From Deseret News archives:
Jennings defends Mormon faith via N.Y. newspaper
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.
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.
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