started charging church leaders with felonious accessory after the fact and started threatening senior church leaders with significant jail time and felony convictions for failing to act in these circumstances that things would change post haste!
Nobody would want to be bishop due to the legal liability. I think the church needs to get off the high horse and stop selling its leadership as inspired servants of the Lord. The local leaders are regular people with regular jobs and they are faking it until they make it. The church builds these guys up to be super holy masters of the universe. It’s just asking for disaster.
The church is so misleading. In reality, the bishop should be the guy that overseas the sacrament service and calls people to help run the ward and leave it at that. No intimate interviews and no faking that you are some special representative of God with holy discernment and revelatory powers.
When you call a member of the ward to be a bishop with zero training you are asking for disaster. I worked with two bishops and they both said you get asked to take the calling. You are in shock. You accept. You are set apart and now you are the ecclesiastical leader of several hundred people. Yeah there’s a hand book but neither bishop told me it was useful. Bishops fly by the seat of their pants.
I’m sure these guys hear all sorts of stuff. I do know members say bad things to bishops about other members and sometimes it’s not true. Then there’s confidentiality. Then of course protecting the church from looking bad. The whole bishop hing is a mess. I have a friend who left the church after he served as bishop because of what he experienced. Sadly his wife divorced him.
Being a bishop took too much time. I used to meet with the bishop on Sunday afternoon/evening for reconciliation. That's where the bishop and I would quarrel over church mandated data/stats.
For instance, there was a monthly report that needed to be 100% correct when submitting it to SLC. And I had a local ward database, the stake had their database and then SLC had theirs. And it was made abundantly clear that local/stake data had better match SLC!
OMG what a freakin' nightmare.
Just to prepare for this pain in the butt meeting, I usually spent an hour at church printing out 3 copies of 9 lists; 2 were working copies and one was a corrected copy with amendments that the bishop would take to his meeting with the stake president.
In the middle of this meeting, his phone (before cell phones) would be ringing off the wall. Sister Tattle would call to report someone she saw shopping at the store. Sister Neverworthy would call to set up her 20th repentance meeting. Brother Overachiever would call the bishop because his other leaders wouldn't answer his home teaching calls.
This dumb meeting at his house ran 2-3 hours. He was usually eating dinner while my dinner sat in the oven- shriveling up. The wife usually left me a note. It read:
I am tired of waiting so I ate and went somewhere else. Ask God to end your meetings.
Stupid church and their relentless meetings. It nearly cost me my marriage.
I was renting a car recently and the associate couldn't get the dot matrix printer to work and was cursing the printer's vintage. I kept telling him to turn it off and on. He finally did and it worked fine.
Those printers are cheap to run and can last a long time.