Alone and Unobserved

Growing up, I thought coffee was the devil. Booze was the devil squared. People who drank coffee or beer were evil, filthy, satanic. They were destroying their souls. And besides, caffeine and alcohol were poisons, right? Those people were poisoning themselves.

Even worse, Mormon propaganda films so conflate alcohol and drugs that there was almost no distinction in my mind between a) drinking vodka, b) smoking pot and c) shooting up heroin, and there was certainly no way to do any of these things responsibly. Any and all of them would inevitably lead to you overdosing and dying… presumably while your pure Mormon family stood around your bed, weeping at your lost potential and blaming themselves for your terrible life choices.

While I was growing up, I heard all the time about Mormon girls who slept around, who got abortions, who lived with their boyfriends without getting married—pretty much the worst things you can do in Mormonism besides murdering someone—but who wouldn’t touch caffeine, alcohol or tobacco. When you heard these stories, you were supposed to laugh at how screwed up the worldviews of these women were, because keeping dietary restrictions is way less important than staying chaste and morally pure.

“Hahaha! They have sex at the drop of a hat, but they won’t smoke a cigarette! What idiots.”

(It’s also interesting that the subjects of these stories were all female—men were expected to remain pure and chaste as well, but somehow it felt worse when a woman crossed that line.)

And yet, what was my experience of giving up Mormon teachings like? I drank my first cup of coffee furtively at ten o’clock at night in a Salt-Lake-area Village Inn, feeling guilty and sinful. But before I allowed myself that first sip, I had already

• Made out with any number of boys, including strangers
• Had two boyfriends
• Given my first handjob
• Received my first handjob
• Given my first blowjob
• Received my first blowjob
• Stopped wearing my temple garments

My first mouthful of liquor was from a friend’s Cosmopolitan at a party. It looked delicious, but to my virgin tongue it tasted like turpentine. Poison! I thought. I didn’t really have my first drink until two years later, by which time I had

• Resigned from the Mormon church and had my priesthood authority and temple covenants revoked
• Had SEX-sex—like, all the way—with any number of people, including hook-ups and one-night stands
• Railed openly against the Mormon church and its history of corruption and deception

I stopped even paying lip service to “divinely inspired” Mormon dietary restrictions quite early on in my deconversion, but still they were almost the last part of my upbringing that I let go. And I can’t explain why.

In our lovely Deseret,
Where the Saints of God have met,
There’s a multitude of children all around.
They are generous and brave;
They have precious souls to save;
They must listen and obey the gospel’s sound.

Hark! Hark! Hark! ’tis children’s music—
Children’s voices, oh, how sweet,
When in innocence and love,
Like the angels up above,
They with happy hearts and cheerful faces meet.
(“In Our Lovely Deseret,” Eliza R. Snow)

I’m sure all ex-Mormons (and lots of other people too) have a most-hated hymn. I have several! But at the top of the list is “In Our Lovely Deseret,” a cheery abomination written for Mormon children by Eliza “Zion’s Poetess” Snow, whose poetry career just proves that “prolific” and “talented” are not even remotely related attributes. The music her hymns are set to is, if anything, worse: do not, under any circumstances, go searching for an online recording of “In Our Lovely Deseret,” because it will colonize your brain and drive you mad.

In second place we have a sixty-way tie between all of the solemn hymns about Jesus bleeding and dying for my sins. They make my mouth taste like the white bread Mormons eat for communion, and the paper cup they drink the communion water from. (Yes, you heard that right: Mormons drink water for communion, and no, I’m not going to try and explain it. I don’t have to explain Mormonism to people now that I’m not Mormon.)

In third place—

Never mind. When I hear a Mormon hymn, I’m transported back to a time in my life when I hated myself. Worse, I believed in an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good being called “Heavenly Father” who hated me, too. Is it any wonder that my list of hated Mormon hymns encompasses the whole Mormon hymnbook?

I’ve featured Mormon ‘apostle’ Dallin Oaks and his, er, peculiar take on sexuality and family relations on this blog before ([1], [2]). In some ways, Oaks has become the go-to guy when the Mormon church needs a ponderous, intolerant statement about the homosexuals, perhaps because of his talent for sounding authoritative and paternal even when he’s at his most insane. Such as in a speech he plans on giving at BYU-Idaho (formerly Ricks College), a Mormon-owned school in Rexburg, Idaho. In the speech (according to a copy obtained by the AP), Oaks “refers to gay marriage as an ‘alleged civil right’” and says “[t]he anti-Mormon backlash after California voters overturned gay marriage last fall is similar to the intimidation of Southern blacks during the civil rights movement.”

