Pssst… The Minister's Gay

Consider these words:

McConnell matter-of-factly told me he likely helped write Bush’s 2004 remarks endorsing the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Even now the gay speechwriter defends that course. “I believed the president was taking a principled position, and the words he spoke on that issue were always reasonable and tolerant. That hasn’t always been the spirit of the debate, but it’s always been the spirit of George W. Bush. There was never a day I wasn’t proud of him and the vice president.”

(Full article here.)

It’s reasonable and tolerant to endorse legislation that restricts an essential human right? And you’re gay, and you’re writing the speech? Oh, and everybody knows you’re gay, since you’re bringing your boyfriend to White House activities?

If any of this makes sense to you, you’re firmly in the closet. Wait—make it stronger—you’re a mote of dust on the top shelf of the closet. But it turns out that McConnell was hardly the only gay staffer at the White House: there were more than seventy of them, a number that has surprised everybody.

By all accounts, Bush was a gracious man who, initially, was hardly the most vehemently homophobic Republican (remember Pat Buchanan?) True, two or three years into his term, he embraced the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, but he had appointed openly gay people and committed significant funds to combating AIDS in Africa.

Nor was he the only Republican to go to bat for gay people: there was Ronald Reagan, who as far back as 1978 came out and opposed the Briggs Initiative, which would have forbidden gay people to teach in the public schools. Here’s what a long-term Democrat said about Reagan:

“Never have I been treated more graciously by a human being. He turned opinion around and saved that election for us,” Mixner said. “We would have been in deep trouble. He just thought it was wrong and came out against it.”

Curiously, after not having thought about the Briggs Initiative for years, it’s cropped up twice in the last two days, since I spent a fair amount of time contemplating Troy Perry, the founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, a denomination that currently has 222 congregations in 37 countries.

Born in Northern Florida in 1940, Perry always felt the call to preach—his aunt had been a snake-handling pastor in another state. So he got married, got ordained, and had two kids. Then a sex partner outed him at work.

It happened in those days, and the result was predictable: he was immediately dismissed and the head of the church council threatened to tell his wife. So Perry lost his wife—whom he loved—his kids, and his job.

And if all that weren’t enough, when he finally met a guy he loved, the man dumped him, leading him to attempt suicide. After a period of depression, he went on to found his church, with a ministry specifically for LGBT folk.  

It’s always felt a little bogus to me—why should gay people want to associate with a religion that has some significant homophobic baggage? Shouldn’t we get over it, stop wanting to be accepted, stop needing to be religious? And why does it feel that starting our own church is sad, in a way?

That said, Perry has balls of the most polished brass. They burned down three churches—one incident left 32 people dead. And when the Briggs’ Initiative came up, Perry went on a 17-day hunger fast to raise the money to help defeat the measure. And every Valentine’s Day for years, he and his now-husband went down to the county clerk’s office to ask for a marriage license. When he finally got married, he came back to California and sued the state to recognize his marriage.

He’s fought every battle, and seen a number of victories; he also is a shining example of the power of one person to move mountains. And if I have not been given the gift of faith, I can admire someone who has, and who has led his life according to his beliefs. For those of us who are out and proud, it’s hard not to wonder what seventy gay men and women working in the Bush White House might have accomplished.

Pop Quiz, Boys and Girls

Pop quiz, boys and girls. Get out your No. 2 pencils and get to work!

1.     The statement below is _______ true / ________false

The Vatican said Friday that Monsignor Jozef Wesolowski was found guilty by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in recent days, and sentenced to the harshest penalty possible against a cleric: laicization, meaning he can no longer perform priestly duties or present himself as a priest.

If you answered “true,” you got a zero on the quiz, but guess what? You’re also not alone. Here’s a sweet little description of “the harshest penalty possible against a cleric:”

Poor prisoners are called "ranas" or frogs. They sleep on the floor with mice and vermin around them. They have no private rooms or baths and they must use latrine-type holes in the jail patio and openly evacuate. These prisoners all shower together and fight for the last drop of water, while the goleta owners enjoy private baths. Every morning at about 9am there is a "conteo" or prisoner count where they are asked to walk out of the cells into the hallway to be counted.

