As for September Dawn, I really don’t feel like bothering with it. Reviews are pretty much unanimous that it royally sucked, as a film. Whether it’s “anti-Mormon” or not is pretty much irrelevant to the raw suckage factor. I know, I know, I haven’t seen it, so I can’t judge, but my brother wrote a pretty amusing review of it, and I trust his judgment.

I want to see September Dawn now. I found the Church’s claim that it played a part in the movie’s demise rather entertaining

Church PR is very, very convienient.

I’ll just highlight two: Mormon Coffee posted the clip, so of course I had to watch it. Actually, I think it was pretty artfully done, and you get a sense of why this ritual is important to this character. Personally, I’ve never seen the temple ceremony IRL, but from what I’ve heard about it, it always sounded way more corny than this.

Then, the best of the Bloggernacle reactions was this one, where Kristine talks about the complexity of the situation and about how the show humanizes a tradition that is unfamiliar to so many. I especially like the conclusion:

This was not the show’s finest hour as a work of art, but it is perhaps the most interesting, because the several gears here ground more loudly than usual. However, it’s insufficient to simply (as the Newsroom did) lump what happened in this episode in with September Dawn, or either of them with South Park. If nothing else, this affair might convince us that the usefulness of the hypersimplistic term “anti-Mormon” is rapidly narrowing.

If so, it sounds like maybe somebody’s got a new dilemma to ponder: will anyone notice if/when we quietly edit/remove the evidence of our premature petulance from the Newsroom?

Lisa — Exactly.

Actually, of all of the things one can criticize about the LDS church, the institution of the “LDS Newsroom” is the one that really sticks in my craw. It ties in with the discussion Andrew and others were having on McKonkie’s Mormon Doctrine: The leaders discovered that it’s convenient to have a body of quasi-official statements that can be used or denied in accordance with the winds of expediency. It shields the official leaders from having to make statements on controversial subjects and saves them the whole embarrassing “maybe the prophet was ‘speaking as a man’” thing when it comes time to pretend they never said XYZ.

Forgive me for using a Seinfeld metaphor, but the thing this most reminds me of was when George Costanza said that wearing sweat pants all the time means that you’ve given up; you’re not even going to try. The “LDS Newsroom” is the sweatpants of the LDS Church’s integrity. The church isn’t even trying to be forthright. They’re not even pretending to try to be forthright anymore. P.R. is now their God.

And having seen the episode, I can say that HBO was very fair and neutral in how they portrayed it.

If they had not been spinning more gold than Rumpelstilzchen’s princess, they would be less embarrassed by bad news.

I suppose I was thinking of a different part of the reaction which stuck with me particularly. I can see why you’d call it petulant, though I might even go so far as snobbish when they have lines such as this:

Certainly Church members are offended when their most sacred practices are misrepresented or presented without context or understanding.

Considering most recent events.

Respect *is* a two way street and often you have to give to receive.

I could go on about the official statements and stories given to circumvent the “liberal media” which they believe serves only to distort their side of the story. I have to say I find the media’s spin to be much more palatable than the church’s.