John Dehlin: A Spy Story

[_Fence Sitter]

I know it is a bit of a derail (Sorry Kish) but I am interested if either Prester John or hagoth7 have figured out how to do Google searches yet?

I mean if they haven't, isn't that evidence that at least two members are not spying on others by using the internet?

[_Kishkumen]

One thing that comes to my mind is that John did record conversations secretly and without the consent of the other party. That deserves to be noted if we are going to look at this in a balanced way.

Very true. It is also important to keep in mind the issue of the balance of power. The Church has the power to get rid of John whether he wants to be gone or not. They make the process opaque and break their own policies in order to get this done. The member has next to no power to seek redress. With the cards stacked that heavily against the individual member, I think John's trespass is a relatively minor issue.

[_fetchface]

Very true. It is also important to keep in mind the issue of the balance of power. The Church has the power to get rid of John whether he wants to be gone or not. They make the process opaque and break their own policies in order to get this done. The member has next to no power to seek redress. With the cards stacked that heavily against the individual member, I think John's trespass is a relatively minor issue.

I agree. The church places a very high value on its own privacy but has very little respect for the privacy of individuals. And it has the power when it comes to its members.

I just think it deserves acknowledgement. I don't begrudge John that recording any more than I would begrudge Joseph Smith his revolver.

[Guest]

I know it is a bit of a derail (Sorry Kish) but I am interested if either Prester John or hagoth7 have figured out how to do Google searches yet?

I can't speak for PJ, but my Etch-A-Sketch can't bring up anything called Google for some reason.

I mean if they haven't, isn't that evidence that at least two members are not spying on others by using the internet?

The only evidence you need is that spying on anyone about such things doesn't interest me and wouldn't sit well with me at all. I prefer to allow people the freedom to simply believe or disbelieve as they wish.

[_Mayan Elephant]

My EQP and some other members of my ward had started to spy on me and investigate me.. and attempted to gain entrance into some of the private forums I was entering. And, this all came out, and I became furious, and I felt like I was being spied on. And so, at that point I didn't feel welcome to go to Elders Quorum because these guys who had been spying on me without telling me were in the leadership there. And so, I would just go to sacrament meeting with my family. And that was true up through June of 2014. I was still actively attending sacrament meeting with my family and letting my kids be raised in the church.

well, that is one version of the story. a misleading version.

in june of 2012, john dehlin did an interview with Tom Phillips. i have said many times, it is, by far, dehlin's best work. it is but one example of what dehlin was doing at the time. it was widely available, even as dehlin was trying to walk the fancy balance of being both in/out of the church. dehlin was doing his part to antagonize the church while pretending to raise his kids in the church. he had a so-called repentance period around his child's baptism. while he says he was letting his kids be raised in the church, he had also sent a letter asking not to be contacted or considered a member of the church. this is not just being a sunstone celebrity, this was possibly seen as a trap to be used by dehlin later - which it was.

So, but, it was that fall, that, so going back... it was the fall of 2013... where L. Whitney Clayton reorganized my stake and called Brian King um, and, where Oaks gave that talk, and where I realized I could not just be silent anymore about the harm being done to LGBT people, and women and minorities, etc., and so I gave my TED Talk that November. I wrote my Ordain Women profile that December, I think, and then I got called into the bishop that January, February of 2014.

eh voila. dehlin was establishing a public position in contradiction to what he had been saying for a decade, and what he was pretending to be at church. long, long, long before this june 2014 date he refers to earlier. the bishop had to deal with this, and maybe he did it poorly and maybe he did it ethically. we do not really know.

Uh, man, I am not prepared... let me just see. So when Brian Hunt my bishop called me in in late January early February of 2014, he specifically mentioned my Ordain Women profile and my work on Progressive Mormonism which was a website I had created. Um, you know, trying to encourage a brand of Progressive Mormonism. And he basically just said, "Those things are a problem, and I am going to start an investigation." And by that point, I was just, I didn't have patience for another investigation, and I said, "You, Brian Hunt, can investigate me, but I will not be participating in that investigation." So, this is when I wrote him and said, "I will be attending sacrament meeting with my children, and I'll still remain a member of your ward, but for ecclesiastical reasons, you can just as well not consider me a member of the ward, because I won't be interacting with you anymore as my ecclesiastical leader, if you're going to conduct yet another investigation after all of the investigations I had already had.

hunt was upfront that he was going to look into the public aspects of dehlin. not sure how this is considered spying or stalking. dehlin did not want to participate, and yet he wanted to antagonize. what the hell is hunt supposed to do here? again though, what we have here is one version and it may be hearsay.

Yeah. Just tired. Just tired, and, yeah, I was angry. But the crazy thing is I was still committed to activity, so I was still raising my kids in the church and I was still attending sacrament meeting. But I just, the investigations really just got to me, you know. You know, a member... a guy who lives on my street, who was EQP, would be home-teaching me and acting like he loved me and my family and then he would be secretly gathering, you know, Tweets and Facebook comments and trying to get into secret forums and then turning all that information in to try and get me excommunicated.

tweets and Facebook comments are publicly available.

