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Update to prior CW topic, in another round of America's favorite game Everyone Has a Sex Scandal Eventually: Vice reports that Tim Ballard’s Departure From Operation Underground Railroad Followed Sexual Misconduct Investigation
From Vice's reporting:
OUR states only that:
The Mormon church meanwhile chips in to scold Ballard as well:
Prior thread on Ballard's film here; My own prior comment here
My read on all this is that it is a human psychological tragedy, Ballard got lost in his own masculine heroic fantasy. Good men nearly all carry the fantasy of, as they say, wishin' a nigga would. We want a reason to give our World of Cardboard Speech. We have the urge to engage in violence and adventure, but we want justified violence, righteous adventure. We want to fight, but fight for the right. Ballard found it in child trafficking investigations. He got to play James Bond in real life!
And what does James Bond do? He sleeps with every woman he sees, "as part of the mission." One can see the logic, if these OUR operatives were in an undercover role pretending to be a couple, that making love would be important. Blowing their cover could cost their lives, could endanger the children they are there to rescue, so whether they want to is irrelevant, they have to! But that was also part of the fantasy for him: he wanted to have to, he wanted an environment where he just had to sleep with these women, which he would then enjoy. No doubt, in his mind, the women involved shared the same fantasy. After all, while else would they join OUR and put themselves in these operations?
Ballard never meant any harm to anyone, he never meant to take advantage, he just thought he had found a moral loophole, an opportunity to enter a morals-free zone for a good cause. Apparently the women involved, the rest of the organization, and the Mormon church disagreed.
We should be wary of our fantasies of righteousness, as men. Engage in self-criticism, when we want to have a reason to use righteous violence, sometimes we just want violence. Which itself isn't necessarily a fatal flaw, there is value in harnessing masculine urges in positive ways, that can be seen as the basis for all social function. But we can't let our fantasies obscure our real mission, or harm those around us.
As the author of the first thread I feel a need to comment, though I don't have strong feelings on the matter. My impression from my original research was that Ballard is a weirdly motivated guy who actions were probably on net good. My guess here is he, like many men with a little power, simply couldn't keep it in his pants. Disappointing, but not surprising. Of course now the media is feeling vindicated and taking this opportunity to do victory donuts over the conservatives who rallied around the film. I doubt it will have any large effect since the public has already moved on from the spectacle of the "weird conservative Christian Qanon etc. movie" hitting it big. People who disliked the movie will feel smug, and the people who liked it will ignore the scandal and make excuses, or simply move on.
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I have no dog in this fight. Ballard could be the hero he is made out to be or a grifter. I have no idea and don't really care, but there is nothing in the world that I loathe more than:
My heuristic with Vice and most other "progressive" news outlets is that when it comes to reporting on non-progressive topics, I'm more likely to be closer to the truth by believing the opposite of what is reported. I view every part of the article as presenting the available evidence in the least charitable and most misleading light possible.
So, let's look at who the authors of this piece are, Tim Marchman, a "sports journalist" formerly of Deadspin with a lot of articles about Q-Anon and Anna Merlan, author of Republic of Lies, a book about Q-Anon. So we have two Q-Anon obsessed progressives focusing their little part of the eye of Sauron on an organization that works against child human trafficking. They have written 12 articles critical of OUR since December of 2020. The linked article is pretty much a rehash of their last article on the subject in July. It's surprising there is any axe left here after all that grinding.
So, let's check on the sourcing here:
So, presumably there was a public statement that is no longer available online, was withdrawn without comment by the Mormon church, and what we have left is some citogenesis where the Salt Lake media sources cite Vice citing the Salt Lake media sources. I'll chalk this up as having existed at some point, but perhaps no longer representing the official position of the Mormon church.
So, out of 9 sources, only one partially confirmable source even sort of supports the allegations and even that is now offline less than a week after it was created.
Now let's look at the nature of the allegations:
So, a bunch of anonymous sources saying that a guy may have inappropriately conducted himself in ways that did not lead to actually having sex with women, but with maximum innuendo of massive misconduct and multiple cover-ups in ways that can't clearly be proven as actual malice in a defamation case. Also known as a Tuesday in Vice-land. If anything in this article turns out to be true, it will be in spite of the reporting on it.
