W.J.

I have a confession to make. I would say this confession is directed to the world in general but to Claire Hoffman especially. First of all, let me preface this story with a description of a man named Warren Jeffs. He is perhaps the most notorious polygamist in existence today. If that isn't creepy enough, he is charged with two counts of rape as an accomplice and currently resides in the Utah State Prison serving two lifetime sentences. The guy's a straight up weirdy. So one Sunday night Hannah comes to me with an idea: make a facebook profile for this guy. I immediately hop on board.

Throughout the next few days we spend literally hours adding friends. I would say only about 10-20% of the people we added actually accepted our friend request and one girl specifically requested that we leave her alone. Ultimately we accrue about 150 friends over the course of 3 days. Among these is a woman named Claire Hoffman. This honestly is the hugest coincidence I have ever encountered, so stay tuned. The day she accepts our friends request Claire writes on our wall:

"warren: are you mormon?"

Upon reading this I respond: "awkward subject... we aren't on the best terms. they would say that i'm "excommunicated", but i just like to say we're on hiatus from each other."

A few days later, being LDS myself, I become curious about why she would ask that question. It was totally random. I look at her profile and realize that she has two masters degrees, one in journalism and one in religion. After closer examination I discover that she writes for the Washington Post. The freaking Washington Post! Unbeknownst to us, the day before we added her she had written an article about the very man we were impersonating. Here's a link to it:

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2008/04/polygamy_and_intrusion.html

In this article she refers to Warren Jeffs and his creepy little clan of followers as Mormons. Understandably, she received a lot of backlash because of this from members of my church. The day after I responded to her question, she wrote another article in response to the backlash. AND SHE QUOTED WHAT WE SAID! Here it is, read away:

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2008/04/readers_response_whats_in_a_na.html

That very day our Warren Jeffs profile got disabled by administrators for claiming to be someone we were not.

So what's the moral of this story? You win some, you lose some. But the loss might be worth it to be quoted in the Washington Post.