YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

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stealthbishop
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YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by stealthbishop » Tue Sep 06, 2022 12:01 pm

TRIGGER WARNING: Child Abuse. Death of a Child.

I am becoming more and more cynical all the time. You constantly have to drill down on these faith promoting experiences to find the truth.

Bonnie Cordon is the YW's General President and she has shared the story of her 2 year old grandson's death publicly and repeatedly. In her versions of the story he just stopped breathing in the hotel room one night while they were all on vacation in Orlando. She talks about how in the midst of this experience, she was praying that her grandson would be able to return to full health and resume the activites planned for the next day but then the Holy Ghost told her that her grandson had died and his spirit was in heaven now.

Well, somebody looked into this and brought it to the attention of Bill Reel and RFM. There is a public report on the Florida Department of Child and Family site of how this toddler didn't just stop breathing but he had been abused on the night in question and sustained severe injuries that resulted in his death. It was ruled a homicide. It's public information:

https://www.myflfamilies.com/childfatal ... 344471.pdf

Bonnie Corbin's DIL was arrested for aggravated child abuse by the police and her son had been founded by the department to have medically neglected the child. The whole story is so disturbing and can be found on Mormon Discussions:

https://mormondiscussionpodcast.org/202 ... e-hearhim/

I am so angry that Bonnie Cordon would dare to use this horrible story as faith promoting. She is either in complete denial or she has no shame. Just makes me sick.
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by Linked » Tue Sep 06, 2022 1:02 pm

The story of this child's death had me staring at my screen in horror. What that mother did is unthinkable and awful. And then to bring up the death of the child in a faith-promoting story is just mindboggling. It's so foolish that I wonder if Bonnie just didn't know the full circumstances of the child's death.

I suspect this kind of thing happens far too often unfortunately. A quick search shows just under 2,000 cases of child abuse or neglect related deaths per year. Far too many. Hug your kids.

One thing I read when looking into this is that technically "homicide" means the death was caused by another person. It does NOT specify intent, so a homocide could be murder or manslaughter. So even though the death investigation notes that it was a homicide, that does not mean murder. That seemed like an important distinction.
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by stealthbishop » Tue Sep 06, 2022 1:27 pm

Linked wrote:
Tue Sep 06, 2022 1:02 pm
The story of this child's death had me staring at my screen in horror. What that mother did is unthinkable and awful. And then to bring up the death of the child in a faith-promoting story is just mindboggling. It's so foolish that I wonder if Bonnie just didn't know the full circumstances of the child's death.

I suspect this kind of thing happens far too often unfortunately. A quick search shows just under 2,000 cases of child abuse or neglect related deaths per year. Far too many. Hug your kids.

One thing I read when looking into this is that technically "homicide" means the death was caused by another person. It does NOT specify intent, so a homocide could be murder or manslaughter. So even though the death investigation notes that it was a homicide, that does not mean murder. That seemed like an important distinction.
Yes, that is an important distinction.

With Bonnie saying that she was there on vacation with them I would find it hard to imagine that she would not have known her DIL was arrested. But it is possible.

Also, some people believe the husband may have abused the child and the wife took the fall for him.

RFM has put a freedom of information request in to get the other documents in regards to this case.

It is so horrifying. I just couldn't believe what I was hearing on the podcast.
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by Tangent » Tue Sep 06, 2022 2:45 pm

Even if she didn't know the full circumstances the first time she shared this faith promoting story, she certainly would have found out a short time later. These events happened in 2017. I don't know what excuse there is.

this is bad PR, now that mormondiscussions has brought this to light. Let's see if her story goes down the memory hole.

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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by moksha » Tue Sep 06, 2022 6:34 pm

When I watched this episode of Bill Reel and RFM dealing with the murder and cover-up, it made me wonder if Kirton McConkie had later been involved with items to include and omit in order to turn this 'murder and cover-up' into a faith-promoting story.
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by 2bizE » Tue Sep 06, 2022 9:12 pm

I think the father injured the child so the mother took him to the hospital.
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by lostinmiddlemormonism » Wed Sep 07, 2022 6:32 am

<snark> I wonder if the daughter-in-laws bishop called the church abuse hotline to learn how to handle this situation/<snark>

-lost

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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by Not Buying It » Wed Sep 07, 2022 12:41 pm

While I sympathize for any grandmother who loses a grandson like that, it is nothing short of bizarre the way that Bonnie Cordon keeps telling the story publicly and leaving the details out. In one telling she told about them trying to take the empty carseat back on the plane and getting a hard time from an airline employee, and made the daughter-in-law the hero of the story and the example we should follow.

My take is there is some seriously messed up psychological stuff going on in Bonnie Cordon's head. On the one hand, she knows what really happened, there is no way should couldn't have. But on the other hand, it is horrifying to think that one of your grandchildren was killed by either your child's spouse, or possibly, your child. One of the two of them for sure. And that's probably more than she can handle.