The church statement was confirmed by Deseret News, and KUTV. It originated from an employee named Doug Anderson, and at least I'm tapped into rumors in LDS-land that yeah, it's bad and the Church is pissed at Ballard. If the Church would like to make a statement disavowing the Vice article, they have had 5 days to do so and have not.
Do they have a history of making statements disavowing tabloid hit pieces against laypeople of the church? Also they are pissed at him about what? His alleged sexual misconduct, which makes up the majority of the piece, or his inappropriately using the name of an elder? They aren't even in the same ball park crime wise, but they are listed together so the legitimacy of the church rebuke can be tied to the allegations of sexual misconduct.
This is certainly somewhat unprecendented (hence why it's sticking around), but there's no reason to assume malfeasance here, a rogue PR agent. It's been out long enough that someone would have corrected the record by now. Usually the Church responds to things through its newsroom portal, in this case they just responded to a request for comment. Not sure why, but also not sure why it matters.
we don't know specifically why the Church viewed his actions as morally unacceptable, but it is true that he has repeatedly invoked Elder Ballards name and the Church is trying very hard to tamp down on various forms of affinity fraud that sadly take in many of our more guileless members. If the sexual allegations are true it's even worse - but for now it's all based on anonymous accounts so idk. But at minimum, using an apostles name to make money is, to me, bad enough.
I don't think the statement was falsified, I think it's unlikely the church will say anything about the vice article. I thought you were falling for a false dichotomy - 'they commented on the elder stolen valor thing, so not commenting on the vice article implies they agree with it'. It kind of looks like you are falling for it again here -
Because it's true we don't know exactly why the church rebuked him, because they took down the statement they made (which implies they don't fully support it imo, but let's assume they do support it for this argument regardless), but we can be pretty damn sure they were rebuking him for claiming he was good friends with elder Ballard and not the allegations of sexual misconduct, because they speak at length about the elder thing and never say anything about allegations of sexual misconduct. Based on the evidence in this article, there is zero reason to think the church were rebuking him for the sexual misconduct.
To be clear, I don't think anyone in the church has done anything shady at all (except younger Ballard). But I trust vice about as far as I can kick them, and this article only reinforces that.
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I was reading your account and, because I don't know what Ballard looks like, I was picturing Jim Caviezel sending a woman a sexy mirror selfie. I looked up the man himself and he looks like a weird cross between Ray Liotta and that one blond guy who was the villain in every movie/TV show made in the Noughties.
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Seems to gel with my impression that a lot of higher-ups in "aid organisations" are complete sociopaths. I recall a top boss in the Red Cross who systematically groomed and later raped refugees. Doing so was easy because they didn't know the language, didn't know people in their new country and many of them were single and teenagers.
The same pattern was found in Haiti. This isn't to say that aid work is inherently suspect. Just that it often provides a perfect cover for sociopaths to exploit victims who rarely can defend themselves. This Ballard character is just the latest example.
The Red Cross is like the UN Peacekeepers in that the vast majority of grunts come from very poor third-world countries. There are a few westerners (eg. the Irish are a big component of the UN peacekeepers in Lebanon) but the majority are from countries that are very poor, that send workers (often soldiers in the latter case) to do work-for-hire for the UN or NGOs.
In the Haiti scandal case, the country director for Oxfam (a large British NGO), who was a white Belgian, did cavort with prostitutes and had a 16 year old 'girlfriend' (as you note). But the majority of sexual assault cases in these regions by peacekeepers and NGO workers aren't committed by Westerners.
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I'm not sure if he quite fits, as to my knowledge no evidence has been presented suggesting that he personally abused the child trafficking victims he ostensibly came to rescue. Abusing your position of power to try to get your subordinates into bed with you is the kind of run-of-the-mill sex scandal not peculiar to any individual line of work.
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I had to look this guy up to find out that he’s married. For some reason the articles about the scandal don’t seem to think that’s relevant. Really shows how these low-level journalists think. His wife won’t give quotes to the media, or file publicly-available court documents, and of course, it would be unethical to speculate on how she feels about her husband trying to sleep with his coworkers, so the biggest victim is left unadvocated for. In Vice News’s America, the worst sin one can commit against a woman is triggering the almighty ick.
Why is the emotional harm to his wife privileged over the emotional harm to his employees?
