SALT LAKE CITY- A Mormon man who gained notoriety over the past decade for running a website that offers doubting Latter-day Saints a forum to chat has been kicked out of the religion. John Dehlin announced the decision from regional church leaders...Regional church leaders in North Logan told Dehlin in a letter that they made a unanimous decision to excommunicate him for apostasy.
#1...ALL of those "regional church leaders" in Logan -- where Dehlin was a Mormon church member -- are lay people.
#2...given the national media coverage the church knew that this excommunication would elicit, 'twas no way it was a decision made at the "regional" or local level...by fellow "lay people."
#3...this is born out in the very location of the story...the first words out of the shoot in this article reads "Salt Lake City."
Dehlin didn't live in SLC; and the supposed excommunicators were in Logan, which is NOT a suburb of SLC and is, in fact, over 80 miles away.
So, the Mormon Church's transparency-by-gaffe attempt to make this out to be some "local" decision shows itself to be a farce, which is itself scandalous of its general authorities in SLC. This was not only evident in articles like this thread, but was shown in Wednesday's article that ran in two Lds-owned media venues -- KSL.com and The Deseret News.
The article -- see Mormon Stories founder Dehlin's spread of 'false concepts' results in excommunication from LDS Church -- ran in both outlets and carried, therefore, the same spin...
In those articles, it claimed from an Lds HQ "statement" -- which was a very minor part of the article and was buried in the article -- that "church discipline is a local issue"
Otherwise, the piece from the get-go took great pains to present the whole thing as "local" very early in the article...
..."his LOCAL church leader..."
..."North Logan Utah stake president..." (Dehlin's stake)
and then the local "council" this and "council" that...
YET the author Tad Walch -- gave a "giveaway clue" to the whole thing.
Like this article in the Fayetteville Observer, Walch and his editors gave the dateline location as "Salt Lake City" -- even though the actions were supposedly about what a North Logan stake president and his North Logan "council" "decided."
Why would "Salt Lake City" be the epicenter of this article?
There'd be no need for that...unless, of course, the Lds general authorities were 100% running the show from "Salt Lake City!"
Ethics' lesson: When Lds general authorities aren't "ethical" and show integrity about basic facts of who's doing the decision-making...
...when they sign off on PR-pieces-masquerading -as-news-articles that carry a "Salt Lake City" acknowledgement -- therefore partially unveiling who's really pushing the buttons while otherwise totally undermining the narrative thrust of the PR piece...
...yet when they fail then in trying to slouch this decision off as one in the proper chain of command...
...it goes beyond farcical
Grassroots Mormons -- if they had any sense of accountability -- should demand that heads should roll unless greater transparency comes out of Salt Lake City.
(Don't look for that anytime soon in hierarchical Utah, especially coming after a grassroots "dissenter's" dismissal)
in before the flood of people who mistake you for a current mormon.
May I have the ‘throwing size rocks’ monopoly in Utah for the next week?
PLEEEZE!
Well...of course it came from S.L.