Jennings defends Mormon faith via N.Y. newspaper

"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."