So it was...and that same EQP told me his grandpa had been excommunicated and that it was the best thing that ever happened to him, and that if he ever had to excommunicate me, or had to help contribute to my excommunication, he would consider it an honor to have played a part in that because he would feel like excommunication at that point would have been God's will and he would have been helping, you know, perform God's will. And he told me that himself! You know, and that was just a really twisted, sick way to be my EQP, and my, you know, ecclesiastical leader, from my point of view.

unsubstantiated. and how the hell does this make any sense? john asked for no contact. and yet he still had home teachers? i have seen other comments where he did not allow home teachers. there are so many contradictions and all we have is john's version of this.

From what I am able to piece together of this interview, it appears that L. Whitney Clayton reorganized John's stake, placed King in as stake president (the man who would ultimately excommunicate John), and John's bishop called John in to tell him that he was going to investigate John. John declined to participate. Then his EQP, a neighbor, started gathering information from John's Tweets and Facebook page, and tried to get into different private online forums under false pretenses to gather yet more information about John. At the same time, this EQP is home-teaching John's family, acting compassionate toward John, and yet telling him it will be an honor to participate in John's excommunication should it come to that.

that^^^ is a conspiratorial version of events. it excludes all the activity that john was doing, the traction of the phillips interview, the ted stuff and the extreme about-face. it excludes john living off of donations for an antagonist rag, Mormon stories. it excludes the valid distrust others have in john, because of his inclination to play all these relationships for press coverage.

[_Mayan Elephant]

One thing that comes to my mind is that John did record conversations secretly and without the consent of the other party. That deserves to be noted if we are going to look at this in a balanced way.

Very true. It is also important to keep in mind the issue of the balance of power. The Church has the power to get rid of John whether he wants to be gone or not. They make the process opaque and break their own policies in order to get this done. The member has next to no power to seek redress. With the cards stacked that heavily against the individual member, I think John's trespass is a relatively minor issue.

it is also important to keep in mind the TOTALITY of the balance of power, and not just one aspect of it. the church does not have the power to get rid of john whenever it wants, it has a process for getting rid of anyone and it can choose to follow or not follow that process. we have established that there are different views of how that was done, but there was a process followed.

the member has next to no power? are you effing kidding me? look pal, with all due respect, i have been on the wrong side of a lot of church courts. more than you can imagine. i am ashamed of it. but that comment is absolute BS in this case. the cards stacked heavily against john? BULLSHIIIIIIIIIIT! john was running a media campaign that was unmatched by the church. unmatched. john's trespass is not a minor issue given the scope and personal nature of it, including PUBLISHING DR. KINGS PROFESSIONAL information to have his followers slam his reviews. do not say stacked against or diminish the unethical nature of what dehlin was doing to volunteers and lay members along with his propaganda against the church.

[_Mayan Elephant]

conflation. i do not agree with bot much. however, the conflation of spying and the dehlin's "autobiography" is problematic for real people, including quinn, in my opinion.

Hey, Mayan E:

I am not clear on what you are trying to say here. What do you mean by the conflation of spying and Dehlin's autobiography?

And, also, what do you mean when you say that whatever this is is a problem for Quinn too?

the conflation is this. spying and snitching are bad, yes. we agree. and it occurs, we agree. saying this is the case with dehlin base on his version of his history is just lunacy at best. spinning those together is a conflation of two unrelated events.

problematic for real people and quinn? john is the master of making himself the center of attention by making him the victim and advocate for others. he is a victim for what he said about lgbt people when he changed his stripes. he is the victim for what he said about women when he got around to it. and now, he is the victim of spygate and snitching now that it suits him.

this kind of advocacy is just self-aggrandizing and one we addressed ad nauseum about his whole spin and BS about pretending to be exed for advocating for gays. he was not a victim of snitching and spying, he was the victim of creating his own dossier and insults about people and then having that done to him.

[_Mayan Elephant]

Now John has done a lengthy miniseries of interviews with folks like Dan Wotherspoon and Gina Colvin that go into great depth on where John is today and how he got there. One bit from part 3 ........

and that, my friend, is the exclamation here. this is an interview about john and about john and about john and about john and about john. it is not about spying. it is not a connection to practices of Arthur Zander or the practices of hauling in a young woman because some young man or young woman in the stake confessed to heavy petting with her. it is not even on the spectrum.

this is a case of a man, running a business and a campaign, who even after one year, cannot stand to be outside the concentration of attention. a man who still fails to acknowledge even ONE IOTA of his own role in anything that ever happened to him. who now does hours of interviews pretending that he suffered from the things that are done that actually do harm to real people. eff him. the joke is up.

[_Fence Sitter]

The only evidence you need is that spying on anyone about such things doesn't interest me and wouldn't sit well with me at all. I prefer to allow people the freedom to simply believe or disbelieve as they wish.

I know right? I mean who wants to think their dear and beloved church leaders might actually worry enough about their positions of power to start up an innocuous and definitely not insidious sounding "Strengthening Church Members Committee" just to keep tab on members who might be publicly disagreeing with them?

