Will you listen to somebody who's still active? Your congregations are not safe. Please protect your children. I'm not talking about walking away... I'm talking about being responsible adults who pay 10% of their income to an institution that would rather invest in missiles and pharmaceuticals than child safety. Help your leaders understand what your priorities are, and how you expect them to behave. You have just as much inspiration as they do - by their own admission. For the love of God, do something. Before it's your child, not just walking through the door to tell you Brother so-and-so got arrested at the church building, but that Brother so-and-so touched her inappropriately. Please.

Hmmmm. Sigma Chi money. Wonder where that rabbit hole leads to. Wonder if it leads to names like Simmons / Huntsman / Marriott, and entities related to them. Wouldn't it be weird if fraternities just ended up being some sort of weird Masonic money-laundering scheme. Yeah... that would be weird.

Yeah, I thought I had looked into this before... thanks for reminding me, friends... Click through to see how a Hinckley made off like a bandit through this whole unethical setup.

You couldn't be more welcome, Shannon. If anyone else is researching abuse, and would like me to take a look at how to improve data extraction and ingestion systems, please never hesitate to reach out. I've obviously got a lot going on, but I'm never too busy to try to help those doing God's work. 🙏

I'm not a financial expert, but I've got questions about this whole Zion's bank / Simmons thing: At first glance, if you only read the TIME news article about the sale of the bank (Time is a longtime pro-Mormon publication), it looks like the church makes a clean 1960 exit/divestiture on the sale. But the minute you look at what actually happened you see that there's a sale where the seller is the lender and apostles remain on the board and the seller is still using the sold asset and partnering with the same family it lent millions of dollars to in other unrelated ventures. This is like selling your house, but still holding the mortgage, then hopping into bed with the new owner's wife. The Church floated Simmons millions of dollars in loans because... why? Then they left their people on the board, and continued to use the bank as a customer. So, not so much divestiture... it looks more like cronyism for unknown reasons that benefitted a very small group of people, many of whom just happen to be frat boys. The economic result is simple enough: there's a bank that grew from ~150 million in assets to 90 billion *accrued to the buyers* (and later public shareholders), not to the membership whose institution had owned it. You see a really bad situation with A CEO’s brother sitting on Credit Review, which is the committee that looks at loans, while his brother was CEO. Big no-no there. Unbelievable opportunities for fraud (which was alleged, by the way, but not proven as far as I can tell). You see an even worse situation where the incumbent of a corporation sole is also acting as a Church president (already a conflict of interest) chairing a commercial bank (a HUGE conflict of interest) where his sheep are the customers potentially getting fleeced. Right, @dgoates? In the end, we don't even know who the lending arm was, what the negotiated rate was, and whether the Church to Simmons loan was repaid. Why is that? But the "look here, not there" principle is what really bothers me at first glance, because guess where the Skull and Bones brothers ended up? Houston energy. So you have the same brother who is unethically sitting on the Credit Review of his brother's bank also running an energy fund in a traditionally sketchy vertical. Even if he's not moving money, he's almost certainly moving information, which, as everyone knows, ends up being money for somebody (just ask Nancy Pelosi). This gives me the willies, big time. It all just feels wrong to me: one family and their frat boy cronies profiting wildly off radio, satellite, and a poorly run insurance company that has to be bailed out with church money (Beneficial Life) by sitting on their boards and giving high paying jobs to their ass-paddling buddies. Isn't this exactly how a small set of men would get wildly rich relative to the fold without "stealing" the "sacred tithing funds"? Bank the tithing, then get the for-profit side of Church-adjacent commerce dumped into their pockets? I dunno. It's time to sleep. G'night, y'all.