Ok, if you haven’t seen the news yet, the guy responsible for the Mormon missionaries cheesecake calendar has been summoned to a disciplinary council:

Chad Hardy, the brain behind the Men on a Mission calendars, which feature topless returned Mormon missionaries doing their best to look sexy, is facing discipline and possible excommunication because of the project.

Check out this Associated Press article on the controversy.

The basics are this: Hardy got a letter from Frank E. Davie, a Las Vegas Mormon church leader. The letter summoned him to a meeting with the church’s council of elders to discuss his “conduct unbecoming a member of the church.”

Of course, all the news articles are playing up the “possibility of excommunication”, though in truth I can’t imagine that any stake president in his right mind would excommunicate someone for this calendar.

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UPDATED 07/13/08: Sheesh, well, I guess I was sure wrong about that last statement.
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I understand the concept of disciplinary councils to ‘protect the good name of the Church’, but in cases such as this, it appears to me to have the opposite effect. The Church looks silly and the calendar (and its creator) gets far more publicity — and, most likely, far more sales — than if the Church has just maintained a dignified silence over the whole matter.

Sigh. ..bruce..