Uchtdorf violates Church policy on political neutrality

[Shulem]

so perhaps Mrs. Utchdorf misremembered that the policy applies only to the FP and used her husband’s name because she’s from an era where the husband’s name was used for all financial transactions.

Hold on, the policy applies to the presiding officers of the Church, hence the so-called "oversight" made by Utchdorf's family while he was a member of the Twelve after having left the First Presidency in January of 2018. The contributions were made while Utchdorf was in the Quorum of the Twelve. There is no doubt in my mind that Utchdorf and his wife were thoroughly briefed and reminded of the policy, probably on an annual basis, and likely signed something to that effect.

Right?

[Shulem]

To get to “oversight” as an explanation, someone has to forget both the church’s neutrality rules and mistakenly state that Dieter was the donor when he wasn’t.

They didn't forget. He's making an excuse to cover his sorry ass. He's lying. They know about the policy but the button was clicked multiple times and the donations were sent. Up with the rules!

[IHAQ]

For example, my wife and I share a PayPal account that is in her name because we originally set it up. But when I use the account to make an online donation, whether through a campaign website or a site like Act Blue, it doesn’t just record the donation as being from her. The campaigns have to report to the FEC and they know that’s it’s illegal for them to accept donations that violate the limits. So they specifically ask for the name and address of person making the donation.

So, just “sharing an account” explains nothing about what happened here. The donations were made directly to several campaigns and through Act Blue — in otherwords, to different organizations. Each one would have asked for the name and address of the donor.

To get to “oversight” as an explanation, someone has to forget both the church’s neutrality rules and mistakenly state that Dieter was the donor when he wasn’t. I’m a big fan of Hanlon’s Razor, so perhaps Mrs. Utchdorf misremembered that the policy applies only to the FP and used her husband’s name because she’s from an era where the husband’s name was used for all financial transactions. And maybe Dieter wasn’t paying close attention to his family finances during election season. But when I try to persuade myself that “oversight” is an honest and accurate description of what happened, I can feel Hanlon giving the side eye.

I'm struggling to see anything other than Uchtdorfs bland and brief "sorry, it was an oversight" as an attempt to not tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If he's so thoughtless about managing his own personal spending should he really be in a position of trust over hundreds of billions of dollars of donated funds?

[Res Ipsa]

so perhaps Mrs. Utchdorf misremembered that the policy applies only to the FP and used her husband’s name because she’s from an era where the husband’s name was used for all financial transactions.

Hold on, the policy applies to the presiding officers of the Church, hence the so-called "oversight" made by Utchdorf's family while he was a member of the Twelve after having left the First Presidency in January of 2018. The contributions were made while Utchdorf was in the Quorum of the Twelve. There is no doubt in my mind that Utchdorf and his wife were thoroughly briefed and reminded of the policy, probably on an annual basis, and likely signed something to that effect.

Right?

Partly right. The policy applies to Mr. and Mrs. Utchdorf, s he is in the Q12. However, one possibility is that whoever made the donation misremembered the policy, thinking it applied only to the FP, but not to apostles. This is the kind of mistake that human brains regularly make — even on important facts. Human memory is incredibly fallible, especially when recalling the details of a written policy.

One of the most interesting things about my legal career is experiencing how common it is for people to make innocent mistakes, innocently misremember events, etc. Most of my career has consisted of figuring out complex factual situations and applying them to often Byzantine insurance policy language. My mentor, when I was first introduced to this specialized legal practice, was a well-practiced curmudgeon. He was well known for growling his number one rule: “Read the god-damned policy.”

And he was right. Even experienced claim handlers get claims wrong because they misremembered some piece of policy language. And even after doing this for 35 years, I always read the policy when evaluating claims, even forms I’ve worked with many times, because I have seen how easy it is for a brain to misremember something.

So, unless whoever made the donations actually read the policy right before donating, misremembering the policy is a perfectly plausible explanation for what happened. It’s plausible because it’s consistent with what brains typically do during normal operation.

More life experience. Part of my practice has been in insurance fraud investigation. Once the brain thinks it has found something and someone suspicious, confirmation bias sets in hard. You have to work very hard to figure out contrary explanations because your brain does not want to do it.

There are warning flags that help spot motivated reasoning. One is when you start bolstering your preliminary conclusions with assumptions based on what you think must be true. If you follow that path, you are virtually certain to reach the wrong conclusion.

So, when you say “there is no doubt in my mind that,” a little red flag pops up in my brain that says “motivated reasoning.” The fact is, I have no idea how the election neutrality policy is presented to the Q12 and the FP, how often it is discussed, or the detail in which it is discussed. And, unless you have actual evidence of any of this, then not only should you have doubt in your mind, you should have no opinion on those facts. They are facts to be investigated, not conclusions to be reached.

