SALT LAKE CITY — Mitt Romney has major headaches named Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.
This month, he also had Helen Radkey.
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At 1:55 p.m. on Feb. 8, Radkey, an excommunicated Mormon who spends her days combing through databases at the church’s Family History Library, e-mailed Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named for the famed Nazi-hunter.
“FYI, discovered today: Posthumous baptisms for the parents of Simon Wiesenthal,” Radkey wrote. “I am collecting evidence, which will be e-mailed to you, if requested, as long as there is a public stink.”
The Wiesenthal Center obliged, and a week later, Radkey followed with the revelation that Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, was also listed in the private Mormon databases as “ ‘ready’ for posthumous rites.” This appeared to be a violation of the spirit of the Mormon agreement with Jewish groups not to posthumously baptize Holocaust victims and led to Wiesel’s public appeal to Romney to demand that his church stick to its word. All the reports credited Radkey, an independent researcher in Salt Lake City, as the force behind the revelations.
Radkey, an eccentric and familiar face at the church’s sprawling genealogical archive here, has a knack for notoriety.
She has acquired a measure of acclaim for her discovery that Mormons in the Provo, Utah, temple had posthumously baptized Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, during the 2008 presidential campaign, as well as revealing that Joan of Arc, Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe had also received proxy baptisms.
Now Radkey’s energies are directed at a new area of research, which she hopes will cause a new headache for Romney: the posthumous plural marriages of his ancestors. She calls this “Romney’s polygamy tree.”
* * *
On a recent afternoon in Radkey’s apartment on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, a menorah and Virgin Mary statuette stood atop the refrigerator, a Buddha sat under a lamp and Egyptian sun gods rested on a coffee table. A book called “The Animal Wise Tarot” helped explain the preponderance of wolf posters hanging on the walls alongside a framed “universal life church minister” certification.
“The only thing I won’t talk about is my metaphysical work,” Radkey, 69, wearing a red sweater and black beret, said in her Australian accent. She explained that it would be used by the church to discredit her research. She preferred to leaf through stacks of manila folders labeled “Gaskell Romney, grandfather,” “Archibald Newell Hall, great-great grandfather,” and “Parley Parker Pratt, great-great grandfather.”
Radkey, who is a regular guest on the weekly cable show “Polygamy: What Love Is This?” (“a live, call-in television talk show dedicated to the subject of polygamy and Mormon fundamentalism”), has decided that the world should know about what she considers the posthumous love life of Romney’s forebears.
This is because, she said, “there’s a double standard” in which Mormons have renounced polygamy for the living, but “allowed plural marriages for the dead.”
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