One of many slanderous cross stitches that has recently surfaced in Salt Lake |
SALT LAKE CITY,
UT—Violence again has erupted between prominent LDS bloggers. The violence, which broke out over the
weekend when competing bloggers were in Salt Lake City ahead of the church’s
General Conference, seems to stem from several long-standing disputes. Those
disputes include who actually started the bloggernacle, which blog does the
most to improve Zion, and which blog worries the church’s leadership the most.
“This year it was pretty
bad,” said one blogger who did not want to give her affiliation.“At one point
everything was just blood, rage, and semi-coherent comments like ‘it is your Times and Seasons to die,’ ‘you are all Dove and no Serpent,’ or ‘oh, I will give
you some Instruction, Juvenile!’”
Emergency room reports indicate
a number of rather serious injuries. When asked
about those injuries, hospital staff told the Mormon Tabernacle Enquirer that, “apparently the
Modern Mormon Men saw some bloggers from Feminist Mormon Housewives and
Zelophenhad’s Daughters and said things like, ‘hey, you don’t have to cover up
those shoulders for me,’ or ‘I’ll unload your dishwasher,” or, most offensive
of all, ‘I find your modesty attractive,’ and apparently that is how those men ended up here.”
Stoking the violence has
been some rather unusual threats. Police reports indicate that a “pastel cross stitch
was left outside a conference room where bloggers where meeting. The cross stitch said, ‘Soon
it will just be Wheat and Tears for all of you!’”
“What we found,” reported
Salt Lake City police officer Oliver Jensen, “was that accusations of
conformity or being ‘almost correlated’ got the strongest reaction.” Jensen
gave the example of a blogger, known only as “The Voice of the Uncommon
Malcontent,” slanderously shouting at bloggers from Rational Faiths that their
posts “sounded like they were ghost written by [Elder Boyd K] Packer.” Jensen continued
that, “once we heard language like that, the Molotov cocktails, samurai swords,
and jagged, broken bottles of consecrated oil would soon be all over the place!”
When asked about the
violence and the Church leadership’s concerns about criticism and activism on LDS
blogs, Elder Robert D. Hales, the apostle in charge of Electronic Communication
Correlation, said, “wait, what’s a blog?”