37 replies to this topic

[smac97]

Here:
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Quote

At 1:55 p.m. on Feb. 8, Radkey, an excommunicated Mormon who spends her days combing through databases at the church’s Family History Library, ­e-mailed Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named for the famed Nazi-hunter.
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“FYI, discovered today: Posthumous baptisms for the parents of Simon Wiesen­thal,” Radkey wrote. “I am collecting evidence, which will be e-mailed to you, if requested, as long as there is a public stink.”
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"As long as there is a public stink."

That's what Helen Radkey is after.  

Helen Radkey is an agenda driven anti-Mormon. In 2003 she spoke at a 2003 Convention of American Atheists, at which she vilified the LDS Church (see here). She is a former (that is, excommunicated) Latter-day Saint. She has approached the LDS Church some years ago and offered her ongoing services to keep an eye on the Church's proxy work and alert the Church to any "Jewish-sounding" names ("Learning about Jewish names,"according to Radkey, "is a specialized skill, which took me years to develop, and it is not always possible to know by a name if the person was Jewish."). She wanted, according to this article, $30,000 for her work from 1993 to 2003 and to be paid $18 per hour thereafter for her continuing research. The church did not express interest in her offer.

In other words, Helen Radkey has been trying to make money out of this. Isn't that just a wee bit odd? If she really found vicarious baptism to be so odious, why not simply turn over her research? Why insist on trying to make a buck off the names of dead people?  

And why is she conditioning her release of information about the parents of Simon Wiesen­thal on whether or not it results in "a public stink" raised against the LDS Church?

There is nothing admirable about this woman.

Back to the article:

Quote

Now Radkey’s energies are directed at a new area of research, which she hopes will cause a new headache for Romney: the posthumous plural marriages of his ancestors. She calls this “Romney’s polygamy tree.”
...
Radkey took three trips to the Vatican in unsuccessful attempts to drum up interest about the Mormon proxy baptisms of Catholic saints. Dejected, she returned to her Salt Lake apartment, where she underwent an epiphany when one of her twin sons brought home a Jewish girl from college.

“I said, ‘I’ve had enough of the Vatican,’ ” she recalled. “I’m going to help the Jews.”
...
Radkey says that in the course of her research into what she describes as the postmortem marriages of the Romney ancestors, which she hopes to turn into a book, the genealogy experts of the library, which is open to the public, have been only polite and helpful. The feeling hasn’t always been mutual.

In 2006 and 2009, the library disciplined her for sneaking onto computers used by Mormons who had not logged off their terminals and then spending hours using their accounts to dig through the private church records.

“I don’t hack the database,” she said. “Let’s just say I have a way of accessing it through a confidential Mormon source.”

Radkey previously criticized  Ernest Michel, chairman of the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, for not being pugnacious enough against the LDS Church.  See here:

Quote

In an e-mail sent to Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Radkey lashed out at Michel, saying he did not understand the complexities of the Mormon database system and was too invested in the 1995 agreement to challenge the church hierarchy when it is being less than candid.



Michel defended himself in an interview with the Forward. "I have an established relationship with the church," he said. "They are not antisemites, and they want to work with us. I'm not coming in like a bull in a china shop. I'll let Helen Radkey speak for herself."

Helen Radkey has no interest in "help[ing] the Jews," else she wouldn't have conditioned her "help" on the Simon Weisenthal Center raising "a public stink" against the LDS Church (or excoriated Mr. Michel for not being sufficiently opposed to the LDS Church).

She is attempting to foment religious prejudice by coaxing the Simon Weisenthal Center into raising "a public stink" against the LDS Church, and by emphasizing that Romney's ancestors practice of polygamy.  And before this episode, she has attempted (apparently with some success) to make money off researching the names of dead Jews.

I can respect, occasionally even admire, principled opponents of the LDS Church.  While I believe these people are misguided in their antagonism, I believe many of them have good intentions and are basically decent people.

I have no respect for Helen Radkey.  She is a repugnant person.

-Smac

[calmoriah]

smac, see here for other comments on the article:  http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/56962-what-do-mormon-and-helen-radkey-have-in-common/page__view__findpost__p__1209092115

[calmoriah]

One point, we don't know why she was excommunicated.  My memory says that originally to get your name removed, you had to be excommunicated so depending on the timing, it could have been as simple as that.  However, her beliefs as stated...as little as she is willing to admit to....are not in accord with church doctrine.

[Sky]

She's obsessed with baptisms for the dead - and will never pass up an opportunity to make the LDS Church look bad.  In fact it looks like she goes out of her way to throw dirt at the Church.  She is a divider and not a uniter.  Anybody else notice the timing of all of this with Romney?  It looks like it was all calculated.  

[calmoriah]

Okay, I just have to repeat myself because I chuckle every time I think of it.

Ms. Radkey believes she is the mother of Gabriel Lalemant,  She is ticked off because the LDS Church believes it is offering people who have died another chance to make a choice about their religious faith, she believes that we have no right to intrude in this way into the memory of dead people and their connection with the living and yet she thinks it is perfectly okay to completely take over the identity of another person.

If she is wrong, got to wonder how that woman whose identity she has tried to steal feels about it.

Edited by calmoriah, 20 February 2012 - 07:23 PM.

[calmoriah]

Sky, on 20 February 2012 - 07:20 PM, said:

She's obsessed with baptisms for the dead - and will never pass up an opportunity to make the LDS Church look bad.  In fact it looks like she goes out of her way to throw dirt at the Church.  She is a divider and not a uniter.  Anybody else notice the timing of all of this with Romney?  It looks like it was all calculated.  