In Mormonism (and, to a slightly lesser extent, orthodox Christianity) because one is a violation of a promise wrapped up in a sacrament, and the other is common-or-garden boorishness. It is similar to how lying about office sex having sworn an oath to tell you the truth, and called divine judgement down on yourself if you forswear is worse than casually lying about bombing an aspirin factory. Except more so, because judicial oaths simply invoke the name of god while touching a holy book, whereas sacraments are basically real-world cleric spells.
What I find more interesting is the total inversion of the principle in secular (and secularised nominally-Christian) culture. The thing that crystallised this for me was the Ryan Giggs superinjunction affair - both sides of the debate agreed that the interests being balanced were Ryan Giggs' right to conceal his affair from his wife and children vs. Imogen Thomas's right as a vulnerable victim to tell her own story (and get paid for it). But it goes back further - even Christian conservatives talked about the Clinton sex scandals as if Monica was more of a victim than Hilary. (For the avoidance of doubt, under the traditional Christian conservative standard the "other woman" was also contemptible - terms like "homewrecker" were not compliments).
Matthew Parris wrote a book of famous British political scandals in the early noughties, and one of the points he made in the closing essay is that since the 1980's it has been easier for politicians to survive a sex scandal if they divorce their wife and marry their mistress than if they dump the mistress and return to their wife. This is also consistent with the "the other woman is the real victim" frame.
Modern secular culture no longer believes that we owe our spouses fidelity. It does believe that men owe the women they are fucking (regardless of the official nature of the relationship) some kind of fair dealing which is incompatbile with carrying on with a mistress while planning to return to your wife.
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There is innately a hierarchy of moral obligation, as expressed by your son being worth more to you than a generic person on the moon.
.. to you, yes.
I'm not sure why we as outside observers would share that moral hierarchy.
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Family is holier than business. Clearly.
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Umm... why shouldn't it?
Yes, that's a serious question.
From where I am standing if we're to be ranking sins in order of severity, "violating a sacred vow" or "cheating in a relationship" strike me as far far worse than "hooking up with a coworker".
One of these things is lurid enough to make the news, while the other is a normal Tuesday.
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That's not privileging harm to anyone, that's privileging his vows.
Which is a fine thing for you morality to be based on, it's just different from OP's point, which was centering the wife as 'the biggest victim'.
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The closer you are to someone the more they can hurt you. Better to lose a job than a spouse, better to be mistreated by a boss than a spouse. I'd rather be sexually harassed than have my spouse sexually harass someone.
Strong disagree honestly, you take vows that typically include 'for better or for worse' when you get married, any harm suffered from your spouse is still morally bad but you sort of knowingly signed up for that gamble and did a lot of paperwork about it.
Whereas 'My boss will fly me to a remote and dangerous part of a foreign country, insist that we have to sleep in the same hotel bed, then try to fuck me' should not be an assumed risk people are taking when they sign up for a job where that isn't explicitly specified in the contract. That's too high a burden to place on the employment relationship, especially because people have to wok to live and can't realistically decide not to take that gamble.
I mean this sort of thing both should not be, and is, an assumed risk in any relationship, mainly because abuse is bad. Talking about "risks" at all muddies the water, since there will always be a risk of something bad happening, and there's virtually nothing we can do about that no matter how draconian our laws.
People can (and should) more easily switch jobs than spouses, so again I have to disagree here. People are (and should be) much more psychologically harmed by switching spouses than jobs too.
This is just such a strange perspective. I don't like the phrase "victim-blaming" but it really feels like you're putting the moral responsibility on the victim here. I think the closer the relationship the more responsible you are for not mistreating your partner. Sure, in closer relationships you should try much harder to forgive the perpetrator before giving up the relationship, but that's not really relevant to how bad the perpetrator's actions are.
We have obligations towards our children which we don't have towards strangers. It is a moral obligation for the former relationship to be better than the latter. Therefore, should our treatment of our children be equal to our treatment of strangers, we are neglecting our duty to our children, whatever that treatment is. If you don't feed a stranger, that's fine. If you don't feed your children, that's abuse. If you hate a stranger, who cares. If you hate your children, they will be deeply scarred psychologically.
The same goes for a spouse. You're more morally responsible for your spouse than your employees, so you bear more moral responsibility for mistreating the former than the latter.
