Just caught this quiz on Facebook hosted by mormon.org. Feel free to take the quiz. I got 14 out of 14 correct, but two of the questions stood out. First, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints really, really, really hate it when you associate Mormonism with polygamy, as this question indicates:
The second question that really bugged was one that forced you to choose the wrong answer, though, for anyone familiar with Mormonism, the answer they want will be obvious:
Anyone else take this yet?
I make it a policy to never take polls online, and this is a perfectly reasonable answer is never one of the choices.
I vote in political elections, so occasionally I will answer calls for political polls, but only if they tell me who paid for the poll, before they start.
The two questions you put up are strange, but these questions, ask about 10 days ago, falls in the same category, and might be slightly stranger. The poll introduced to me as a short poll paid for by a Republican candidate, in our state, which asked these gems;
1)”If you knew that a Democrat had multiple affairs would it impact whether you voted for them?”
2)”If you knew that a Repiblican had multiple affairs would it impact whether you voted for them?”
3)”How many affairs can a candidate have before you consider them in-eligible to hold public office?”
4)”Do you generally vote for the candidate you like, or the candidate that you think makes better decisions?”
5)”Our records show that you are not a Democrat or a Republican, what would a party need to offer you to make you choose one?”
All of the questions seemed pretty strange to me. The Republican candidate is a woman with four kids and a husband on the school board. The Democrat is an openly gay woman, registered as part of a domestic partnership here, and she and her partner of 20+ years, had a formal wedding last year, somewhere that isn’t Oregon.
These are not the answers I gave the poor college kid who kept pronouncing Oregon incorrectly. I have been thinking about it, and put in what I could or should have said. For your edification:
1) only if the affair had been with me or my husband.
2) only if the affair had been with me or my husband.
3) prostitutes manage to have multiples in a day, there are some holidays and family vacation to take into account. I think a politician could keep up with 100 (what do we call Johns now? Jon creators? Oh, my bad “Job Creators!”), so I think about 100 would be the max you could handle, unless you had some kind of party with lots of helpers that worship you.
4) I like to be able to vote for candidates that I agree with, who are kind to those around them, have an attachment to something that they care for (wife, children, dog, cat, goldfish, or even another politician. (I do think this is a threatened and possibly an endangered animal.)
5). Sorry, the only way you could get me to register as a member of a political party is if Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert were running mates. I would register with THAT part!
Ha! I like the answers to that poll. Go Stewart/Colbert! (Why is it that the only honest source of news are the satire news-shows?)
So, essentially, they’re push-polling (with a social media poll instead of a serious poll). This way people can pat themselves on the back for being really knowledgeable about Mormonism if they know “Mormons do not practice polygamy.”
My guess is that they’re hoping that people will read this poll (and other similar statements from the PR wing of the CoJCoL-dS) and then the next time they read something in the news about “Fundamentalist Mormon Warren Jeffs”, they’ll go “That guy’s not really Mormon, he just claims to be Mormon!”
It’s amusing that they went so far as to feed people their supposedly “right” answer right in the question. Wouldn’t want to take any chances on people failing to check their answer carefully against the answers provided at the end of the poll! I wonder how well this tactic works?
Yeah, that’s pretty eyeroll-worthy.
And chanson is correct: this is essentially a push poll. The questions are framed in such a way as to influence the person responding to the poll. That’s the real agenda: not to find out what people think about Mormonism, but to influence how people think about and frame Mormonism.
Yeah, this is the modern propaganda, which isn’t near as creepy as the propaganda as they use to have (though some reminents of it certainly still exist, especially in Primary), but still worrisome.
I just wish the church would drop the propaganda altogether and focus on the good aspects of the church, while not trying to hide the more unsavory aspects of its history. I think things would go a lot smoother then. Though any organization of any significant size is bound to develop a beurocracy which breed propaganda and be slow to change aspects that are considered outdated.
The problem I have with the polygamy question is the unspoken assumption that the LDS church has exclusive rights to the label “mormon”. For a church that wants desperately to be able to use the label “christian” they sure are picky about the word “mormon”. Just sayin’.