Coggins7 wrote:1. If you did not, in essence, call him a liar here, what are you claiming about him?
2. Upon what criteria do you make such an assertion?
What did I, in essence, claim about him? Exactly what I said. That he, like many other human beings, is putting his own past actions in as favorable light as possible. It is the natural way in which we all cover our own asses. We minimize what makes us look bad in front of others and maximize what makes us look good.
On the balance, I see Tal's representation of Mr. Keyes as quite sympathetic, up to the point that Tal parts ways with him by leaving the LDS Church. In other unrelated stories, like the one about Keyes being mortified when a GA told a group of stake missionaries that stake missionaries are generally called to that position because they are losers, Tal casts Keyes in the role of someone who sees things much like he does (i.e., both he and Keyes were mortified by the GA's insensitivity).
What I do not get is the impression that Tal is consciously distorting his stories about Keyes in order to make Keyes look bad. He sees in the man a potential ally.
It is clear that Keyes, reading Tal's claims, is not comfortable in that role, and we can all understand why. If he is still serving as a stake president, it would be very damaging to members of his stake to read about their acting stake president having doubted Joseph Smith's honesty and motives for engaging in polygamy. So, Keyes carefully represents his version of the story such that any implication of doubt on his part is removed. I can imagine Keyes saying "you invented things I did not say," when he actually said something close enough to that for Tal to draw those conclusions.
Technically, Keyes is not lying in denying he said exactly what Tal says he said. I think Tal does sometimes stretch a bit in his powerful emotional response to this stuff. He is prone to hypebole. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Tal pulled this material out of thin air. To say that he was making this stuff up out of whole cloth is to attribute to him a level of maliciousness at the time that does not really stand scrutiny, especially when we understand that he seems to have quite liked Keyes.
Keyes probably did admit to doubting aspects of Joseph Smith's claims and behavior. And, although Tal took it as an admission that Keyes did not believe, he read too much into what Keyes was saying by doing so. At the same time, I do believe there is a certain culture of noblesse oblige among the leadership of the LDS Church that demands a greater deal of public profession of certainty than often actually exists. Keyes is probably prone to the same behavior. It seems he let down his guard a little too much around Tal, probably imagining that Tal, as a celebrity of sorts, would play within the rules. I am sure he now regrets having assumed that Tal would do so.
What can Keyes do at this point? What he does most of the time he speaks as a representative of the LDS Church in public. He expresses his certainty about his testimony. I do not find this damning of Tal's credibility. I do not blame Keyes for doing what he sees as his sacred duty. The two are in conflict on this, as one should expect, I would think.
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”