Let me premise by saying my feelings about a spouse are not applicable to my feelings about children. Spousal relationships are at least in theory voluntary, being someone's child is not. And children are a special class anyway because they lack other rights and capabilities.
But, speaking only about spouses: I'm not sure how much we disagree vs. how much we're asking different questions.
I think there are two axes here, the perspective we're judging morality from, and the difference between harms vs obligations.
I would agree that, from the perspective of a husband, the husband has moral duties and obligations to his wife that he doesn't have towards other people.
I think you agree with this?
I also believe that, from the perspective of society, we should more harshly sanction a husband doing harm to a stranger than to his wife. The wife made a choice to be in that situation, and has legal recourse to leave it; strangers did not and do not, generally.
I think you don't agree with this, and call victim blaming? My feeling there is that, again from the perspective of society, 'blame' is not a useful construct and we should instead be thinking about systems of harm minimization. We want to minimize the amount that society or the state interferes with voluntary marriages, giving people a free escape hatch if they want out but otherwise letting the couple negotiate the nature of that relationship mostly for themselves. We want society and the state to interfere with the relationship between employers and employees, or random people with strangers, a lot more closely stringently than that.
I think usually it's harder for the wife to leave than for a stranger to leave, though. And theoretically the wife didn't choose to be in that situation either (though, knowing relationships in real life, it does seem that the red flags exist and are usually quite obvious long beforehand).
Emotional abuse--as a stranger, walk away. As a spouse, get a divorce. Way harder. Same with almost anything else, it really is harder for the spouse to leave than a stranger, or an employee. Maaaaybe it's harder for some employees to leave their jobs than for some spouses to leave the marriage, but this is a very rare case and I think can generally be ignored.
As far as whether the government should be interfering more, idk, I was just talking about moral culpability, not legal. Legally I think we generally should treat this stuff similarly no matter the victim's relationship to the perpetrator.
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I've been conditioned to be very suspicious of such accusations and entertain contexts in which the raw allegations could be benign.
Sharing a bed: booking a two bed hotel room might raise suspicion.
Sent a undies / fake tattoos photo: having some racy photos of one another could be used as evidence of a real relationship.
Showering together: maybe this happened in a context where a trafficker offered his shower for them to use together.
"How far are you willing to go": that's a benign question on its own.
The point I'm most curious about is the advantage in presenting as a couple. Is that typical of child trafficking customers? Is it the only way to plausibly have a second person around for backup?
There's also no indication that any sex or even unwanted touching took place.
Presumably it makes for a better cover story if you really do want to bring a child sex slave back home: "yes, this is me and my wife and we are bringing our new adopted/foster child home with us from [Third World country]" while a single man might be deemed more suspicious. I don't know.
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Wait, were these temple garments? Because that’d be hilarious if so.
My guess is that he was not wearing garments for his sex trafficker undercover work...though that would certainly be a Choice
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James Bond only very rarely sleeps with women 'for the mission', and even most of the time when he and the girl have to pretend to be together (like in Casino Royale) the sex is extracurricular.
In Dr. No for the mission, he sleeps with Miss Taro (along with other women extracurricularly)
In From Russia With Love, Tatiana Romanov.
In Goldfinger, Jill Masterson and Pussy Galore.
In Thunderball, Fiona Volpe.
That's 4 for 4 with the first 4 Bond movies. In Casino Royale, it's Solange, not Vesper.
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So the charge is that he, an adult man, tried to convince adult women to engage in consensual sex with him?
I’m getting sick of this thing where every shot a guy takes which doesn’t land is somehow seen as a sexual assault. Do people realize that women have agency as well, and also engage in these sorts of fantasy? “Oh no I guess I have to sleep in this bed with this big strong man who is out here saving the children for the sake of the mission” is the plot of like 90% of female targeted erotica. “We had to shower together to convince the cartel that we were married” sounds like it was literally written by a female erotica writer.
Human adults have sex with each other. Sometimes there is a period of courtship. Sometimes, and in fact just due to pure statistical reality, most times that courtship fails.
That is not a scandal.
The scandal is that these people just cannot understand that the scandal is the fact that adults want to engage in sexual activity with CHILDREN.
Go to a drag show? No problem. You do you.
Go to a drag show, with children? Problem.
Engage in a gender fetish? No problem. You do you.
