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Mormon Stories Podcast

960: David Eccles Hardy - the Journey of a Trailblazing Activist Pt. 2

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.55.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2018

⏱️ 80 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

David Eccles Hardy lived as an orthodox Mormon for years, serving as an LDS Bishop and raising his family "in the covenant." While serving as a Mormon bishop, David learned of his son's homosexuality and the difficulty/pain his son experienced being raised in the LDS church as a gay youth.  This experience led David to re-evaluate his faith, and ultimately to resign as bishop. Soon thereafter, David launched a campaign to convince the Mormon church to eliminate several pamphlets for youth and adults that he felt sent damaging messages regarding sexuality.

In a 1999 letter to Boyd K. Packer, David outlined the heartache and damage these publications caused his son and countless others.

In our interview, David outlines his careers in music and law, his interactions with prominent LDS leaders, as well as his involvement in helping to secure Salt Lake City's bid to host the 2002 Winter Olympics. He also treats us to how he would have born his testimony in French as an LDS missionary in France.

Transcript

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Music

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Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and relies solely upon

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to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing

0:46.4

the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks

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for your support.

1:22.0

I hope you'll be wasn't.

1:27.0

Hello everyone and welcome back to part two of my interview with David Eccles Hardy. We're

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going to be talking about how a bishop starts to lose his faith and becomes a Mormon activist

1:39.0

back before the internet and what that was like. Super fascinating part one hearing about

1:45.0

David's life, you know, descendant of David Eccles and growing up in the DC area in wonderful

1:53.0

time in Chevy Chase, Maryland and really cool stuff in part one culminating in him not only meeting

2:01.0

John Denver and playing at a concert with John Denver but also going to the U and serving

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a mission and meeting Mitt Romney lots of cool stories but now we're in part two and tell

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us about, you know, kind of after your mission how you end up married and ascending up the

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hierarchy of the deserts. Before we do that I'm going to make just a couple really quick announcements.

2:28.0

We have a lot of super cool Mormon Stories events coming up, workshops and retreats.

2:33.0

We're doing Idaho Falls in Portland in August. We're going to Sweden to celebrate Hans

2:39.0

Mattson and the Swedish people and then we're going to Switzerland to do a workshop there in September.

2:46.0

October we have the Bahamas crews, November we're coming to Sacramento and we've got a really cool.

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