"What is 'counter-punch?"'
That's the latest answer that Utah's reigning "Jeopardy!" game show champion, Ken Jennings, gave the New York Daily News this week in an opinion piece titled, "Politicians & pundits, please stop slandering my Mormon faith."
Only days after Elder M. Russell Ballard of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve asked Latter-day Saints to defend their faith on Web sites and in blogs during a BYU-Hawaii commencement speech, Jennings' two-page opinion piece appeared in the newspaper's "Be Our Guest" section Wednesday at www.nydailynews.com/opinions.
Jennings became something of a national celebrity in 2004 after winning a record $2.52 million during his long-running stint on the popular game show. He went on to author a book.
In the opinion piece, Jennings said he's tired of seeing Latter-day Saints portrayed as "either a gullible joke or a satanic menace (or, if you can stand the cognitive dissonance, both)" in light of publicity surrounding Republican Mitt Romney's presidential quest.
"This is a strange season to be a Mormon," Jennings begins. "During my lifetime, I thought The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had effectively mainstreamed itself. Being a Mormon was like being Canadian, or a vegetarian, or a unicyclist — it made you a bit of a conversation piece at dinner, but you didn't come in for any lip-curling scorn."
But of late, he lamented, "I can read anti-Mormon screeds almost every day, both from the secular left and the evangelical right."
Jennings takes on both former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee — Romney's biggest challenger in the all-important Iowa caucuses — as well as commentator Lawrence O'Donnell and his "bizarre anti-Mormon explosion on 'The McLaughlin Group' this month," in which O'Donnell called Romney's forefathers "a long line of extreme rapists of teenage children."
"Not just teen rapists — now we're extreme teen rapists," Jennings writes.
"There are a lot of things you can say about the polygamy in early Latter-day Saint history, a chapter many modern Mormons don't avidly defend. But O'Donnell's implicit charge — that the whole practice was a scam cooked up by dirty old men — is wrong," Jennings writes.
"Early accounts show the church's founders, including Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, tearfully resisted 'plural marriage.' They complied not out of eagerness for some hot 19th-century swinging, but from a conviction that an authentic Old Testament practice was being divinely restored. Many of these early marriages were primarily 'dynastic' — ceremonial, that is, and not romantic or intimate in any way."
He also takes on columnist Christopher Hitchens for his assertion that the LDS Church is "an officially racist organization," noting "other major U.S. denominations had racist and segregationist dogma on their books until the 1970s as well. And today, the church has more than half a million black members, including prominent leaders, both here and abroad."
To sum up, Jennings said he's "tired of being a punch line and a punching bag. If the only way to get Mormonism out of the arena is to get Romney out of the race, then I'm counting the days. This is one Mormon who would rather have a little civility and tolerance than one of our own in the White House."
The piece makes Jennings one of the — if not the — first high-profile Latter-day Saint who is not identified as a church leader to defend the faith in a widely read public forum.
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com
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