Month: March 2009

On Tuesday, we published a story based on a letter to the editor of the City Weekly in Salt Lake City that revealed that the Mormon Church has posthumously baptized — a practice referred to as “proxy rites” — a long list of controversial people that ranges from Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula, and Adolph Hitler to Bonnie and Clyde and Bugsy Seigel.

While it was bizarre and alarming that Mormons chose to baptize some of the most evil historical figures who have walked the planet, finding the name of Ted Bundy, a relatively recent serial killer, on the list was even more disturbing. Bundy, whose name at birth was Theodore Robert Cowell, joined the Mormon Church in 1974, at around the same time he began the cross-country spree in which he raped and killed as many as 100 women.

Now a source close to the investigation into proxy rites informs us that Bundy, who was executed in Florida in 1989, was given proxy rites by the church less than a year ago, in May 2008. Furthermore, it appears the church scrubbed the record of Bundy’s posthumous baptism last month, around Feb. 11, after his listing in the proxy-rites database was reported in the Salt Lake City media.

We also learned that another serial killer with Mormon ties was given proxy rites. Arthur Gary Bishop, a serial rapist and murderer of underage boys from Hinckley, Utah, was excommunicated by the church prior to his execution in 1988, and has been given proxy rites since.

According to Mormon dogma, proxy rites do not guarantee their subjects entry into heaven. Upon entering the afterlife, the subjects of the rites have the option to accept them or disavow them and, presumably, go to hell.

A Tufts University study last year found that people appear to have the ability to recognize a gay man simply by looking at his face. As part of the research, random sets of people, men and women, were shown photos of straight and gay men in random order. The study group was able to identify the sexual orientation of the men in the photographs at a rate “above chance.”

Additional studies showed that people were able to guess orientation even based on photos showing only the subjects’ eyes and mouths.

Details of the study and its methodology were reported in Scientific American last month by research psychologist Jesse Bering. (For details, read Bering’s article.)

Two things are unclear. First, what do the findings mean? About this Bering says:

Frankly, these findings are a little puzzling to me. Rule and his co-authors mention a few lackluster evolutionary reasons why it would be biologically adaptive for women to know which men aren’t worth the trouble and for men to know who’s not really a sexual competitor. But they also acknowledge that it’s impossible to know from these findings what exactly it is about these facial features that give gays away. “Future studies,” the authors wrote, “may wish to examine what aspects of these features lead to accurate judgments, what their origins might be, and how we acquire the ability to detect them.”

The second ambiguity is more basic. What was the underlying purpose of undertaking the study? Let’s assume it’s part of ongoing research to determine how sexual orientation develops and where its origins lie in the human psyche.

People with a paranoid bent might fear that if the research were perfected that it might be incorporated into facial recognition technology to be used in some dark, dsytopian era to ferret out closeted gays. At the lighter end of the speculative spectrum, maybe it’s useful as cocktail chatter, “Guess what? Scientists have proved that gaydar is real. Discuss.”

When Mormon leadership encouraged church members to donate $20 million to the Proposition 8 campaign in California last year — instead of, say, giving the money to feed the hungry or house the homeless — the leaders also invited unwanted scrutiny of the church’s unusual practices and beliefs.

One of the strangest of these is the practice of “saving” dead people through posthumous baptism, which they call “proxy rites.” According to this belief, the dead are not automatically saved. Instead, the rites give them the option to choose salvation in the afterlife.

In a letter to the Salt Lake City CityWeekly last week, researcher Helen Radkey claimed that the list of famous people who have received these rites includes fascists Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann and Benito Mussolini, Communist dictators Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung; pirates Blackbeard and Jean and Pierre Lafitte; and gangsters Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde and Benjamin “Bugsy” Seigel, who was, of course, Jewish.

Also on the list, according to Radkey, are two infamous serial killers, Vlad the Impaler, whose exploits were fictionalized in the Dracula story, and the only known Mormon serial killer, Ted Bundy.

Bundy raped and killed as many as 100 women on a cross-country crime spree from 1974 to 1978. He became a Mormon around 1974, while he was attending law school at the University of Utah. It’s unclear whether he was excommunicated before or after he was executed in Florida, in 1989, but Radkey says the list of those given posthumous rites includes Theodore Robert Cowell, the name given Bundy when he was born on Nov. 24, 1946, in Burlington, Vt.

The names of those who have received proxy rites are stored in a huge database called the International Genealogical Index (IGI). A search of the online database for Theodore Robert Cowell produced no results, but it’s possible that Bundy’s and the other controversial records are not included in the online database.

It’s also possible, based on their recent behavior, that church officials have scrubbed the records in the week or so since Radkey’s letter was published.

Update: A source close to the investigation says the church apparently scrubbed Bundy’s name from the IGI database after the story was reported in the Salt Lake City media on Feb. 11, 2009. There’s more on the scrubbing here.