After the fact, it’s easy to say “they must have remembered X.” But, in fact, to say that, you have to ignore almost everything we’ve discovered about how the brain works.

There are portions of the neutrality policy that are extremely important to the organization — the ones that put its tax exempt status at risk. The donation policy is not one of those. A perfectly plausible scenario in this case is that whoever made the donations remembered that there was something about donations, but none of the specifics. So they googled the IRS regulations and saw the donation was legal and had no effect on tax exempt status. But they forgot that portions of the policy are more restrictive than the IRS rules. Again, these are common mistakes that brains make.

So, when I get to the end of your post, I have to say “not right.” The evidence to date is nowhere near sufficient to conclude that the donations represent an intentional violation of the neutrality. It takes highly motivated reasoning to get there.

[The Stig]

Aside from the schadenfreude I will derive from seeing the meltdown of members of the LDS Chuch who have long since demonstrated that their REAL religion is the U.S. Republican Party, I see this as a harmless and honest mistake.

[Res Ipsa]

For example, my wife and I share a PayPal account that is in her name because we originally set it up. But when I use the account to make an online donation, whether through a campaign website or a site like Act Blue, it doesn’t just record the donation as being from her. The campaigns have to report to the FEC and they know that’s it’s illegal for them to accept donations that violate the limits. So they specifically ask for the name and address of person making the donation.

So, just “sharing an account” explains nothing about what happened here. The donations were made directly to several campaigns and through Act Blue — in otherwords, to different organizations. Each one would have asked for the name and address of the donor.

To get to “oversight” as an explanation, someone has to forget both the church’s neutrality rules and mistakenly state that Dieter was the donor when he wasn’t. I’m a big fan of Hanlon’s Razor, so perhaps Mrs. Utchdorf misremembered that the policy applies only to the FP and used her husband’s name because she’s from an era where the husband’s name was used for all financial transactions. And maybe Dieter wasn’t paying close attention to his family finances during election season. But when I try to persuade myself that “oversight” is an honest and accurate description of what happened, I can feel Hanlon giving the side eye.

I'm struggling to see anything other than Uchtdorfs bland and brief "sorry, it was an oversight" as an attempt to not tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If he's so thoughtless about managing his own personal spending should he really be in a position of trust over hundreds of billions of dollars of donated funds?

Well, clearly "oversight" isn't the "whole truth." It's a conclusory, descriptive term and not a recitation of any facts. If I were to make a guess on the information we have alone, I'd guess that "oversight" is a face-saving term for "somebody made an embarrassingly stupid mistake." If I were an investigator, it's the kind of comment that would lead me to say "we need to take a look at the specifics on this." After all, one of the possibilities is that "oversight" seems to me to be a poor fitting term is my own idiosyncratic of what constitutes an "oversight."

As to your conclusion, it's based on unstated and unwarranted assumptions. We've got brains that evolved mainly on the plains of Africa. The part of our brain in which reasoning occurs is the newest part of the brain, and is very fragile. It is incredibly easy to distract or overload that part of the brain so that it doesn't function properly.

Think of all the data that hits your brain every second. It is impossible for the part of your brain in which reasoning takes place to process all of that data. So, parts of your brain that you aren't conscious of heavily filter that data before it is passed on to the part that reasons. I mean really filter. The brain doesn't show you what the world looks like at the time the data were created. It projects what it thinks the world would look like slightly in the future to account for the time it takes to receive and process the data. If it didn't do this, you couldn't drive a car. When you shift your focus from one point to another, it edits out the blurred image you get on a videocamera when you do the same thing.

Most important in this case, it edits out stuff that it doesn't think are important or that it doesn't expect to be there. So, I'm guessing we've all seen some flavor of the basketball attention video. If you haven't, stop, go here, and watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB_lTKZm1Ts

What comes to our attention is heavily influenced by what you're looking for. How good are you at proofreading your own writing? Typically, its easier for someone else to find mistakes in your writing than you can. I was taught to proofread in college in a two-person team. One reads the text aloud to the other. For some reason, seeing and hearing a mistake at the same time is more likely to bring the error to one's attention. I still proofread all my writing by having my computer read me the text while I read the text off of the page.

What the unconscious filtering processes flag for the part of the brain in which reasoning occurs is heavily dependent on what the brain expects to find. We don't know what Dieter's practices are with respect to reviewing his checkbook. I used to balance mine every month faithfully. With my bank now reconciling transactions for me that I can view on a screen, I don't do that anymore. I review the transactions from time to time.

Given how our brains work, it's completely plausible that whenever Dieter reviewed that account, the filtering process simply never called the campaign donations to his attention. Or he misrecalled the details of the policy. These types of mistakes are absolute expected given what we know about how our brains work. I make them. You make them. (Thankfully, confirmation bias helps us ignore or forget how many we make.) Accounts make them. Hedge fund managers make them. That's one reason you build redundancy, overlap and oversight into financial control system.