Engage in a gender fetish with children? Problem.
Make erotic literature? No problem. You do you.
Make erotic literature for children? Problem.
The scandal is that these maybe actual pedophiles don’t understand the demarcation between “sexual activity among consenting adults” and “sexual activity with children.”
The charge is that he violated his vows of marriage, but because neither the reporters at Vice (appropriate name is appropriate) nor a sizable majority of Mottizens consider marriage vows to be particularly sacred they are unable to properly articulate the true nature of the conflict.
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He isn't taking criticism because he took run-of-the mill shots that didn't land. He's taking criticism because he came up with bullshit scenarios where he tried to convince women that they had some kind of professional responsibility to sleep with him, or engage in the kind of activity short of actual romantic involvement that most men would nonetheless like the opportunity to do with attractive women. And then to top it off he tried to lay a guilt trip on them if they expressed any reservations, making a claim that children would be harmed or even killed from a position as someone who would at least seem to be a credible authority on the subject. Maybe there's a legitimate explanation, but it all depends on the timeline. The kinds of things he asked the women to do are certainly unusual requests for employees or volunteers for a charitable organization. If you're going to make these kinds of requests from a position of authority, they'd better be necessary, and exactly what is required needs to be made explicit at the very beginning of the relationship, preferably with signed consent forms. If this seems extreme, keep in mind that these aren't women he met at a bar and invited to Ocean City for the weekend who were taken aback by his advances; they were women who never expressed any desire other than to help trafficked children. I haven't heard the whole story, and if he actually did all that it would be one thing. But my guess is that the "we have to share a bed and shower together" thing isn't something they found out about until they got to the hotel.
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Keep in mind also that Tim Ballard was married. I'm sure his wife didn't exactly consent to him trying to sexually proposition the women who went with him on these trips.
Unfortunately, as Quantumfreakonomics notes, she has not spoken on the issue, and she is most certainly a victim.
And that makes him, if the allegations are true, an adulterer. That’s an issue for his family. I don’t see the need to make this a national story.
The thing that makes this a national story is that Mr. Ballard, through the fictionalized version of his life that is "Sound of Freedom," one of the major cultural figures held up as virtuous and good by Team Red. Thus, it is imperative in the kulturkampf that Team Blue knock him off his pedestal or prove him to be bad in some way, lest Team Red be able to convince people that Reds can be virtuous, or that it is virtuous to be Red. That's what's driving amplification of this story in higher-profile news networks/through non-Red social media networks. Obviously Reds, Mormons, and Utahns have their own reasons to care about this - their idol has feet of clay / adultery is something they care about, etc.
Yeah, that was what struck me about the reaction to the movie: it was excoriated, and I couldn't figure out why. All the QAnon accusations, about some movie that had been held up by studio internal politics, and was a mid-tier action movie about saving victims of child sex trafficking.
Nobody was having conniptions about the latest Jack Reacher or Bourne movies, which are all about heroic white guy going out and kicking ass in action hero style. Why this particular movie? What was provoking such reactions?
And I honestly had to think it was the religious angle: Caviezel is Catholic (and not the Biden/Pelosi "Imma Catholic who's cool with abortion" type) and probably forever tainted by being in the Mel Gibson movie about Christ, this guy Ballard is a Mormon (again, remember when Mitt Romney was the Dangerous Mormon Theocrat before being rehabbed as The Only Good Republican?). Not the proper type of religious, the bad conservative traditional anti-all things good, right and progressive type.
Caviezel is into QAnon and believes the elite cabal are extracting adrenochrome from children through torture. So the connection is not spurious.
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I'm reminded of that classic smuggie. What even is the thinking here?
"Oh no the guy who made that one movie that vindicates the elite pedophiles cult narrative is an adulterer? Allow me to purity spiral senselessly and immediately reject the entire memeplex associated with it"
Smuggies all have a grain of truth to them, but they're also the ultimate example of motte-and-bailey arguments in practice.
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This sorts of thing is some reversed 'republicans pounce' in action and it is every bit as pathetic. Of course this is a story. You don't need 'senseless purity spirals' to consider cheating on your wife and abusing your authority as a literal hero bad things.
