1) Dr. Ted Lyon admits that prior to his tenure as mission president in Chile, the missionaries bragged that they frequently baptized converts within two hours of initial contact, and sometimes even made up names and listed them as baptized converts. There may have been many thousands of such made-up baptisms! The activity rate for most of Latin America is only about 11 or 12 percent. He suggests that there may only be about 4 million active members in the LDS Church (cf. the official figure of 13 million members). [MormonStories]
2) Note from the Church to the Native Americans: you may not be Lamanites after all. Sorry we've been telling you you were for the past couple hundred years or so. It turns out your principal ancestors are probably actually from Mongolia, to which they may originally have migrated from that cursed land of Cain known as the Dark Continent. Don't worry; the priesthood ban is over now, so you don't have to turn in your temple recommends. [Deseret Morning News]
3) It turns out that that new apostle guy, Quentin Cook, helped Sutter Health bilk the state of California out of a couple million bucks. C'est la vie! [Mormons4Justice]
4) It turns out that bilking is something that happens a lot in Utah. The LDS Church urges you to be wary of con men like Joseph Smith and Quentin Cook. [Deseret Morning News]
5) Something else that happens a lot in Utah is suicide. The Mormons like to point out that the suicide rates for active young Mormon males in Utah are actually quite low, so it must be all the non-Mormons in Utah who are skewing the numbers. Good point, says ex-Mormon scholar Duwayne Anderson. So what is it about Utah that makes all the non-Mormons want to kill themselves? [Exmormon Conference (MP3), Mormon Discussions]
6) Mitt Romney won 89% of the Utah vote. I'm guessing it's because he has good hair. [The Spectrum]
7) When the First Presidency wrote this,
In 1995 we issued a Proclamation to the World on this matter, and have repeatedly reaffirmed that position. In that proclamation we said: "We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society." We urge our members to express themselves on this urgent matter to their elected representatives in the Senate.
what they actually meant was that members should "write to their senators with their personal views." They absolutely "did not request support or opposition to the amendment," even though that's how everyone interpreted it at the time, because that would be thoroughly tyrannical and unpatriotic! So you see, when Peter Danzig was run out of the Church for disagreeing on this issue, he actually left voluntarily because he's a dirty apostate. Did we mention that the filthy anti-Mormon Tribune article about Mr. Danzig lied when it said, even though it didn't really say this at all, that he was "officially disciplined" by the Church? We certainly did not mention that Danzig quit the Church in order to avoid a disciplinary council, because that would expose us as lying mind-Nazis! [Salt Lake Tribune/Official LDS Church Response/Equality Time Update]
8) In Provo, Mormon capital of the world, 90% of rapes are not reported to the police. The reason is apparently that "most Provo residents are religious and have a tendency to stigmatize discussion of sexual assault and sometimes to demonize the survivor." [Deseret Morning News]
9) "Hinckley's likely successor, Thomas S. Monson, said in a speech last year that women should seek secular education — not to pursue careers, but because their husbands might fall ill or die." [Denver Post]
10) Orem, UT-based Clean Flix owner Daniel Thompson, who sanitized movies for Mormon families for a living, was actually just using his business as a cover for a porn studio. He's now in jail for paying two 14-year-old girls twenty bucks for sexual favors. He should have promised them guaranteed exaltation for their whole families. That's how Joseph Smith seduced teen girls, and I guarantee you he never had to pay for sex. [Daily Herald/Deseret Morning News]