W. T. F. He did not just go there. But OH YES HE DID. And he’s standing by it, too!

In an interview Monday before the speech, Oaks said he did not consider it provocative to compare the treatment of Mormons in the election’s aftermath to that of blacks in the civil rights era, and said he stands by the analogy.

“It may be offensive to some—maybe because it hadn’t occurred to them that they were putting themselves in the same category as people we deplore from that bygone era,” he said.

The “anti-Mormon backlash” is exactly what the Mormon church deserved for spending so much time, money and effort taking rights away from an already-oppressed segment of the population. This is a democracy; free speech—including free speech you don’t like!—is everyone’s right. Including Dallin Oaks’s right to stick his foot so far in his mouth it comes out his ass.

EDITED (23:18): Somehow the SL Trib article I linked to in the body of the post changed from the AP story to a related one; I’ve changed the link to the AP story on Fox 13 News Channel’s website.
[SL Trib article] [AP article (on Fox News)]

After the hair-raising experience detailed in the previous post, we got to go up to the fourth floor of the Mormon Church History Library and visit the conservation lab, where materials such as books and photographs are cleaned, repaired and occasionally taken completely apart and reassembled. While we were there I drove everyone else insane by wandering around and taking pictures of EVERYTHING. Here’s the Flickr set I uploaded the photos to.

They do a lot of really cool stuff there! I wish I could have videotaped the whole presentation. It nearly, nearly made me not regret spending the whole day with Mormons.

I was stuck in a horrible orientation at the Mormon Church History Library today, WITHOUT PHONE SERVICE. Here are the irate things I jotted down on my phone while I endured it in suffering silence. (If you want to know why I was there at all, consult this page.)

I can’t believe they’re making us watch a Mormon propaganda film. WHAT.

It’s a terrible film, too, all about the sanitized Mormon history they’re “preserving” (read: creating) here at the Church History Library. *vomit* *puke* *gag* *retch*

LET ME OUT OF HERE. I want to see the conservation lab, not this horrific, manipulative glurge.

I’m-a gonna CUT A BITCH if this video doesn’t end soon.

Thank the good nonexistent god it’s over. Why are they showing this crap to professional librarians? We don’t care about your doctrine or your regurgitated feel-good pablum.

“You wouldn’t believe who wrote to Brigham Young in the 1800s. He was the ‘Dear Abby’ of 19th Century Utah.”

OMG, they debunk over-the-pulpit feel-good stories! At last, something USEFUL.

Okay, okay, you’ve made your case for why you needed this special new building. But why am *I* here, and why should I care??

I wonder what would happen if I asked to see my Mormon membership record. “Whaddaya MEAN I can’t see it????”

Every Mormon ward+stake has a historian who submits an annual “history” to Mormon HQ?!

“The financial records of the LDS Church aren’t going to be released to the public, for obvious reasons.” It’s not at all obvious to *me.* Please explain your reasoning!

They are apparently desperately behind in digitizing their collection.

I did survive the orientation, and so did everyone else. But JUST BARELY.

Back in the early 1990s, a number of Jewish genealogists made an unwelcome discovery: their ancestors, including hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims, had been posthumously baptized into the Mormon church. Jewish community leaders were incensed, saying it smacked of the Christian aggression and forced conversions of medieval times, and that it defamed the memory and sacrifice of the deceased.

Mormon leaders decried this apparent “mistake,” and as a token of their good faith, provided Jewish community leaders with the names of 380,000 deceased Jews and Holocaust victims whose records had allegedly been removed from the database, and agreed to stop baptizing such persons in the future.

Unfortunately, the vast network of well-meaning but misguided and amateurish Mormon genealogists proved impossible to control, and evidence quickly mounted showing that not only were some of the previously removed names turning up in the database again, more questionable names were being added. This led to more meetings with Jewish community leaders, and even a meeting between Utah Senator (and practicing Mormon) Orrin Hatch and New York Senator Hillary Clinton (on behalf of some of her Jewish constituents), all without, apparently, definitively resolving the problem.

But wait, the story gets better: in May, it was revealed that some busybody Mormon had gotten Stanley Ann Dunham (b. 1942, d. 1995) baptized into the Mormon church. Her claim to fame? She is the mother of the current President of the United States, Barack Obama.