Well of course, it makes no sense otherwise why she is writing a book about Romney.  She is quite up front about it.

[Duncan]

Jewish sounding names? isn't that subjective? My last name sounds Jewish apparently but I don't know if we have any Jewish family members from back when-we may but I don't know

[blackstrap]

Chaplin......probably

[Buzzard]

I kind of feel sorry for the poor woman, left to kick against the pricks like that.  In a profile in the SL Tribune a few years back, she stated her goal was to cause the destruction of the LDS church.  As if.  Even her children roll their eyes at her obsession.

[Kenngo1969]

Buzzard, on 21 February 2012 - 07:22 AM, said:

I kind of feel sorry for the poor woman, left to kick against the pricks like that.  In a profile in the SL Tribune a few years back, she stated her goal was to cause the destruction of the LDS church.  As if.  Even her children roll their eyes at her obsession.

Have they made any public comments to that effect?  If so, I'd be curious to read them.

[Buzzard]

Kenngo1969, on 21 February 2012 - 09:18 AM, said:

Have they made any public comments to that effect?  If so, I'd be curious to read them.

Here: http://archive.sltri...71&itype=NGPSID
The comment from her son is in the paragraph headed "Moving to Utah".  He basically says if she was not obsessed with trying to singlehandedly bring down the church, she would be obsessed with something else.

[stemelbow]

I"m with Buzzard.  I feel bad for her.  We ought to be prayerful for her.

[Freedom]

When we die, we will look back at this life as we now look back at primary school. All will be forgiven and forgotten, and those who are bitter still will be pitied. Reading the online attack on religion, we are being treated very well compaired to Catholics and Evangelicals. At Huffington Post, an article about Romney will gather as much as rude 1,000 responses. An article about Santorum will gather 100,000 such responses. We tend to only see the attacks on our own values, but our critics are marginalized receive little attention in the media.

[thesometimesaint]

Prayer is good.

[Daniel Peterson]

I can feel sorry for her, and I do.  But I dislike what she does.  And not merely because at least certain elements of it seem to involve cunning and deception.

She's deliberately attempting to sow religious discord.  That's a very bad thing, and, whatever pity or empathy she may deserve, her efforts need to be opposed.

[stemelbow]

Daniel Peterson, on 21 February 2012 - 11:18 AM, said:

I can feel sorry for her, and I do.  But I dislike what she does.  And not merely because at least certain elements of it seem to involve cunning and deception.

She's deliberately attempting to sow religious discord.  That's a very bad thing, and, whatever pity or empathy she may deserve, her efforts need to be opposed.

I can agree with your sentiment, but how do you propose one oppose her efforts?  It doesn't appear to me she's being stopped or hindered at all.

[calmoriah]

Decided my comments were too personal and deleted them save the last sentence below...

I feel bad for her as well, but feel worse for her victims and I am not talking just about LDS.

Edited by calmoriah, 21 February 2012 - 05:59 PM.

[calmoriah]

Freedom, on 21 February 2012 - 11:02 AM, said:

When we die, we will look back at this life as we now look back at primary school. All will be forgiven and forgotten, and those who are bitter still will be pitied. Reading the online attack on religion, we are being treated very well compaired to Catholics and Evangelicals. At Huffington Post, an article about Romney will gather as much as rude 1,000 responses. An article about Santorum will gather 100,000 such responses. We tend to only see the attacks on our own values, but our critics are marginalized receive little attention in the media.

In many ways we are new to the game, things got quite quiet for us for many decades and only now are we really getting fully back in the public eye instead of just surfacing now and again due to a popular figure or a hot political issue and only just being consistently noticed by a small sector of it who saw us as poaching their sheep. (At least in the US and Canada).  When it comes to actual hate though (as opposed to just thinking we are weird) from what I've read Catholics and older faiths that also take strong stands on moral issues have a much harder time overall with hate and anger as opposed to mocking and trivializing though the media giving the public face of Prop 8 primarily to the LDS and not to the Coalition like it should have has cranked things up for us quite a bit.

[Daniel Peterson]

stemelbow, on 21 February 2012 - 11:21 AM, said:

I can agree with your sentiment, but how do you propose one oppose her efforts?  It doesn't appear to me she's being stopped or hindered at all.

She's not, really.

But I think the fuller story would blunt her impact quite a bit.  Her own transparently obvious animosity toward the Church, her plain shopping around for a group (Catholics, then Jews) to use as a weapon against Mormonism, her apparent venality, her possible instability, the suspicious way in which inflammatory name submissions are made and then immediately discovered and revealed, her virtually full-time labor at finding useful "dirt," her expressed lust for a "public stink," and etc., and etc. -- none of this makes her look very good.  None of it makes her look like the kind of person who ought to be taken really seriously.

[calmoriah]

stemelbow, on 21 February 2012 - 11:21 AM, said:

I can agree with your sentiment, but how do you propose one oppose her efforts?  It doesn't appear to me she's being stopped or hindered at all.

One is to educate others about what proxy baptism means.  The other the church is doing by producing tech to catch false entries faster and identify abusers.  It may even need to get to the point where people who submit names don't just do it themselves, they may have to work through a first stage approval with someone trained before the names are accepted to be submitted, no one being able to approve their own work and making it hard to use others' ids and passwords.

I would find it extremely doubtful that anyone would believe a faithful member would hack into the church database to add inappropriate names.  If the Church tracks down abuse to such sources, then it becomes a victim and more sympathetic.  Those trying to destroy the Church with this method may end up doing the opposite if they go to too extreme measures.

Edited by calmoriah, 21 February 2012 - 11:44 AM.