"Innocence of Mormons: How two cultures respond to criticism"

[LA Ute]

This Weekly Standard article is an interesting read.

A subscription may be necessary to read the whole thing.

Cartoonish, cheerfully sophomoric, and often hilarious it might be, but The Book of Mormon is far more insulting to the LDS church than The Innocence of Muslims is to Islam. Its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone (working with Robert Lopez), have said that they were moved to write the show because they were amused by the discrepancy between how nice Mormons are and how ridiculous their religion is.

Stone and Parker are equal opportunity offenders—despisers of religion. They first came to public attention with a short film in which Jesus kills Santa Claus (“there can be only one”). They made a show insulting Scientology that ran afoul of their cable channel’s parent company and its relationship with leading Scientologist Tom Cruise. And they made an episode of South Park ripping the
censorship of the Danish newspaper cartoons parodying Muhammad—only to have the episode itself censored by their cable channel after a jihadist threatened their lives.*

But in this case, they chose their target wisely. How have Mormons greeted The Book of Mormon? In a word, nicely. The church’s official statement was this: “The production may attempt to entertain audiences for an evening, but the Book of Mormon as a volume of scripture will change people’s lives forever by bringing them closer to Christ.” Asked about it in December 2011, Mitt Romney said, “I do want to see it, sure. It’s a Tony Award-winner, big phenomenon—yeah, I want to see it someday. But I don’t have a lot of time for Broadway shows.”

In his equanimity, Romney expressed not a thousandth of the horror at the blasphemy tossed at his faith that has characterized the Obama administration’s reception of The Innocence of Muslims. The repetition of the words “reprehensible” and “disgusting” in relation to the YouTube video by the president and secretary of state and others suggests that there was, and is, something uniquely awful about The Innocence of Muslims that demanded their outraged intercession.*

The Book of Mormon demonstrates that there was, and is, nothing uniquely awful about it. It’s just a sustained assault on people whom the creators feel no need to appease—in this case, a small number of Americans toward whom Barack Obama and those like him in the American cultural elite—aggressive in their demands that minorities be respected and honored—feel no commonality and no common civic responsibility whatsoever.

[Danimal]

Interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

[UtahDan]

I was 100% with him until the final paragraph:

The Book of Mormon demonstrates that there was, and is, nothing uniquely awful about it. It’s just a sustained assault on people whom the creators feel no need to appease—in this case, a small number of Americans toward whom Barack Obama and those like him in the American cultural elite—aggressive in their demands that minorities be respected and honored—feel no commonality and no common civic responsibility whatsoever.

By minorities, I can only assume he means racial minorities. Attacking a person because of their race and attacking someone's ideas, religious or otherwise, are simpy not the same thing. There is no hypocrisy in putting one above the other as he seems to suggest. I think it is enough to give the church the praise it deserves here, particularly compared to Muslims, but he and others seem unable to resist taking that extra step and suggesting that it is somehow unfair that people are afraid of Muslims but not Mormons.