And now, Helen Radkey, a Salt Lake researcher who tracked down a number of the Holocaust victims’ names as well as Dunham’s, has discovered a number of Obama’s other ancestors in the Mormon genealogy database, including his father, Barack Obama, Sr., and several of his African relatives. It is as yet unclear whether they were ever posthumously baptized

Throughout this ongoing debacle, Mormon leaders have used two main arguments to defend themselves:

1. The practice of “baptism for the dead,” as understood in the Mormon church, is meant to offer those who have passed on the opportunity to accept the Mormon gospel, and should not be viewed as a kind of “compulsory conversion.”
2. The Mormon genealogy database is enormous, and consists of names submitted by a vast network of volunteers. Mormons are not supposed to submit names of anyone born less than 95 years previously, unless they are that person’s direct descendants… but it is impossible to police the submissions of each and every volunteer, or to sift through all the entries in the existing database.

Regarding Excuse #1: with all due respect, Mormons who make this argument are completely missing the point. The offensiveness of posthumous baptisms lies in the here-and-now, not in some nebulous afterlife that non-Mormons neither understand nor believe in. Non-Mormons generally don’t want their ancestors’ names associated with the Mormon church, period, and they certainly don’t want them baptized after they die into a faith they never professed in life.

As for Excuse #2, I have no doubt that, under the current system of amateur genealogy and name submission, it is next to impossible to keep individual Mormons from submitting whatever names they want to be baptized into the Mormon church. What this incredible series of embarrassing failures should teach the Mormon church, however, is that the system is not only broken, it is unfixable. If they really were committed to preventing these offensive lapses, they would invent a new system that was easier to oversee.

“If” being the operative word here, of course.

You’ve probably already heard about the gay couple who was confronted, thrown to the ground, handcuffed and ejected from Mormon-owned Main Street Plaza in downtown Salt Lake City with a trespassing citation—for a kiss on the cheek. Per the couple, they were also told by disgusted Mormon security guards that their behavior was gross and unnatural.

Here is the Mormon church’s response, via ksl.com (website of the Mormon-owned KSL television channel):

Two individuals came on Church property and were politely asked to stop engaging in inappropriate behavior—just as any other couple would have been. They became argumentative and used profanity and refused to leave the property. They were arrested and then given a citation for criminal trespass by SLPD.
—Mormon spokesperson Kim Farah

“Any other couple,” Mormon spokesperson Kim Farah? So when a heterosexual couple walks across Main Street Plaza holding hands, and one happens to give the other a peck on the cheek, they are routinely confronted by security guards and kicked off Mormon property? What about the heterosexual couples who take engagement or wedding photos on the plaza, photos in which many of them are caught on film kissing and hugging on your church’s property? Do you send your minions to round them up as well for engaging in “inappropriate behavior”?

No, you don’t, and you know you don’t. This couple was approached and kicked out because they were gay and had the audacity to show affection on Mormon church property.

Now, the Mormon church does own Main Street Plaza, and they have the right to refuse entrance to or to eject whomever they please. And maybe this unpleasantness really comes down to a handful of bigoted security guards, and is not official Mormon church policy. But the Mormon church wants to have it both ways: it wants to campaign openly and fiercely against gay rights on a national level, and still pretend to love the gays. Don’t believe them for a second. If an organization that really loved the gays were involved in a situation like this one, they would immediately clarify the behavior policy governing their property (something Farah reportedly has refused to do), apologize for the actions of a few security guards in singling out a gay couple, and announce that those security guards have now either been fired or are undergoing training on how to deal with homosexual couples.

The Mormon church is homophobic. Homophobia is behind all of its anti-gay actions—not love, not tolerance, not high-mindedness, but hate and bigotry. Don’t let them get away with sugar-coating it any longer.

If you follow the accommodationist debates at all, you know that one defense both religious and non-religious folk give for the compatibility of religion and science is that each is a different “way of knowing,” or a different way of “reaching truth.” So let’s talk about religion as a “way of knowing,” and about the “truths” that religion nets us.

Imagine you had never encountered a “religion” before, and someone told you that they were a member of an organization that had been founded by a benevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful being, and that this being had imparted teachings to its followers that explained certain things about the natural world and about the human condition. What would you expect to be true about this organization, and about those teachings?

1. You would expect the claims this organization makes about the natural world to be more correct and more descriptive of reality than the theories and claims of mere humans, since the former claims are based on the teachings of an benevolent, all-knowing being, and the latter are based on empirical evidence at best and on guessing, lies or storytelling at worst.
2. You would expect any claims this organization made about the future to come true more often than future claims made by a mere human.
3. You would expect members of this organization to have a better understanding of human relationships, human happiness and human ethics than could be arrived at by a mere human.

Let’s look at how religion stacks up.

First, are the claims religions make about the natural world even minimally true? Not usually. Religion gave us creationism, after all, as well as various bizarre and often harmful theories of disease. If a religion truly were inspired by some all-knowing deity, you would expect its adherents to have known about the true age of the earth before science discovered radiometric dating, and about the germ theory of disease centuries, if not millennia, before science even imagined it.

