Mormon baptism of the dead IS desecration of the dead

[iverglas]

10. human groups have all sorts of taboos and traditions about their dead members

I imagine most US jurisdictions have some kind of law equivalent to the provision in the Criminal Code of Canada against offering indignities to a dead body. And the same sort of requirement that the representative of the deceased make appropriate arrangements for disposal of the body.

We just don't like it. We don't even mandate post mortem organ donation.

Now, granted, generally nobody can sue for defamation of a dead person, say. Our laws/norms tend to relate to the body itself. But there are long-standing customs, expressed in sayings like "do not speak ill of the dead", that do reflect our feeling that deceased members of our groups still have a sort of honorary membership.

Basically, we don't like the idea of our own bodies or memories being mistreated, so we don't like to see it being done to others'.

I'm a genealogy hound. I've run across evidence of ancestors of mine being posthumously baptised by proxy by some Mormon. (There are websites where people post family trees, and those associated with the giant Mormon/Ancestry.com octopus include a space to record each person's status in that regard that someone not in the know might not notice.) I think it's disgusting.

I would call it disrespect rather than desecration. It is simply disrespectful to the person who was, and yes, we do still "respect" deceased persons, to impose a choice on them that they never made.

I'm a lucky atheist, myself. Some years ago, my former church (the United Church of Canada, pretty much the most progressive Christian church on the planet) obtained an undertaking from the Mormons that they would not do posthumous proxy baptisms of people baptised in the UCC. I was baptised as an infant, of course, so I'm shielded from Mormon intervention.

... Of course, after reading a bit here about how they are not honouring their undertaking in respect of Jews, maybe I should not be so sanguine ...

All in all, though, yes: these posthumous proxy baptisms are every bit as disrespectful as desecrating graves, and yes, we human beings and our groups quite reasonably frown on the latter kind of disrespect and so quite reasonably frown on the former as well.