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Sound of Freedom beat the final Indiana Jones movie at the box office, albeit through a ticket multipurchase scheme, and the idea that Hollywood might lose its power is unthinkable to them. The "need" is to regain control of a public narrative of mainstream moral superiority over Christians, and nothing hurts Christians in the news like the "hypocrisy" of a single Christian falling like Samson to a woman's wiles.
That's the Culture Total War mentality: destroy all monuments and great works the other side might conceivably claim as theirs, and salt the earth, from football and beer all the way down to knitting forums.
One of the guys from Angel Studios is on this podcast: https://www.thebulwark.com/podcast-episode/how-2023s-oddest-box-office-hit-paid-it-forward/
He claims that under the "Pay it Forward" ticket scheme, the tickets aren't counted as "box office" until a ticket is claimed and used to attend a screening. That is, the theaters do not see the purchase of the ticket until it is actually used. If true, I don't see how that is any less legit than the buy-it-yourself ticket model. Attendance is attendance.
It might say something interesting about the distribution of interest in the movie: some people were sufficiently interested to buy multiple tickets and contribute more towards the movie's success than they had to, and some people may not been sufficiently motivated to see it without a free ticket (although i don't know a lot about how you get a free ticket and it's possible ticket recipients would have seen the movie anyway)
I'm not sure that's negative towards the movie, though: having some people be super excited about your movie isn't uncommon, and it's kind of interesting that we don't see more of this.
Imagine a campaign where feminists and allies subsidize a movie that they think portays women well, to try and get more moviegoers to explore along those lines. Kind of terrifying in what it'll do to movie creator incentives in a Toxoplasma of Rage way, but i don't think people are making a strategic decision not to do it on those grounds.
We will definitely see a lot more of it now that there's been such an effective proof of concept.
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I have no idea what you're talking about with respect to this story.
If you're saying that the women who accused him, employees of Operation Underground Railroad who dedicated their lives to stopping child sex trafficking and pedophilia, the board of OUR that conducted the investigation and removed him, or the Mormons are all just blind wokies... That's astonishingly uncharitable.
I am commenting on the Vice article, as well as the more general culture war climate where failed attempts at courting women are treated as some form of sexual impropriety.
Also you and the other person that commented something similar: you are both apparently falling into "wait, which side of the culture ware is firmamenti on here? Who is he accusing of being a wokie?" - this is bad form. I would highly encourage you to try to get yourself out of that framing.
n = 2, but I read your comment the same way.
What do children have to do with this guy’s creepy hotel fantasies? It sounded like you were looking for an excuse to take shots at people who “can’t understand” that pedophilia is bad. I think everyone involved in this anti-child-trafficking organization understands that. I assume the rest of the Mormons are fully aware, too. So who are you complaining about, if not some straw progressives?
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Did you read the article at all? He wasn't cancelled for being 'anti-woke' he was cancelled for being a Mormon man (ie. a sexually conservative culture in which premarital sex is banned) and trying to get young single women to sleep with him.
Your boss / employer telling you to get into bed with him is different than a man hitting on you in a 'UwU...unless' way. Why are you so deliberately trying to reframe the allegations?
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Seriously -- if sex-positivity is a thing that needs to be discussed/encouraged with 9 year olds by their teachers, then I think grown women are going to need to learn to handle a dude asking them "how 'bout it?" from time to time.
They have learned to handle it, by reporting when their boss does it to them repeatedly under coercive circumstances.
The next step is for men to learn how to handle that.
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Do you think the Mormon church is sex positive or has liberal views on promiscuity? He's being cancelled for being a hypocrite.
Do you think that 'Vice Magazine' is likely to reflect the interests of the CJCLDS in any way?
Liberals calling out conservatives for their hypocrisy about promiscuity, homosexuality and so on is as old as time, what's your point?
"Look at this self-identified Mormon conservative trying to sleep with his interns against the core tenets of his church" is a story, sure.
And liberals being explicitly pro-promiscuity and pro-homosexuality is even older so who's the real hypocrite here?
Not the employees or readers of Vice, who will agree with you that cheating on your wife is bad.
I don't know how clever you think you're being here but my reflexive response is the old Cole Phelps "press X to doubt" meme
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Well, actually...
It could be argued that any righteous Mormon man (and what could be more righteous than rescuing children from sex slavery) has the right, nay, the obligation, to share his righteousness with as many celestial wives and spirit children as possible.
