This Week in Mormons

This Week in Mormons


EP 446 – The Misadventures of Pierre Delecto

October 22, 2019

It's been a week of humorous highs and sobering lows when it comes to Latter-day Saint related news. Our international correspondent, Josie Gleave, is with us to has it all out.

Let's talk about Pierre. It seems one Willard "Mitt" Romney has been skulking about the depths of Twitter using a pseudonym, according to a great new profile by friend of TWiM, McKay Coppins. However, what was a cursory mention of said Twitter lurking led Slate to investigate further, and they have discovered Romney's secret life! Mitt Romney has, narrowly, won the internet for the week! Our friends at The Cultural Hall also managed to secure an interview with the "real" Pierre Delecto, who is concerned about Romney trying to co-opt his identity.

That's not the only Mitt Romney news. The Los Angeles Times picked up on the so-called "White Horse Prophecy" and how Mittens may be a fulfillment of it. Of course, the Times goes to no lengths to explain that the "prophecy" is apocryphal at best and forms no part of Latter-day Saint canon. Besides, we saw North Korea's leader on a white horse only this week!

Important news! Geoff is appearing in a Reddit AMA on October 23. Sign up for Reddit and be there!

In more important political news, this week, the Church came out against a Utah bill that would ban conversion therapy, a process to essentially flip a gay individual over to straight. The practice has long been decried by professionals and even the Church. (The Church goes to lengths to explain that Family Services expressly prohibits its counselors from employing any form of conversion therapy.) As expected, most media seized upon this with headlines along the lines of "Mormons Refuse to Denounce Conversion Therapy," but as is the case with headlines, that fails to tell the whole story. We get more in depth about the Church's reasons for not backing this bill, and a lot of it comes down to semantics.

Using his heightened apostolic sense, President M. Russell Ballard, Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, seems to think not all is well in the United States. What could possibly be wrong?! In a meeting in Massachusetts that was broadcast across the northeast United States, President Ballard encouraged Latter-day Saints to pray for the United States, that it can be led by righteous individuals, and that proper rule of law and morality can prevail. Geoff chooses to see this as an oblique critique of the Trump administration. Josie, the expat, is baffled by such US-centric counsel coming out.

Which leads us to international news. Singapore celebrates the Church's 50th anniversary in the country with an ...