Dallin H. Oaks

You are currently browsing articles tagged Dallin H. Oaks.

Conservative Crank’s Paranoia of Media’s Anti-Mormon Bias Is Validated

17 October 2009 @ 12:04 am | 12 comments

As a member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy™, I am obligated to sniff out media bias wherever it may lie.

This finely-honed skill helped in my assertion that the Associated Press’ coverage of Elder Oak’s talk was in large part to blame for the civil-rights analogy kerfuffle this week. In anticipation of his talk, Elder Oaks gave the A.P. an interview and his talk’s text to accompany its coverage of his address. With his cooperation and a despite a very substantive talk, the A.P. reporter framed a news story based on one sentence aiming for maximal controversy.  And it worked.

The A.P.’s coverage is not too surprising.  I’ve long thought it covered the Church unfairly, (recent egregious example). But this week, it has also been interesting to see the local Utah media reaction behind the scenes.

The City Weekly jumped on the Deseret News for not covering the civil-rights analogy issue as did all the other news outlets who followed the A.P.’s lead.  In its view (and by way of Twitter, the view of other area reporters), if the D.N. didn’t follow the A.P.’s lead, it wasn’t being fair and balanced. So much for original reporting.

Most remarkable was another post at the City Weekly about an executive news producer at the local Salt Lake Fox affiliate, Fox 13 who violated the Church’s embargo with a tweet. Perhaps not a big deal but her blog about her phone call with the Church’s Public Affairs office and her feelings towards the Church as a former member and its involvement in Proposition 8 is quite an eye opener (to read a sanitized version just read the Weekly’s version, there you can click through to read the very crude and psychodrama-rich original if you dare, but beware). Quite astonishing to realize that this is someone who deals with and reports on the Church as a journalist.

Fox 13 news doesn’t strike me as biased, or anti-LDS.   I do think that it did stoke up the controversy a bit online by tweeting up the story over and over and over and over and over and over again (and no, Elder Oaks did not claim that “Mormon backlash after Prop. 8 [was] similar to treatment of Southern blacks”). But the controversy probably sent them pretty good traffic.

As for their news producer, it’s nice to see news folk let it all hang out and not pretend that they are impassive robots unburdened by the silly squabbles the rest of us mere mortals deal with. Perhaps in such a small news operation she can’t recuse herself from stories when she loathes the subjects she covers. But for her own mental health it might be for the best.

As for the City Weekly, its interesting to read some of the local inside baseball of the journalism scene. But after reading its own coverage and the tweets from other reporters, its laughable to single out the Deseret News as unbalanced. And soliciting for more LDS Public Affair horror stories to confirm your own biases? That’s not high-minded journalism, it’s called blogging. Join the club.

Even more see, “Dallin H. Oaks: Calling for fair reading, fair thinking, fair commentary“

The Church has now posted video of Elder Oak’s talk “Religious Freedom” at Newsroom.lds.org.



15 October 2009 @ 5:58 pm | No comments

Listen to Elder Oaks talk, “Religious Freedom.” BYU-Idaho has posted the audio of the talk as downloadable mp3 or podcast [iTunes link].

Please read or listen to it. There is so much more to the talk than what the selective outrage has focused on.

Religious belief is obviously protected against government action. The practice of that belief must have some limits, as I suggested earlier. But unless the guarantee of free exercise of religion gives a religious actor greater protection against government prohibitions than are already guaranteed to all actors by other provisions of the constitution (like freedom of speech), what is the special value of religious freedom? Surely the First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion was intended to grant more freedom to religious action than to other kinds of action. Treating actions based on religious belief the same as actions based on other systems of belief should not be enough to satisfy the special place of religion in the United States Constitution.

15 October 2009 @ 9:50 am | 4 comments

Keith Olbermann declares Elder Oaks one of the worst people in the world

14 October 2009 @ 9:30 pm | 105 comments

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Hall of shame or badge of honor? I’ll take the latter, but it just goes to show what power the Associated Press has in setting the standard media message. It lifts one sentence from a talk, distorts the meaning behind it, grossly exaggerating it out of context and news outlets across the country relay it unquestioningly. Then Mr. Olbermann gets to call out Elder Oaks as one of the “worst people in the world” (I guess it lasts for only a day so don’t be too concerned).

Quick aside: are all those who are so concerned about Glenn Beck okay with Keith Olbermann and his brand of “civility”?

Unsurprisingly, the Church-owned Deseret News didn’t follow suit. But the local City Weekly takes umbrage that the DN refused to copy and paste the AP’s characterization of Elder Oaks’ talk and decided to write its own story instead. More outrage.

Curious to hear Elder Oaks explain himself? Ignore the video above and see below.


Why Elder Oaks’ Civil-Rights Analogy Works

14 October 2009 @ 7:00 am | 59 comments

Most coverage of Elder Oaks’ talk on Religious Freedom has centered on one sentence that analogized the intimidation of those trying to exercise their civil rights in the 1960’s with those of today.

Speaking of the backlash following the passage of Proposition 8, Elder Oaks said [emphasis added]:

These incidents were expressions of outrage against those who disagreed with the gay-rights position and had prevailed in a public contest. As such, these incidents of “violence and intimidation” are not so much anti-religious as anti-democratic. In their effect they are like the well-known and widely condemned voter-intimidation of blacks in the South that produced corrective federal civil-rights legislation.