I think re-telling the story over and over again and fashioning it as a faith-promoting story rather than a stomach-turning account of homicidal child abuse is her way of processing it. She's been conditioned through decades of Mormonism to see things the way you wish they were and not the way they really are, I think she is simply taking that mindset to the extreme. The more she publicly describes it as her grandson simply stopping breathing and fashions it in to a spiritual experience, the less dissonance she has to feel about what really happened.

That, or she's the coldest liar I ever knew, someone who would twist a family story about her grandson's homicide at the hands of a parent into a warm fuzzy moment. Kind of like Gordon Hinckley did with the Willey-Martin Handcart Company. But personally I don't think it's a case of her just being a liar like Hinckley was.
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by stealthbishop » Wed Sep 07, 2022 2:31 pm

Not Buying It wrote:
Wed Sep 07, 2022 12:41 pm
While I sympathize for any grandmother who loses a grandson like that, it is nothing short of bizarre the way that Bonnie Cordon keeps telling the story publicly and leaving the details out. In one telling she told about them trying to take the empty carseat back on the plane and getting a hard time from an airline employee, and made the daughter-in-law the hero of the story and the example we should follow.

My take is there is some seriously messed up psychological stuff going on in Bonnie Cordon's head. On the one hand, she knows what really happened, there is no way should couldn't have. But on the other hand, it is horrifying to think that one of your grandchildren was killed by either your child's spouse, or possibly, your child. One of the two of them for sure. And that's probably more than she can handle.

I think re-telling the story over and over again and fashioning it as a faith-promoting story rather than a stomach-turning account of homicidal child abuse is her way of processing it. She's been conditioned through decades of Mormonism to see things the way you wish they were and not the way they really are, I think she is simply taking that mindset to the extreme. The more she publicly describes it as her grandson simply stopping breathing and fashions it in to a spiritual experience, the less dissonance she has to feel about what really happened.
I think those are fair points.

I have thought about it that way too but for her to share this story so often in public is such a risk. Does she not know that there is a public record of the circumstances of her grandson's death?! In fact there would have been no scrutiny and this probably would not have come to light if she had not told this story! The whole thing is just mind-blowing. I think the psychological explanation makes the most sense to me. There are some parts that she seems to be misleading or lying about like the fact that only her DIL drove the child to the hospital where in one of her versions she said it was both parents. I just don't see how she would not have known that fact. But it's possible I suppose. She may have been lied to by her son and the DIL. I wonder if she was interviewed by the police?
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by Linked » Wed Sep 07, 2022 2:39 pm

Not Buying It wrote:
Wed Sep 07, 2022 12:41 pm
I think re-telling the story over and over again and fashioning it as a faith-promoting story rather than a stomach-turning account of homicidal child abuse is her way of processing it. She's been conditioned through decades of Mormonism to see things the way you wish they were and not the way they really are, I think she is simply taking that mindset to the extreme. The more she publicly describes it as her grandson simply stopping breathing and fashions it in to a spiritual experience, the less dissonance she has to feel about what really happened.
I wonder if the only way she can make sense of the horror of it all is to force some higher purpose on the event. So in order to make her grandson's death "worth it", it MUST be a lesson from God. And to make it even more valuable that lesson needs to be shared widely. A twisted way of honoring her grandson and what he went through.

But to not realize that this is a really bad idea takes a serious lack of common sense.
"I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order" - Kurt Vonnegut

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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by jfro18 » Wed Sep 07, 2022 4:30 pm

This one makes me so uncomfortable. On one hand it's another instance where leaders are willing to fudge a story to make it faith promoting, but on the other hand it's someone probably trying to make sense of a truly horrible event.

That said, the church should not be promoting a story like this given that the details of her retellings do not match the actual event. It's one thing for someone to reframe a horrific event to give comfort, but it's another for a church to exploit that for the warm fuzzy feelings of a faith promoting story.

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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by Just This Guy » Thu Sep 08, 2022 5:40 am

stealthbishop wrote:
Wed Sep 07, 2022 2:31 pm
I have thought about it that way too but for her to share this story so often in public is such a risk. Does she not know that there is a public record of the circumstances of her grandson's death?!
I wonder if a lot of the upper levels of the church really don't know this. At a minimum they are not used to thinking of the consequences of their statements.

How many stories have been debunked in recent years? The RML's air flight of death? Bill Reel's "Liar liar pants of fire", the miracle navy ship, etc.

I have to be age-ist here, but a lot of the upper level leadership are of a generation that did not have access to the media and information that is the modern world. I suspect a lot of them just are not used to thinking about the public being able to do stuff like FOI requests and being able to find information to fact check their stories. They are just not used to thinking that their stories may get fact checked. It wasn't a thing for many decades of their lifes, and very old thinking habits are hard to change.

Maybe it's a different generation, maybe it's just just people being isolated by Yes-men that they don't know how to keep claims from growing.

Another aspect is that LDSinc. is not used to getting called out for BS claims. For the most part, when a story gets looked into, it is really only an issue in ex-mo podcasts/blogosphere. As such, it is easy for the church to ignore them. Not many really get blown up to the level that enough people take notice and LDSinc. gets a real push back.

