Lies, More Lies, and Mor-mon lies

The following post is from the events of Monday, August 14th. Since I do not have a wireless card on my computer, I am not able to access the internet at will.

Monday, August 14th, 2006
Today was the first day that Bill McKeever and I were able to visit the temple together. We got into town late Saturday evening and passed out papers for about an hour and a half. The temple is closed on Sundays so today was the first chance we had to go through the temple. Bill has already been through once and decided to go through again with me.

To give a little history, on the first day the temple opened Bill and Eric Johnson toured the temple together and had a very eye opening experience. The tour guide, hereafter referred to as tour-guards, basically lied to Eric and Bill. Eric saw the entrance to the washing and anointing room (which is never included on public tours) and asked about the room. The tour-guard said that there was nothing but more lockers there. You can read about the whole experience here. As Bill and I were on the way into the temple this morning, Eric called Bill on his cell phone and asked that we address the same issues that Bill and Eric encountered a couple of weeks ago. As we figured, we were lied to again. I don’t want to get into all of the details at this point, but the tour-guard, Dawn, admitted that she lied to us once we confronted her in the hospitality room after the tour. She said, “We are told to say what we can say.” We picked up some punch and cookies, sat at our table for about 15 minutes, then left after not talking to anyone else.

Hours later, I noticed two security guys in an SUV taking pictures of me from across the street. They drove through the light and then pulled over and walked up to talk to me. One guy stood there taking pictures of me as the other guy, Doug Diamond, informed me that I was being banned from the temple. I found out later that the tour-guard that lied to me and Bill recognized me as she drove away from the temple. She must have been convicted about being caught in the lie and then informed the temple security of who I was. What is really funny is that Bill, who confronted Dawn in the hospitality room, was standing just across the street. Since she did not see him, I was the guy who was the target of her anger.

I tried to reason with Doug that it was not truthful to tell the Sacramento community through the newspaper that, “Church representatives… are prepared to answer any questions the public has and be as transparent as possible about their practices” and then ban someone from the temple for asking questions. As Bill McKeever often says, “If the Mormon Church doesn’t want to be known as a cult, they need quit acting like one.”