Alone and Unobserved

Remember how I blogged just a little while ago about the Mormon Church’s heinous, homophobic press release from last August? Well, it turns out that I did not actually read the entire document. I had intended to. I thought I had. I was certainly already angry enough at what I had read. But no, it turns out there’s more—apparently the document is approximately 100% longer than I had thought it was, and 1700% more filled with homophobia and barely concealed condescension and malice.

How did I discover this, you ask, when reading it the first time was so distasteful to me that I obviously tricked myself into thinking I had finished it so that the horror, the revulsion, could finally pass? Well, it turns out that if you do a Google search for “Lance Wickman,” my site is on the second page of search results (link). Who the heck is “Lance Wickman”? Good question. Turns out he was the second (i.e, non-Apostle) Mormon leader to be “inteviewed” for the press release. You know, the one who found the word “sex” so distasteful that he wouldn’t even use the already risible term “same-sex attraction,” but went for the even more wrong-headed “same-gender attraction”? And who further exposed his ignorance and prudishness by saying “gender orientation” instead of “sexual orientation”? Yeah. Him.

Well, also on the second page of the current search results, two entries below mine, is a link to this blistering exposé posted on Todd’s Hammer, which conveniently reproduces the entire press release, in three parts, with Todd’s interpolations inline in bold. I read the first part and the first half of the second part, nodding at almost every one of Todd’s comments. But the press release kept going, and I realized I had never seen this stuff, and by golly if it wasn’t worse than the first half!

So do yourself a favor and read Todd’s take on the whole press release. Get yourself good and steamed—either at Oaks and Wickman and their smarmy, patronizing homophobia, or at me and Todd for having missed the point and spoken ill of the Lord’s anointed. I’ll even give you all of the links:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Recap

It’s generally well-reasoned, as the press release was not. It’s also raw and angry, but what do you expect? These two men, Dallin Oaks and Lance Wickman, have a deep impact on the lives of homosexual Mormons all over the world, and, in Utah at least, on the lives of many non-Mormon homosexuals. And at that time, they were doing their best to support (in all possible ways) the infamous amendment to the Constitution that would have dramatically affected the rights and futures of every homosexual in the country. Fortunately, the amendment died in the then-Republican-controlled Senate last June. But don’t think for a minute that Oaks and Wickman and Hinckley, et al. have given up. Because they haven’t. There will be more to report. And believe me, this time I won’t let it slide for seven months before blogging about it.