[Vision2020] Potholes of Superstitious Nonsense Not Sublime, But Ridiculous

[Art Deco]

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   In Mormon files, researcher Helen Radkey seeks to cause a headache for
Romney By Jason
Horowitz<http://www.washingtonpost.com/jason-horowitz/2011/03/02/ABZaXuM_page.html>,
Published: February 16

SALT LAKE CITY — Mitt Romney has major headaches named Rick Santorum and
Newt Gingrich.

This month, he also had Helen Radkey.

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.

“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.”

The Wiesenthal Center obliged, and a week later, Radkey followed with the
revelation that Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust
survivor, was also listed in the private Mormon databases as “ ‘ready’ for
posthumous rites.” This appeared to be a violation of the spirit of the
Mormon agreement with Jewish groups not to posthumously baptize Holocaust
victims and led to Wiesel’s public appeal to
Romney<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/elie-wiesel-calls-on-mitt-romney-to-make-mormon-church-stop-proxy-baptisms-of-jews/2012/02/14/gIQAZK6bER_story.html>to
demand that his church stick to its word. All the reports credited
Radkey, an independent researcher in Salt Lake City, as the force behind
the revelations.

Radkey, an eccentric and familiar face at the church’s sprawling
genealogical archive here, has a knack for notoriety.

She has acquired a measure of acclaim for her discovery that Mormons in the
Provo, Utah, temple had posthumously baptized Barack Obama’s mother,
Stanley Ann Dunham, during the 2008 presidential campaign, as well as
revealing that Joan of Arc, Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn
Monroe had also received proxy baptisms.

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.”

* * *

On a recent afternoon in Radkey’s apartment on the outskirts of Salt Lake
City, a menorah and Virgin Mary statuette stood atop the refrigerator, a
Buddha sat under a lamp and Egyptian sun gods rested on a coffee table. A
book called “The Animal Wise Tarot” helped explain the preponderance of
wolf posters hanging on the walls alongside a framed “universal life church
minister” certification.

“The only thing I won’t talk about is my metaphysical work,” Radkey, 69,
wearing a red sweater and black beret, said in her Australian accent. She
explained that it would be used by the church to discredit her research.
She preferred to leaf through stacks of manila folders labeled “Gaskell
Romney, grandfather,” “Archi­bald Newell Hall, great-great grandfather,”
and “Parley Parker Pratt, great-great grandfather.”

Radkey, who is a regular guest on the weekly cable show “Polygamy: What
Love Is This?” (“a live, call-in television talk show dedicated to the
subject of polygamy and Mormon fundamentalism”), has decided that the world
should know about what she considers the posthumous love life of Romney’s
forebears.

This is because, she said, “there’s a double standard” in which Mormons
have renounced polygamy for the living, but “allowed plural marriages for
the dead.”

More important for her, she found Romney’s depiction of polygamy — he
called it “bizarre” and “awful” — in bad taste. “How dare he say that
polygamy was horrible when it was what his ancestors believed?” she said.
“I believe you should honor your bloodline. I have convicts in my
bloodline. I don’t reject them.”

* * *

Posthumous baptisms are a sacred ritual that Mormons believe offer a
secondshot at salvation in the afterlife to those who never received
Mormon
baptism on Earth.

The church insists that there is no polygamy in the afterlife. “We believe
that marriage is the most important relationship in this life and can
continue after this life when performed in a temple. Temple marriages —
also known as sealings — are performed only for those married in this
life,” said Michael Purdy, a church spokesman.

Radkey, however, has produced documents from private church databases that
suggest many prominent Mormons, including Romney’s ancestors, have been
sealed to multiple spouses after they died.

This obsession with clandestine Mormon rituals is four decades in the
making for a woman about whom the Salt Lake Tribune asked in a 2009
profile: “Who is Helen Radkey and why is she out to get the LDS
Church<http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_13926671>
?”

In 1963, two Mormon missionaries knocked on her door in Hobart, Australia,
opening an eight-year passage to Mormonism that eventually ended her
marriage and cost her custody of her two children. She met her second
husband, an American, at his own conversion baptism, but later fell out
with church authorities and was excommunicated in 1978.

Two years later, the Tasmanian arrived in Boston with her husband and took
in a showing of the movie “The Jazz Singer,” starring Neil Diamond. She
described the viewing as a transformative, almost religious experience that
persuaded her to stay in America. “It was Neil,” she said. “We’re coming to
America! Neil had this sound, and I wanted this sound.”

Her second marriage ended in divorce, and in 1984 she moved with her young
twins to the capital of the Mormon church, Salt Lake City.

“I wanted to research Mormonism,” she said.

She bounced around from religion to religion, and soon after her third
marriage fell apart, visited the shrine of Gabriel Lalemant, a 17th-century
Canadian Jesuit who she believes was her son in a past life. (She still
keeps a shrine to him, complete with a relic, in her bedroom.) She was thus
appalled to discover at the library that Mormons had performed a proxy
baptism for Lalemant.

“I started to collect rigmarole, proxy baptisms and sealings on famous
people and saints,” she said. Her research resulted in an April 1994
Associated Press article headlined “Mormons on Their Way to Baptizing
Everyone Who Ever Lived.” She followed up with a short letter published in
the Salt Lake Tribune reporting on the vicarious baptism of St. Patrick. “I
propose that those of us who are proud of our Irish Catholic heritage raise
an extra glass of the old bubbly to St. Paddy on March 17,” she wrote.

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.”

* * *

In 1995, the Mormon church had reached an agreement with Jewish groups to
remove more than 350,000 names of Holocaust victims from their records.

Pursuing her new mission on the library computers, Radkey checked the
private Mormon databases for Holocaust victims and still found thousands,
including a record showing that Mormons had posthumously baptized Anne
Frank. At her request, groups such as the American Gathering of Holocaust
Survivors began to pay her for her research, and she sought to convert to
Judaism. “The Jews didn’t want me,” she said.

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.”

After putting her Romney folders in order, Radkey drove to downtown Salt
Lake and Temple Square, where she passed the historic home of Brigham
Young. (“Of course, they don’t talk about all the wives,” she said of
Young.) At the library, Radkey logged in for another session of Romney
research, next to a man wearing earmuffs and other regulars in a small band
of committed database diggers.

“How long have I been working on this?” Radkey asked her friends at the
terminals.

“Since we’ve been in Mormondom,” answered another woman with her face
inches from the screen. “Forever and ever.”

* *




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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