Polyblogger Takes on DNews

The Salt Lake Tribune posted a blog and gave my blog a shout-out:

http://blogs.sltrib.com/slcrawler/2008/11/polyg-blogger-takes-on-dnews.htm



Polygamous blogger Moroni Jessop (his name, alone, is a road map of western polygamy) fires back at the Mormon church-owned Deseret News after its TV critic Scott Pierce slammed a documentary of Jessop's family.

Pierce says Forbidden Love on TLC is not only "laughably bad" television, but reporter Dawn Porter "is apparently incapable of spending 30 seconds doing research on the Internet."

Porter is also incapable of understanding that Mormons do not practice polygamy. That it was abandoned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1896.

What Porter says in the film that Pierce finds ridiculous is this:

Polygamy means one husband and lots of wives. It's a basic tenet of the Mormon Church. Now it's outlawed, but many fundamentalist Mormons hide out in the middle of nowhere in Utah and the states around it.

The issue here, of course, is who gets to define what "true" Mormonism is, the church headquartered in Salt Lake City, or the so-called fundamentalists like Jessop who are scattered throughout the West?

Jessop, who says he has "two wives and many happy children," (above) critiques the critic, calling Pierce a "Mormon Twit/Journalist," and his review of Forbidden Love simply LDS church propaganda:


. . . Maybe Dawn called us Mormons, because WE call ourselves Mormons. Arguably, we have more right to call ourselves “Mormons” than the ever-morphing LDS Church. We claim and teach all the old foundational teachings of the early founders of the Mormon church whereas the LDS Church has compromised their tenets to appear more mainstream and palatable to society.

The two articles are a point-counterpoint package that you might find more entertaining than the original film.


Here was one of the comments that an anonymous poster made:

"All I need to know about this show I can gather from the picture: A semi-literate polyg clan standing in front of a double wide.it's like something right out of "Deliverance".Wow. Nothing makes polygammy more atractive than mobile homes."


And here is my glorious response:

"I enjoyed your blog. But I especially enjoyed being called "semi-literate" by someone who cannot even spell "polygammy". The sad fact that I live in a trailer has nothing to do with how literate I am."