Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel recently asked Romney to ask the Mormon Church to stop its members from posthumously baptizing Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Forrest Wickman delves into the history:
The church says it learned that such baptisms were occurring in 1991 and formally ordered a stop to them; when it received complaints from an organization of Holocaust survivors in 1995, it re-emphasized the directive and removed hundreds of thousands of names from genealogical records. Even so, members have disregarded the order again and again. … Mormons think of baptisms for the dead as a service to others, almost like adding family members’ names to a guest list. According to Mormon doctrine, dead people who are baptized by proxy don’t automatically join the church. Instead, they have the right to accept or reject the ordinance in the afterlife, and thus the chance to ascend to the highest levels in the afterlife, depending on what they decide.
Lawrence Wright described the bizarre process in 2002:
In practice, teen-agers line up in the temple to be baptized as proxies for dead people whose names appear on a computer screen. “We also have people who are called ‘extraction missionaries,’ Elbert Peck, the former editor and publisher of the Mormon intellectual magazine Sunstone, told me. “They basically go to their little stake center and sit down at a microfilm machine and take these names and put them into our computer database.” According to Richard E. Turley, Jr., the managing director of the Family and Church History Department, in Salt Lake City, as many as two hundred million dead people have been baptized as Mormons, including Buddha and all the popes, Shakespeare, Einstein, and Elvis Presley—what Peck dismissively calls “celebrity work for the dead.”
John Aravosis is upset this is still happening:
So it's been 20 years now that the Jews first begged, then demanded, that the Mormons stop secretly baptizing Holocaust victims, and the Mormons just haven't been able to fix the problem – AFTER TWENTY YEARS. Mind you, the Mormons promised to stop baptizing all Jews, unless they're direct ancestors of Mormons, back in 1995. Oops.
The Dish 