That last sentence generated the following lede from the Associated Press which most other news outlets used in their coverage.

The anti-Mormon backlash after California voters overturned gay marriage last fall is similar to the intimidation of Southern blacks during the civil rights movement, a high-ranking Mormon says in a speech to be delivered Tuesday.

Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably, outrageous outrage ensued that Elder Oaks would dare invoke the civil rights struggle to make his argument.

“Were four little Mormon girls blown up in the church at Sunday school? Were there burning crosses planted on local bishops’ lawns? Were people lynched and their genitals stuffed in their mouths?” asked University of Utah historian Colleen McDannell. “By comparing these two things, it diminishes the real violence that African-Americans experienced in the ’60s, when they were struggling for equal rights. There is no equivalence between the two” . . .

Jeanetta Williams, president of the NAACP’s Salt Lake branch, said there is “no comparison.”

“I don’t see where the LDS Church has been denied any of their rights,” she said. “What the gay and lesbian communities are fighting for, that is a civil-rights issue.”

These two quote illustrate the exact point of view I believe Elder Oaks is trying to overcome. People of faith are just as entitled to participate democratically as anyone else. Although “civil rights” is often considered synonymous with racial equality it’s much more than that, and includes one of the original rights preserved in the First Amendment: religious freedom.

As you can see in the above interview, Elder Oaks is careful not to equate the suffering experienced by black people in the South to modern-day Mormons. Instead, the intended “effect” behind the intimidation of both was similar in purpose. In both instances, opponents sought to discourage or punish those exercising their rights, regardless of race or religion. The intimidation of both were similar in purpose, not in the form.

I believe Elder Oaks used the analogy to call upon the sympathies of those who may not have may not have been so concerned about the aftereffects of Proposition 8 but recall the great injustices of the 1960’s. That shouldn’t be “controversial.”

Interestingly, Elder Oaks prefaced his remarks:

In this time of the Internet, what we say in one place is instantly put before a wider audience, including many to whom we do not intend to speak. That complicates my task, so I ask your understanding as I speak to a very diverse audience.

Elder Oaks was right to be concerned that his words might not be taken as intended.

Elder Oaks on Religious Freedom and the Proposition 8 Aftermath

13 October 2009 @ 3:39 pm | 31 comments

Elder Dallin H. Oaks spoke at BYU-Idaho today on religious freedom but garnered coverage for his remarks on the lasting effects of Proposition 8.

The anti-Mormon backlash after California voters overturned gay marriage last fall is similar to the intimidation of Southern blacks during the civil rights movement, a high-ranking leader in the LDS Church says in a speech to be delivered Tuesday.

More than just commenting on Prop 8, Elder Oaks’ talk “Religious Freedom” deals with some of the concerns he has with those trying to silence religious voices in political debate and the conflict of religious freedom with “newly alleged civil rights.”

Apparently anticipating the attention this would get Elder Oaks spoke with the AP reporter before the talk.

In an interview Monday before the speech, Elder Oaks said he did not consider it provocative to compare the treatment of LDS Church members in the election’s aftermath to that of blacks in the civil rights era, and said he stands by the analogy.

“It may be offensive to some — maybe because it hadn’t occurred to them that they were putting themselves in the same category as people we deplore from that bygone era,” he said. . .

In an interview Monday, Elder Oaks said the Proposition 8 saga was one of several trends that motivated him to deliver the address, but it was “not the trigger.”

“There are civil rights involved in this — the right to speak your mind, to participate in the election,” Elder Oaks said. “But you don’t have a civil right to win an election or retaliate against those who prevail.”

Elder Oaks said he is specifically concerned about a movement toward using hate crimes laws to prosecute or threaten preachers who preach that homosexual acts are sinful.

Elder Oaks’ address also rejects any religious test for public office. He said that if “a candidate is seen to be rejected at the ballot box primarily because of religious belief or affiliation, the precious free exercise of religion is weakened at its foundation …”

In the interview Monday, Elder Oaks said he was referring in part to the 2008 presidential bid of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whose LDS faith troubled some evangelicals.

The LDS Newsroom has a news release “Apostle Says Religious Freedom Is Being Threatened.”

Elder Oaks’ talk “Religious Freedom” transcript.

In short, we preach unity among the community of Saints and tolerance toward the personal differences that are inevitable in the beliefs and conduct of a diverse population. Tolerance obviously requires a non-contentious manner of relating toward one another’s differences. But tolerance does not require abandoning one’s standards or one’s opinions on political or public policy choices. Tolerance is a way of reacting to diversity, not a command to insulate it from examination.

Strong calls for diversity in the public sector sometimes have the effect of pressuring those holding majority opinions to abandon fundamental values to accommodate the diverse positions of those in the minority. Usually this does not substitute a minority value for a majority one. Rather, it seeks to achieve “diversity” by abandoning the official value position altogether, so that no one’s value will be contradicted by an official or semiofficial position. The result of this abandonment is not a diversity of values but an official anarchy of values. I believe this is an example of BYU visiting professor Louis Pojman’s observation in a recent Universe Viewpoint (October 13, 1998, p. 4) that diversity can be used “as a euphemism for moral relativism.”

Elder Dallin H. Oaks, “Weightier Matters,” BYU Speeches, 9 February 1999 [emphasis added]

3 November 2008 @ 10:17 pm | 1 comment