Former Mormon mission president accused of sexual assault, and somehow that’s news
Ugh, identity politics is the worst.
The clearly leftist but ostensibly credible Associated Press, via St. George News, has reported that “A former Mormon missionary leader under investigation by church officials over sexual assault allegations acknowledged asking the alleged victim to expose herself to him during a 1984 encounter, a police report released Wednesday reveals.”
Bishop denies raping the woman.
In the aforementioned piece, 84-year-old Joseph L. Bishop admits to seeing some bosoms, although his son, an attorney, denies that this happened. Even though he apparently wasn’t there.
Everything else is up in the air.
The LDS Church has engaged in its typical public hand-wringing — which ceased to be convincing decades ago. The report itself is rather disgusting.
St. George News, whose reporting seems increasingly centered upon Chicken Little-style journalism, passed along this fashionably unfounded smear piece without bothering to verify whether or not the assault actually took place.
In fact, it has not been verified.
In their defense, it is customary for members of the Associated Press to immediately pass along AP news by default.
My position on Mormonism has been made very clear for anyone who has cared to follow my writing and I hope that my position on our Constitutional freedoms has been made equally clear.
But for the Associated Press to smear a citizen with allegations without proof is an egregious — if increasingly commonplace — violation of journalistic ethics. If Joseph Bishop did not commit the crimes he has been publicly indicted of committing, how will he ever recover? How is this America?
What if this happened to you? Do you think this could never happen to you? No innocent person can recover to false allegations, especially ones of a salacious nature. Just ask Varlo Davenport.
But it’s par for the course anymore. It has become fashionable for news agencies to report on allegations as if they are indictments.
They are not.
I would be quick to suspect Joseph L. Bishop of any manner of irrational and potentially immoral behavior by virtue of the fact that he a prominent member of an embattled faith.
But he has not been demonstrated as guilty of anything but irrationality, which is not a crime.
To be clear, I criticize Mormonism and Mormons on tangible grounds. But I can only imagine that this form of baseless anti-Mormon reporting is permissible within the confines of legacy media’s — including Gannett and the Associated Press — own private Idaho. For all we know, Joseph L. Bishop is guilty of shallow-minded naivety and nothing more.
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