Second, how good is religion at predicting the future? Uh, not good. All of the “true” prophecies I’m aware of can either be attributed to chance, to revision of history after the fact, or to creative reading of the prophecy.

Third, science has shown that religious people are happier in a certain sense than non-religious people, so this is potentially a point in religion’s favor. However, I remain skeptical about this, because I don’t feel there have been enough studies to control for all the variables—for instance, whether this greater feeling of well-being is due to a placebo effect of sorts (religious people often feel they are expected to be happy, after all) or to the sense of community religion fosters rather than to some ineffable blessing from god that non-religious communities cannot duplicate.

But whether or not religious people are happier themselves, I feel that religion has a terrible track record on pretty much every other aspect of the human condition. Traditional religious marriages are sexist, oppressive, and heteronormative. Religion is currently the most vocal proponent of homophobia, sexism, racism and xenophobia in the world. You’d think that organizations inspired by a benevolent being would be ahead of the love-and-tolerance curve, not behind it.

I grew up in a religion that makes some very strong claims about its own nature and about reality. I was taught that God had pronounced himself on any number of subjects, through living, inspired prophets that were alive and led his church today. God was very interested in what my family looked like, what people I was sexually attracted to and had sex with, whether I got married, whether I had kids. Furthermore, he had opinions on all those subjects, and I was promised that if I followed his advice I would be happy.

Well, guess what. The Heavenly Father I was taught about is apparently a raging homophobe, and doesn’t even believe homosexuals exist. I am gay, so you can imagine how well his advice for worked out for me. He also apparently knows a great deal about health. For instance, drinking tea, ever, is damaging to one’s health. More detrimental, apparently, than drinking cola, because he’s never mentioned that. The religion I grew up in also believes in a literal interpretation of most of the Bible, including the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (a tale that plays an integral role in the secret ceremonies that take place in Mormon temples), Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and on and on and on.

All of these truth claims are false. All of the special truth claims I’ve investigated in other religions have either turned out to be false, unverifiable, or incoherent. A couple months ago, Jerry Coyne (author of Why Evolution Is True, and one of those “strident New Atheists” accommodationists are always going on about) announced a little contest on his blog, with a signed copy of his book as a prize. Here was the solitary rule:

Using the Oxford English Dictionary definition of truth given below, please name one truth about the world and/or universe that has been arrived at by faith alone, could not be arrived at by secular reason or science, and that is true in that it is in principle verifiable by all people.

OED: Truth: Conformity with fact; agreement with reality

No one won.

I encourage you to read Coyne’s full blog post for a few addenda, and then to read the comments for all the many suggestions people made of truths they thought were revealed uniquely by religion. And then, if you think you can top all of those suggestions, I encourage you to email your contribution to Jerry Coyne. You might not get an autographed copy of Why Evolution Is True out of it, but you might get a reply, explaining why your suggestion is insufficient, and that is EDUCATION. Which is yet another thing science is better at that religion.

Facebook “friend”:

Sorry Sean, but I’ve grown tired of all your inane twitter posts and Mormon bashing. So I’ve decided to remove you from my friends list, so that they don’t keep popping up. Hope you understand.

Me:

You realize that a) it’s possible to hide updates from anyone on Facebook without actually defriending them and b) the only reason for sending a message like this is if you were trying to be an ass. So… yay for you.

Inane, Mormon-bashing Twitter post “friend” was probably responding to:

There are so many things wrong with the Mormon church. “Out of touch with reality” doesn’t even begin to describe it. http://bit.ly/2rZe1R
about 2 hours ago from Ping.fm

Current inane Twitter post:

Look, I don’t care if you defriend me on Facebook. Just don’t send me a douchey, passive-aggressive message telling me why.
21 minutes ago from Ping.fm

Note: This is the same “friend” who told me to my face that he would physically assault any gay man who hit on him. If that tells you anything.

Update: The guy in question has since apologized for the original message. So I suppose we have to factor that in as well.

Mormon sci-fi/fantasy author Orson Scott Card has made absolutely no secret of three things:

1. He opposes the gay rights movement (claiming that “by and large homosexuals already have” civil rights), supports criminalization of homosexual activity and opposes gay marriage.
2. He advocates overthrowing any government that institutes gay marriage.
3. He does not consider himself a homophobe.

And now he has joined the board of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), the group behind the campy “coming storm/rainbow coalition” ad and the hilarious 2M4M.org misfire. NOM claims not to be homophobic as well, but are they willing to embrace Card’s extremist, “non-homophobic” philosophy?

Read more about Orson Scott Card’s non-homophobia and his position on the NOM board in this People For the American Way press release.