This needs its own thread - Mormon Think -Daily Beast

[_Tobin]

Roger Ebert has tweeted a link to the article. 717,000 followers.

The timing sure seems suspicious. MT has been around for years, with lots of articles critical to the church, and the church never lifted a finger against this guy. He puts up something critical of Romney and the church's political involvement, and bam, all of a sudden they are bullying him behind closed doors and scheduling a church court. Obviously, there is probably a lot more to the story, but the coincidental timing does not look good for the church.

I agree with Ms. Jack that the Daily Beast's characterization is totally misleading.

I'm no fan of Romney, even though he is my second cousin. But the linked article traduces the way the Mormon church intrudes into politics rather than criticizes Romney for being a puppet of Pres. Monson.

I'm don't know whether it is necessarily accurate to use Harry Reid as an example of why certain LDS leaders should not be going after Twede for his political view. The Church would be rather foolish to go after Reid and they know it (and I'm sure some of the leaders would love to because of his political views). But I do agree that MT has had it coming for a while. I'm actually suprised it took this long for Mormon leaders to react. I think Twede's political views ARE a factor, but as MsJack pointed out - there are other issues involved as well.

[_Cicero]

And if they are willingly allowing the media to craft this disingenuous narrative of persecution for criticizing Romney (as it appears they are), then my respect for them is really about to fall into the toilet.

I think the reality is that the general public only cares about Mormonism as it relates to Mitt Romney. Who will care about some unknown member who is being exed for criticizing the church? Without the Romney angle the media can't sell this story.

Right, but we all know that they aren't going after him for what he said about Romney. The fact that Twede (and perhaps others at MT) appears to be willing to let the media characterize this as related to Romney in order to gain publicity is very disturbing to me.

[_3sheets2thewind]

I haven't got my email from mormonvoices telling me to go post

[_Aristotle Smith]

And if they are willingly allowing the media to craft this disingenuous narrative of persecution for criticizing Romney (as it appears they are), then my respect for them is really about to fall into the toilet.

Right, but we all know that they aren't going after him for what he said about Romney. The fact that Twede (and perhaps others at MT) appears to be willing to let the media characterize this as related to Romney in order to gain publicity is very disturbing to me.

I think there is another possibility here. It's possible that Twede is the one crafting the narrative here, that it is he that is the one claiming persecution for criticizing Romney. The Mormon excommunication experience is completely foreign to outsiders, so unless the Daily Beast has ex-Mo or Mormon staff writers, they are going to be dependent on Twede for their knowledge of the what is going on. They can't ask the LDS church because the church has been remarkably consistent about not talking about excommunication proceedings. This leaves the very real possibility that Twede's main motivation this whole time is to get his 15 minutes of fame to try and influence the election.

This would also explain the curious timing of the whole thing. It may not be the LDS church instigating this, but rather the LDS church taking Twede's bait. And because the LDS church has been consistently silent on these types of things, it would be relatively easy for Twede to play both sides. The LDS officials may think they are going after a member who shows up out of the blue with temple material on his website, while the Daily Beast thinks the LDS officials are going after Twede for political reasons.

As far as I can tell the political postings, the reinstatement of the temple stuff, Twede's blog, and Twede's mysterious reactivation all happened at the same time. That's a little too coincidental for my tastes.

If this is true, the MormonThink board needs to ditch this guy ASAP. They have a really good resource that is about to be nuked with petty political maneuverings that no one will remember 6 months from now.

[_3sheets2thewind]

Much to bcspace utter disappointment, the Church will not go after Reid.

The Church will not do this, because the Church does not the IRS coming after it. Several years ago Catholic Bishops were publicly speakinig about denying politicians communion, allmost immediately the specter of the IRS and loss of tax exemption was raised - the Catholic Bishops soon went silent.

[_Tim]

I agree that Twede is pulling the strings here.

If he is in fact just trying to smear Romney, it's not working. As the Daily Beast frames the story it does make the church look bad, but only to outsiders. Unless they've got a tape recording of Romney telling someone to kick this guy out, it doesn't really hurt him.

This may not be the last story written on the subject. If the others don't dig deeper or move off the Romney angle I'd say Twede blew it.

[Guest]

If one wanted to smear Romney, they need only use bcspace, who state definatively that good Mormon can not be or vote for a Democrat.

[Guest]

The Church--whether FAIRites or active digging by his ecclesiasticals--has sought to bust his semi-anonymity. Too bad they cannot respect David as much as he is respecting them--and as much as David is willing to respect their identities even in the face of their disrespect of his.

how did they do that, anyway?

i've heard about many occassion where an anonymous blogger was outed, but i've never heard a detailed account of how it was done. i can think of lots of things that would give you little clues but not enough to narrow down to one exact person, unless maybe it was someone already well known for something else. if i were trying to discover someone i'd think the easiest thing would be to work a confidence scheme -- pose as a friend and try to get them to tell you in real life information so you can talk to them offline.

[_Bob Loblaw]

I agree that the story's angle that they are getting heat for criticizing Romney is way off base, but it's not surprising.

[_palerobber]

A big question is who were these two "Church executives" with the Bishop and Stake President? David needs to provide more information on who these two guys were. Were they just 1st or 2nd counselors to the Bish or SP? If not, then who were they representing and why were they there?

My guess is that its just "non-mormon" speak for the stake president's counselors.

or high councilors, i.e. people on the stake executive committee.