In a way, the fact this story has been told for something like 5 years without any real push back kinda reinforces it to them that they can say what they want, at least to them.
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by Red Ryder » Thu Sep 08, 2022 6:31 am

She’s been telling faith promoting stories without important relevant facts for a long time.

https://www.ldsliving.com/companions-a ... es/s/10353
Because of my father’s call as a mission president, I received my own call to serve a mission earlier than the standard age for sister missionaries. That meant I would enter the missionary training center before high school graduation. To me, the timing did not make sense, but I received a strong spiritual confirmation to trust in the Lord. I did, and things worked out beautifully. Trusting the Lord means moving forward even when the path is not completely clear.
She served in the Lisbon Portugal Mission.

Her father was her mission president.

She served as a companion to her own sister for a month who was also called to the same mission prior to her Fathers assignment.

No wonder things worked out beautifully!

Isn’t that special?
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by Just This Guy » Thu Sep 08, 2022 7:54 am

A sister getting a mission call while still in high school? Either she got held back a few years or her dad didn't like her boyfriend at the time and used a mission as reason to break the two up.
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by Red Ryder » Thu Sep 08, 2022 2:03 pm

Just This Guy wrote:
Thu Sep 08, 2022 7:54 am
A sister getting a mission call while still in high school? Either she got held back a few years or her dad didn't like her boyfriend at the time and used a mission as reason to break the two up.
Her dad WAS the mission president!
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by glass shelf » Thu Sep 08, 2022 4:21 pm

This story is truly disturbing to me. I mean, there are lots of mormon faith-promoting stories that I realized weren't really postive at all once i left the LDS church, but this is wild. I wish she'd gotten quality mental health counseling instead. This is sad all around.

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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by MoPag » Thu Sep 08, 2022 4:40 pm

Wow!! This was a rough one for me!! There was a full criminal investigation and autopsy for my own son's death. It was ruled accidental. I remember her telling the versions of this story empathizing with and her, and the little boy's parents, because he was so close in age to my own son. Now that I know the whole story I want to scream!!!!!!!!
jfro18 wrote:
Wed Sep 07, 2022 4:30 pm
This one makes me so uncomfortable. On one hand it's another instance where leaders are willing to fudge a story to make it faith promoting, but on the other hand it's someone probably trying to make sense of a truly horrible event.

That said, the church should not be promoting a story like this given that the details of her retellings do not match the actual event. It's one thing for someone to reframe a horrific event to give comfort, but it's another for a church to exploit that for the warm fuzzy feelings of a faith promoting story.
Nailed it!!^^

The church is so bad at sharing stories of grief and twisting them into unhealthy narratives. That's probably how Bonnie learned to process the hard things in her life, by making them into faith promoting stories. But what the actual f-ck?!?! That poor baby was murdered!! I hope the mom and dad do break up and we get the full story and that sweet baby angel gets justice one day.
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believing in old men’s lies...--Ezra Pound

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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by MoPag » Thu Sep 08, 2022 4:45 pm

Just This Guy wrote:
Thu Sep 08, 2022 5:40 am
stealthbishop wrote:
Wed Sep 07, 2022 2:31 pm
I have thought about it that way too but for her to share this story so often in public is such a risk. Does she not know that there is a public record of the circumstances of her grandson's death?!
I wonder if a lot of the upper levels of the church really don't know this. At a minimum they are not used to thinking of the consequences of their statements.

Or they don't pay any attention to the sisters. Because why would they? What power do the actually have? I remember Cheiko Okasaki says that she felt like the Q15 didn't even know they (The RS presidency) were there. I wonder if they will pay more attention now. Or if Bonnie will face any backlash from constantly drawing attention to this horrific story.
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believing in old men’s lies...--Ezra Pound

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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by Hagoth » Tue Sep 13, 2022 6:30 am

stealthbishop wrote:
Wed Sep 07, 2022 2:31 pm
I have thought about it that way too but for her to share this story so often in public is such a risk. Does she not know that there is a public record of the circumstances of her grandson's death?!
There seems to be a tradition of just accepting what is said in a formal church setting as truth. It would be disloyal to reject or, God forbid, actively research the claims of one speaking in authority.

I'm sure Nelson must know pilots and airlines keep records of aircraft malfunctions, but he also knows that anyone who actually goes to the effort of doing enough research to determine that a flaming death spiral was really a rattling bolt, and then publicly talks about it, will be treated like an agent Satan seeking to destroy the church by good, believing members, and therefore not to be trusted. I can't imagine how Nelson thought he could get away with embellishing the story of the home intrusion in Africa to the point that even devoted followers felt the need to come forward with the truth. I hear people telling stories in church that are obviously not true, or are heavily embellished or modified, and I think there must be something in our makeup that tells us if we tell a story in a way that makes us or someone else feel the spirit, the story is transformed and validated as true in its own way.
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Re: YW General President's Misleading Faith Promoting Experience of Her Toddler Grandson's Death

Post by moksha » Tue Sep 13, 2022 7:53 am

Perhaps there is a subconscious inner plea to "catch us and finally bring a measure of justice for this little boy".
Good faith does not require evidence, but it also does not turn a blind eye to that evidence. Otherwise, it becomes misplaced faith.
-- Moksha

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