Take that page with a heap of salt. Much of it is outright falsehood, and much of the remainder more misleading than not.
For example, there's a whole section about how women can't be exalted except through men, and are thus otherwise denied salvation. This is false on two levels:
Salvation is different from exaltation. People are saved with no regard to marital status, making the second half of the claim an outright lie.
Men also cannot be exalted without women, making the first half misleading enough that it is essentially a lie. The implication is that righteousness flows forth from men to women, when the reality is just that marriage to a member of the opposite gender is a commandment for everyone. It would be just as accurate to claim the exact reverse, that righteousness flows from women to men.
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A quick google suggests that is not the case any more:
These sorts of public-facing nonbinding documents are often missing important context which committed members understand. Everybody knows that the banning of polygamy was a reaction to political circumstances (Utah wanted to become a state, and congress was reluctant to condone polygamy), not a reaction to divine revelation about the nature of the eternal law. If a man's celestial wife dies, and he remarries in the temple, he now has two celestial wives for eternity. I couldn't find anything definitive, but it seems like there are certain circumstances where a man may be sealed to multiple living women at the same time, even if they aren't civilly "married".
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Was he proposing marriage before sex?
For all we know he may have been. Others in this thread have noted the lack of any actual touching. Maybe he did just want to share a bed together in the temporal realm. It's not any weirder than soaking.
EDIT: To be clear, I still think the default hypothesis is that he was trying to get his dick wet, but I don't want to completely discount bizarre-sounding Mormon explainations.
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This. See that Biden scandal is not about "look at this degenerate druggie pervert", but "look how so called servants of the people abuse their position for personal enrichment".
A servant of the people abusing his position is bad in a non-partisan way independent of any hypocrisy. To make that analogy work, you'd need a weird situation where Democrats care about political corruption, Republicans do not, and the Republicans are criticizing Biden only for the hypocrisy in being corrupt, not for being corrupt per se.
Being a hypocrite about adultery also doesn't seem serious enough that you should try to prevent someone from making money from a movie. Notice that the headline calls it "sexual misconduct", not "hypocrisy", because on some level Vice understands this. "They're just after him for being a hypocrite" is the motte to their bailey.
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"No enemies to the left" is more succinct.
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Alternative explanation, presented as a devil's advocate position with much less charity for Tim Ballard - he was leading a cult and cults often turn into sex cults when their leaders are sufficiently in control of the group. Even the eventually notorious Jim Jones started his cult with what looks like sincere dedication to the anti-racist cause, charity, and equity for all. That Ballard and OUR inspire incredible passion and loyalty from their followers, that the followers are often steeped in conspiracy theories about evildoers going to the highest level of international governments, and that Ballard has experience with LDS doctrine are the sorts of things that make think it's entirely possible that this organization could go from being primarily do-gooders to being basically a cult. What's fun is that this story can fit neatly with your James Bond narrative - if there's anything I've learned from listening to Timesuck cult episodes, it's that these leaders seem like they eventually come up with reasons that they just have to screw the attractive women in their cult, and that the leaders seem to at least somewhat believe the story they're telling. Tim Ballard could have believed that he was the James Bond of the anti-slavery world, that it was very important that he have sex with his followers, and there's a pretty good chance that people would just kind of go along with it until something snaps that makes everyone rethink what the hell they're doing.
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I'm not proud to admit how often I'm on public transport with some scumbags in their late teens/early twenties being generally obnoxious loudmouths (playing music through their shitty Bluetooth speakers, vaping, yelling at each other etc.) and find myself thinking "man, I wish one of these fuckers would start some shit so I could punch his lights out with impunity".
But I don't think we have any good reason, right now, to believe that this was part of Ballard's motivation/rationalisation. I suspect that he was both sincere in his desire to rescue children from sex trafficking, and also a horndog. Maybe he believed that his "heroism" entitled him to some strange - he'd earned it, hadn't he?
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That is definitely stretching the charitability principle to the max. A much more mundane and often happening in the real world is that men just try to convert attraction to the cause to attraction to them. Has been happening forever, will be happening forever.
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This is an interesting post, and a good one, but the most interesting explanation is seldom the right one. The world is often boring, and I'm betting that it is boring in this case as well: lots of men just aren't able to keep it in their pants at a whiff of power, fame, or money. So it goes.
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