If you disqualified every person who made a mistake like those I've described from being involved in financial management, everyone on earth would be disqualified from financial management. Brains make mistakes. You can't fix that by hiring brains that don't make mistakes. You fix it by having different brains involved tasks that are critically important.

So, no. Nothing about this incident would warrant the conclusion that Dieter should be disqualified from involvement in church finances. Making that kind of jump is almost a variation of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. If you were designing a financial system from the start, you would not include "never makes an error in personal finances" as a job requirement. To decide it is a job requirement after discovering a mistake is drawing the target around an arrow that has already been shot.

[Res Ipsa]

Aside from the schadenfreude I will derive from seeing the meltdown of members of the LDS Chuch who have long since demonstrated that their REAL religion is the U.S. Republican Party, I see this as a harmless and honest mistake.

If I had to reach a final conclusion on the facts we have, I think that's where I'd come out. To "harmless and honest" I'd also add "embarrassing."

[Shulem]

Not buying it.

Uchtdorf and his wife were adequately reminded that Church Policy requires them to give up certain rights afforded to ordinary citizens on condition that they continue to serve in the capacity in which they are entrusted. The Church on an annual basis or otherwise, during elections, reminds its members by reading the so-called Political Neutrality policy over the pulpit and releasing it in the Newsroom. Members are reminded of these policies on a regular basis.

The General Authorities forfeit their right to make political contributions because Church Policy demands it -- nothing less. It's not a matter of debate or discussion. The thinking has been done and the leaders have no choice but to abide by the conditions set forth by the policy. The human brain does not forget this kind of stuff! Why? Because it's practically an assault on ones personal liberties enjoyed by freedom loving people everywhere. It surely must sting! The General Authorities and their wives are stripped of their basic right to contribute to the politicians of their choice. That surely must sting. One doesn't forget that, ever!

Surely, these things are discussed in General Authority circles in a solemn manner and it is made perfectly clear that every member understands their responsibility and commitment in abiding by the policies prescribed by the Church. The Uchtdorfs got the bulletin and were well aware of their responsibilities and their willingness to forfeit their rights as prescribed by the Church:

Updated January 22, 2019

In addition, the First Presidency letter issued on June 16, 2011, which is a re-statement and further clarification of the Church’s position on political neutrality. The policy applies to all full-time General Authorities, General Auxiliary Presidencies, mission presidents, and temple presidents and should limit their personal participation in all political party activities. The policy is not directed to full-time Church employees.

"General Authorities and general officers of the Church and their spouses and other ecclesiastical leaders serving full-time should not personally participate in political campaigns, including promoting candidates, fundraising, speaking in behalf of or otherwise endorsing candidates, and making financial contributions.

"Since they are not full-time officers of the Church, Area Seventies, stake presidents and bishops are free to contribute, serve on campaign committees and otherwise support candidates of their choice with the understanding they:

• Are acting solely as individual citizens in the democratic process and that they do not imply, or allow others to infer, that their actions or support in any way represent the church.

• Will not use Church stationery, Church-generated address lists or email systems or Church buildings for political promotional purposes.

• Will not engage in fundraising or other types of campaigning focused on fellow Church members under their ecclesiastical supervision."

[Shulem]

Newsroom Political Neutrality

General Authorities and general officers of the Church and their spouses and other ecclesiastical leaders serving full-time should not personally participate in political campaigns, including promoting candidates, fundraising, speaking in behalf of or otherwise endorsing candidates, and making financial contributions.

We'll do as we damn please, isn't that right, honey?




Oversight, my ASS!

[Shulem]

Aside from the schadenfreude I will derive from seeing the meltdown of members of the LDS Chuch who have long since demonstrated that their REAL religion is the U.S. Republican Party, I see this as a harmless and honest mistake.

If I had to reach a final conclusion on the facts we have, I think that's where I'd come out. To "harmless and honest" I'd also add "embarrassing."

Harmless and honest, my ass! What is wrong with you people? Where the hell is RFM? Consig, where the hell are YOU? It was a direct violation of the mandate they were committed to live by. They broke their covenants and will be answering to the First Presidency. The mandates were clear and precise and are something one doesn't just forget seeing they infringe on their basic rights as free citizens:

General Authorities and general officers of the Church and their spouses and other ecclesiastical leaders serving full-time should not:

1) personally participate in political campaigns
2) including promoting candidates
3) fundraising
4) speaking in behalf of or otherwise endorsing candidates
5) and making financial contributions

These are not commitments one simply forgets. It was in effect a contract in order to maintain their position in the Church. They violated their contract and broke a solemn trust.

They will be punished, rest assured.