Stick with the Etch-a-Sketch

[_Kishkumen]

well, that is one version of the story. a misleading version.

in june of 2012, john dehlin did an interview with Tom Phillips. i have said many times, it is, by far, dehlin's best work. it is but one example of what dehlin was doing at the time. it was widely available, even as dehlin was trying to walk the fancy balance of being both in/out of the church. dehlin was doing his part to antagonize the church while pretending to raise his kids in the church. he had a so-called repentance period around his child's baptism. while he says he was letting his kids be raised in the church, he had also sent a letter asking not to be contacted or considered a member of the church. this is not just being a sunstone celebrity, this was possibly seen as a trap to be used by dehlin later - which it was.

The interview you refer to was put up and taken down and eventually, after his excommunication, put up again. So, the history is not as clearcut as you present it. I seem to recall that the interview's first release was more informal and subsequently it was taken down. In any case, the history on the interview is more complicated in ways that actually reflect John's ambivalence about it.

The whole bit about "pretending" to raise his kids in the Church is petty viciousness, or, at least, it appears so. You drop these bombs habitually, and usually don't back them up. It is gratuitous nonsense that does not help your argument. Furthermore, your idea that John "set a trap" by asking not to be contacted by the bishop strikes me as odd. From my point of view it looks like a natural reaction to an interview in which you are informed that your bishop is going to investigate you. Why would he, or anyone else, desire contact with the guy who is investigating him?

So, in this short narrative, we have a lot of heavy eisegesis regarding John's sinister motives and falseness. I don't see anything that really tarnishes John's credibility.

eh voila. dehlin was establishing a public position in contradiction to what he had been saying for a decade, and what he was pretending to be at church. long, long, long before this june 2014 date he refers to earlier. the bishop had to deal with this, and maybe he did it poorly and maybe he did it ethically. we do not really know.

Again, John is a cynical mastermind, not some guy whose opinions change. He explains in the interview the the prior stake president's pastoral approach had really moved him and that he was committed to giving the Church another chance. I don't see any reason to disbelieve that. Like John, I have gone back and forth on these kinds of issues. Usually what drags me back into a dark place with regard to the LDS Church is the Church's participation in the Culture Wars--the very stuff Dehlin is talking about.

So, what's not to believe? The guy has shifted back and forth right in front of the whole world, and this makes his version of the story believable. The cynical tale of John the mastermind chess player is laughable.

hunt was upfront that he was going to look into the public aspects of dehlin. not sure how this is considered spying or stalking. dehlin did not want to participate, and yet he wanted to antagonize. what the hell is hunt supposed to do here? again though, what we have here is one version and it may be hearsay.

Why should anyone want to go through endless investigations by ecclesiastical leaders? You act as though he should just submit. You seem to think that by investigation, John should have expected that his EQP would be trying to gain entrance into private discussion boards under false pretenses to dig up information on him. None of this is anywhere close to being ethical, and yet you seem to find it acceptable.

Maybe it is to be expected, but that is different from it being acceptable. And while I can agree with you that crocodile tears fall when a Mormon celebrity provokes the LDS Church into behaving like the LDS Church, that does not change the poor ethics of the LDS Church's actions one whit. Stick your hand in the viper's den and get bit. Yes. Got it. But this is not just a viper. It is a human organization that can be influenced to act more or less ethically, and more ethically is preferable to less.

tweets and Facebook comments are publicly available.

Private discussion groups are private. Collecting Tweets and Facebook comments is still stalker behavior.

unsubstantiated. and how the hell does this make any sense? john asked for no contact. and yet he still had home teachers? i have seen other comments where he did not allow home teachers. there are so many contradictions and all we have is john's version of this.

It could be, and is likely the case, that there is some confusion on the timeline. Was the EQP home teaching at the same time he was spying? We don't know. I don't see anything unbelievable about this in any case. There is too much we don't know about the history of his relationship with his neighbor, the timeline, etc. I would be looking for a good reason to disbelieve it, and I am not seeing it yet. If you can establish that John had refused home teachers and yet claimed at the same time that this guy was his home teacher, that would help.

that^^^ is a conspiratorial version of events. it excludes all the activity that john was doing, the traction of the phillips interview, the ted stuff and the extreme about-face. it excludes john living off of donations for an antagonist rag, Mormon stories. it excludes the valid distrust others have in john, because of his inclination to play all these relationships for press coverage.

You and your "conspiracies." There is a difference between a "conspiratorial" version of events and a partial one. I have not excluded from the overall presentation the Ted Talk, the Ordain Women profile, or any of this stuff. John states it himself and I quoted him. What I was doing was distilling the Church's side of things. There is nothing wrong with that, and I have not misrepresented anything in doing so. I did my best to synthesize one angle of the story, because I take it for granted that my presentation of the other facts is honest.

The Phillips interview thing is more complicated than you make it out to be. The living off donations crap is just one more of your diversionary attacks. What does it mean? Does the Church forbid people to run non-profit organizations, collect donations, and derive support from them? John was very open about all of that. If you didn't want to donate, no one was holding a gun to your head. Try to stick to what is pertinent.

So far, I'm not impressed. Your narrative is full of empty rhetoric, attacks on John's character, loose inferences, and so forth. All it says to me is that you think John deserved whatever the Church threw at him, however it chose to do so.