I have been watching with interest, and severe disappointment, the drama unfolding on South Temple Street in Salt Lake City this week.  A group called Protect LDS Children, PLDSC for short, has been inviting a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles to come sit in a camp chair on the sidewalk across the street from Temple Square to answer questions posed by whomever would care to show up, but specifically with respect to the demands being made by Sam Young, the ringleader of the group.

The invitations were issued in reverse order according to the various apostles’ seniority, with the most junior being invited to appear on the evening of Sunday, July 29^th, and each succeeding evening progressing up through the Quorum.  This will last for twelve days, after which “Elder Eyring,” “Elder Oaks,” and “Elder Nelson” were invited for the final three nights of this action.

Each night, shortly before 7, a facebook live broadcast starts and Sam Young looks around the crowd of a few dozen gathered around him and asks for the designated apostle to step forward, feigning surprise when the apostle in question doesn’t materialize.  Sam then offers to stand in the place of that apostle and do his best to answer the questions and demands made by whomever decides to step forward and take advantage of the open mic to talk to the 100 to 200 people who might be watching live and the thousands who view it sometime later. Invariably, McKenna Denson will share a few words and Natasha Helfer Parker will come forward and give a lecture of one kind or another.

Multiple times through the hour or so, Sam and others will repeat that no one should be asked any sexual questions by bishops, not even “do you keep the law of chastity.” They argue that this is so dangerous that it will destroy lives. One women stated that being asked whether she engaged in a certain sexual practice was so damaging that she left the Church over it a couple of decades later.  Every night there have been two to four people willing to blame a variety of problems in their lives to the shame that came from being told that it was a sin to violate the law of chastity in these interviews.

As an aside, one thing that is missing, and glaringly so, is any evidence of speakers or participants who are actually active and believing members of the Church.  Most of the speakers acknowledge that they don’t fit that bill, admitting that they left the Church some time ago.  This is punctuated by the fact that Sam had to make a public appeal for active, believing members to identify themselves so that they can be interviewed by media.  He claims that he has hundreds and thousands of active and believing members amongst his followers, but couldn’t identify any to refer to this reporter without making a public plea.

After each of these broadcasts, Sam (or someone on his team) posts of picture of the invited apostle with the words “NO SHOW” plastered over the picture.  The comments on the live streams and these “no show” posts are glaringly hostile against the apostles and Church.  Occasionally a commenter will defend the apostles, but those tend to be deleted quickly and further comments from that individual never reappear.

Sam claims that he is only doing this because he has tried the normal channels and no one has listened to him.  The PLDSC facebook posts all have #ProperChannelsHaveNotWorked attached to them.  And yet, Sam acknowledges that the proper channels have worked.  He admits that the Twelve are aware of him and his concerns.  He admits that he knows that this has been discussed amongst them.  He acknowledges that he has had lengthy discussions with his stake president and bishop on these matters, and that he has even discussed his concerns with a general authority just last week.  The Church’s statement last week likewise acknowledges that the leadership is fully aware of his message and who he is.

What hasn’t happened is a complete surrender to his demands.  This isn’t about communication, this is about power. Sam, like other apostates before him, has come to Church headquarters to demand that the Church take a specific action despite being told over and over again that it isn’t going to happen.  So Sam, like other apostates before him, has decided to stand and point the finger of scorn at the Church and the apostles, hoping that the Church and the apostles will give heed and allow the pressure of the world to turn their path.

Sam can’t possibly believe that he’s going to convince the brethren to change this path.  He can’t possibly believe that rehashing in public the things he acknowledges they have already seen in private will have any effect.  He can only have two hopes.  The first would be in fomenting rebellion among actual active and believing members (which he hasn’t done to this point); and the second would be in getting “the world” up in arms about this, which has no chance of being effective regardless of the lies the apostates tell each other.

It all leads one to ask whether there is any good reason for an apostle to show up.  This is clearly a trap.  Sam wants to force them to come onto his turf to have a conversation that Sam and his followers are unwilling to engage with in good faith.  Despite his carefully crafted persona, the brethren understand that Sam has spent the last several years raising dozens of criticisms against the Church, and the better part of the last three years encouraging everyone he could reach to vote opposed in conference.

Nothing good can come from a conversation in which there is no chance of coming to agreement.  There is no overlap in the Venn Diagram.  The Church won’t stop teaching the law of chastity, and won’t stop using that law as one of the benchmarks for determining who can go to the temple or be ordained to offices in the priesthood.  That will always be a part of the interview. Sam knows this, or should know it.  I suspect that this has been conveyed to him several times.

Assuming that Sam understands these basic things, why continue with this?  If we take him at his word that he believes asking a teenager if he keeps the law of chastity is so horrendously dangerous, then the motivation can only be to encourage parents to forbid the bishop from asking that question of their child, or to encourage bishops to not do it in the first place.  In the first case, it is clear that if parents don’t allow their kids to be interviewed, those kids are unlikely to be baptized, those kids are unlikely to get ordained, and those kids are unlikely to get to go to the temple. I don’t know if that is what Sam wants, but I know a lot of his supporters do.

On the other hand, if bishops refuse to ask about the law of chastity, they are violating their sacred duty to guard the gates of the temples and to teach the youth (in particular) the necessity of obeying the law of chastity. Again, I don’t know if Sam intends for this either, but many of his supporters clearly do.