Sigh. Cody, Wyoming. Again.

The adventure begins:  Our movie crew heads out on Friday.  They will start filming for Six Days in August at Upper Canada Village, in Ontario,  on Monday, 11 September.  After that, if plans hold, activity moves to Genesee Country Village in upstate New York on Monday, 25 September 25.  Following that, there will be several days of filming at the LDS Motion Picture Studio during the first half of October.

I’m pleased that we’ve come this far.  I still need to raise a significant amount of money for post-production (e.g.. editing, music, sound-sweetening, etc.), as well as for publicity and the like — and I really, really dislike begging for money — but the game is afoot!

(Just to keep the record straight:  I will not earn a single cent from this film project.  Some of my critics like to fantasize about the vast sums that I accrue from apologetics — the estimates occasionally reach into seven figures — but, like the overwhelming majority of those who are involved with the Interpreter Foundation, both my wife and I are unpaid volunteers.  I earn exactly the same hourly rate from my work with Interpreter that I earned from serving as a bishop and from teaching Sunday school.  Heck, to make the parallel even more complete, we’re donors.)

Newly up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:  Women in Ancient Israelite Temple Worship was originally presented by Camille Fronk Olson on Saturday, 5 November 2016, at the Interpreter Foundation’s 2016 Temple on Mount Zion Conference.  You can now watch the video or listen to the audio at your convenience and, of course, at no charge.

I’m still seeing claims on the Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods Facebook page (hereafter, POCN) that the Cody Wyoming Temple represents an attempt by LD$ Inc. to dominate the “skyline” — yes, that is the word that has been used (think of Manhattan, or of Paris) — of Cody, that it will loom over the city, that it will be inescapably visible from everywhere in town, that it will replace the surrounding mountains or hills as Cody’s distinguishing feature, that it will block out the night sky.  One of the reasons that I suspect disingenuousness on the part of at least some of the temple’s opponents is that the claim simply, objectively, demonstrably, irrefutably doesn’t pass the smell test:  “Cody WY Temple views from town.”

There are more than a few participants at POCN who aren’t disingenuous at all, of course, whose derogatory, even nasty, comments about Latter-day Saint beliefs, history, and practices, and, yes, sometimes about Latter-day Saints as people, are overtly anti-Mormon.  Some — not bothering with details about lighting or traffic or the height of the temple spire or the siting of the temple in a particular residential neighborhood —  openly declare that the temple shouldn’t be permitted in Cody at all.  One even announced that no temple should be allowed in the state of Wyoming.

Others are very slightly more subtle, complaining about the existence temples they’ve seen while traveling through such places as Twin Falls, Idaho Falls, Oakland, St. George, and even Afton, Wyoming.  One gets the impression that these folks wouldn’t object to Latter-day Saint temples being built (if building them is absolutely unavoidable) so long as they’re isolated on remote desert islands or at least several miles removed from paved roads or any human population.

Without any reason being given (though I can guess) and without any announcement, I was blocked from POCN at least two or three weeks ago.  That’s their prerogative, of course, as long as they don’t pretend that they don’t do such things, or that POCN constitutes a representative sample of public opinion.  I have plenty of things to do.  Moreover, I have a platform here, and I’ve used it: See, in chronological order, “A small tempest about a small temple in Cody,” “In the world after the Fall,” “Once More, on the Conflict in Cody.” “An Update on the Continuing Crisis in Cody, Wyoming,” “Peggy Brown, Dale Brown, and the Cody Wyoming Temple,” “My Last Comment on the Temple in Cody? (Probably Not),” “My last post on the temple in Cody? Maybe, for a while at least,” and “What if Sacha Cohen were to visit Cody, Wyoming?”

Some of the participants on POCN claim to object to non-residents of Cody — such as I — commenting there.  I can understand that, I suppose.  But the standard isn’t consistently applied.  So far as I can tell, the objection is only deployed against non-residents who dissent from opposition to the temple.  Peggy Brown, for example, who continues to post on POCN, seems to run her anti-Mormon and anti-Muslim activities — and possibly anti-Bahai activities, as well — with her husband, Dale, out of Prosser, Washington.

I’ll also mention Richard Lyons.  He is a lawyer here in the Phoenix area, apparently a formerly active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has now appeared on POCN as a critic of the Church and an adversary to the construction of the Cody Wyoming Temple.  I’m hoping to get him to expand upon something that he wrote on POCN:

“Daniel Peterson heard you speak live more than once. Your blog post about this is pretty awful.”

I would like to know what it is about my “blog post” — as indicated above, I’ve actually written eight of them prior to today– that is “pretty awful.”  I’m genuinely curious.  I’ve taken, I think, a pretty moderate and reasonable position on the Cody matter, and would like to know where, if anywhere, I’ve gone wrong on it.  I’m not permitted to comment or to respond at POCN, so I post my invitation here.

And, impishly enough, I admit that I’m curious to know, if my post is “pretty awful,” whether Mr. Lyons implicitly recommends his own POCN comments as models of responsible and higher-quality civic discourse on the topic:

“Cody residents are getting off easy when it comes to unwelcome Mormon neighbors. Back in the day they’d already have married all your daughters and raised a standing army.”

“I’m absolutely bigoted against people who think they know God’s will. Because I used to be one.”

Of course, I may be biting off more than I can chew, because Mr. Lyon appears by his own estimation to be a very formidable individual.  As he says of himself on POCN:

“I served a mission. I know LDS history and theology better than just about anybody.”

 

Posted from Scottsdale, Arizona

P.S.  There is massive indignation and no little theatricality on display right now over at the Peterson Obsession Board regarding my mention of Peggy Brown and Richard Lyons above.  One POB poster laments that he knows nobody who is more dishonest and angry than I am, and expresses astonishment at the personal demons that torment me.  They plainly compel me to intrude into the carefully protected personal lives of private people who seek only quiet anonymity.

Well, let me explain how I identified the shy, retiring, and very private Peggy Brown.  First, she posts her attacks on Latter-day Saints and Latter-day Saint beliefs under her own name.  And she continually posts photographs of her picketing activity outside of various Latter-day Saint temples.  So I Googled her, and I found that she and her husband have been the focus of a number of newspaper articles and even, it seems, government and legal actions related to their ministry (or whatever it should be called).  Her hometown was identified in at least one of the newspaper headlines about their anti-Mormon and anti-Muslim ventures.

But how did I track Richard Lyons down?  I’m an imcomparable, relentless, and dedicated sleuth but, for my closest friends, I’m willing to disclose my fiendishly cunning methods.  (I’m confident that nobody else will ever expend the time or the effort to do what I do, it being so very difficult.)  I clicked on his name as it appears in his posts on the Preserve Our Cody Neighborhoods Facebook page, where he comments as — cue drum roll — “Richard Lyons.”  Instantly, up came not only his profession, but the name of his law firm (which I didn’t share), where he earned his degrees (which I didn’t share), his high school (which I didn’t share), where he lives (which I didn’t share), and where he’s originally from (which I didn’t share).  Altogether, it may have required as much as two seconds.  His having once been an active Latter-day Saint and the rest I cleverly derived from his own self-description on POCN.