Mormon Temple
Credit: Salt Lake City Tours
Helen W. wasn’t born a Mormon, but she embraced the religion when she was 17 and it embraced her back.
When her son Alex was born with a heart defect and developmental disabilities, it was the Mormon Church that paid for his operations and treatments. When her second son, Zachary, was born eighteen months later, it was the members of her Martinsburg, West Virginia, congregation who helped find babysitters. And when Helen and her husband needed life guidance or wisdom, they turned to their bishop.
Bishops of the Mormon Church — or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it’s formally called — are laymen, not professional clerics. Helen’s bishop, Donald Fishel, had worked full-time as a utility company lineman before his retirement. But as a Mormon bishop, he played an all-encompassing role in his congregants’ lives.
A bishop oversees the spiritual well-being of his followers, instructing them how to act in accordance with the teachings of Mormonisms; and he oversees tithing, the practice of giving 10 […]
This Vice story is false in several important ways. Quoting from a news story about the issue: “‘[Family members’] statements to VICE are wildly different than (what they said in) police reports, depositions and court testimonies.’
“[Church spokesman Eric Hawkins] pointed to the example of a victim’s mother who told Vice that when she couldn’t reach the bishop about Jensen’s abuse, she called police.
“Hawkins said she testified differently in court, that when she couldn’t reach her congregation’s bishop, she instead called his first counselor in the bishopric.
“‘[But] She testified in court,’ Hawkins said, ‘that when she reported the abuse to him, he told her, ‘this is a crime,’ and provided her with the phone number so that she could call the police. The church leader then called the church help line, and the church then called the police to make sure a report had been made.'” The full story can be read here: https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900069024/latter-day-saint-spokesman-denounces-news-story-about-churchs-sexual-abuse-response.html
All I can tell . you, Paul is that the story was sent to me by a Mormon woman reader. Before I would run it, to make sure it was part of a trend as she said, and she was not exaggerating, I ran a Google News search, on “Mormon sexual abuse,” https://news.google.com/search?q=Mormon%20Sexual%20abuse&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen. I invite you to do the same.
Stephan, do you think I don’t keep up with what’s going on with this issue, LOL? Any institution of this size struggles with this. What’s interesting about the Vice story is that the “scandal” had nothing to do with the church, other than that the perpetrator happened to be a church member (but not operating in any church capacity or environment), and people involved reached out to church leaders for guidance. As far as the court record shows, the church leaders did what they should have, and the church STILL was attacked and sued, and it’s name smeared. Overall, the LDS church has a lower incidence of these evils than most–which a nationally-published story a few months back showed. If I can find it I’ll post it. As _most_ institutions in this category have, the church has made mistakes in dealing with these incidents but has worked hard in recent decades to rectify the problem. Yet as this case shows, at least _some_ of the accusations are misdirected, if not outright fishing expeditions trying to get hands into deep pockets.
Paul — As I told you the article was originally sent to me by a Mormon woman and, when I checked I found a long list of articles making similar claims. As to whether Mormons are worse about child sexual abuse than say Episcopalians I don’t know but you prompt me to do the research. We do know that according to two years of Google Trends data examined by Brock University researchers, that states that tended to be more religious were also searching for the word sex on the web more than other states, and according to Benjamin Edelman, a Harvard economics professor who reported his findings in the article “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” that Utah ranks No. 1 in porn subscriptions. I learned the other day, thanks to another Mormon reader who read the article in SR that there is even a category of porn designed for Mormons, Mormongirlz. For me, the main take away though is not specifically about Mormons but, rather, something I have posted numerous times on SR: Fundamentalist religions regardless of denomination correlate strongly with issues of sexual dysfunction. — Stephan