Wesolowski was the papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, and had the habit of strolling, beer in hand, the malecón and contracting the local boys to do you-know-what. And he was so open about it that the local news picked up on the story. Before he could be investigated and /or arrested, however, the archbishop of Santo Domingo went off to tell the pope that they had a little problem. The pope did what they always do: refused to turn the pedophile over to the civil authorities. Instead, for the last ten months, Wesolowski has been sitting in the Vatican, where he enjoys—or enjoyed diplomatic immunity.

So Wesolowski has two months to appeal the decision, and then faces a criminal trial in the Vatican. If convicted, he’ll be jailed there, presumably under conditions a bit more humane than the ones in Dominican Republic.

Isn’t it time to say it? The “state” of Vatican City is a joke—it not only is the smallest nation in the world, it also is just 108.7 acres, making it smaller than the average American farm. And I had assumed that the nationhood that everybody accords it was an ancient thing, from the times with the Vatican had real states. Wrong again—it dates from 1929.

OK, you say, so it’s bogus, but who cares? What difference does it make?

Well, for one thing, the Vatican denied the Dominican Republic’s extradition request, on the grounds that Wesolowski was a “citizen of Vatican City,” which has a policy of not extracting people.

There’s more. Allegations have been floating around the Internet that a common dodge for bishops is to give the files on abusive priests to the papal nuncio, since in several dioceses, victims of abuse have successfully sued to have the files made public.

And so Wesolowski may still have diplomatic immunity. What no one is saying is that he allegedly committed crimes, yes, in the Dominican Republic, but also here, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. And since the FBI, reportedly, is looking into the situation of priestly abuse, are they also looking at Wesolowski? Because Wesolowski made frequent trips to Puerto Rico, and stayed in the parish of a now defrocked priest, José Colón Otero. More, the parishioners were doing everything short of standing outside the church with cardboard placards, so desperate were they—the parishioners, not the placards—to get some church official to do something. They wrote to the bishop, then Wesolowski, and finally the Vatican. And what did Wesolowski do? Nothing.

There is something fishy going on in Arecibo. Consider the fact that the current bishop, Daniel Fernández Torres, is being investigated by the FBI for abuse. Oh, and he came out and said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had cleared him of the whole thing. But the lawyer representing the victim? She came out and said the Vatican never talked to her client.

Guys? It’s hard to know which is greater: the arrogance or the shamelessness.

A Hotbed of Homosexuals

Note: this post was originally to be published over a month ago; for technical reasons, Mr. Fernández and I are not joining the suit. Wish we were! 
_________________

It was a message I found a little screwy, until I went onto a Facebook page entitled “Boicot contra Pedro Julio Serrano por sus comentarios de odio hacia cristianos;” the film-equivalent of the page would be that scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson….

…you remember it, right?

The message we were receiving, last night, was that we were being brave, incredibly brave, for standing up and demanding our rights and refusing to be second-class citizens. What I was thinking, however, was what an incredibly boring group of people we were.

Confession—I have so often wished I had the life that some fundamentalist Christians think I have. Because, wow—what fun that could be: going from the orgy to the ecstasy-fueled rave to the drug-frenzied satanic rituals with the inverted crosses and the squealing newborn about to be sacrificed on the altar! Whee!

Instead it’s:

Marc: Hey, have you seen the garlic press?

Raf: Many times!

Marc: Very funny—now where the hell is that press?

Raf: How should I know? You washed it.

Marc: Dammit, do you want to eat or not?

All right—this is a rather low example of domestic life, but that’s the point. And so I found myself looking, last night, at the six gay and lesbian couples who had assembled in the law offices of LGBT activist Ada Conde and thinking how ordinary we all were: nobody was in drag, the whips and chains had decently been left at home, and there wasn’t a strand of purple hair. It was as lurid as a Tupperware party.

Not that there weren’t some serious people: two lawyers from Lambda Legal had flown in from New York, and Lambda Legal, about whom I’ve read for years, is major. Here’s what their website says:

With the generous support of thousands of friends around the country, what began in 1973 as a couple of volunteers working out of a spare room in a supporter’s apartment has now grown to an expert staff of more than 80 in five offices around the country—New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles. 

What didn’t I know? Well, the organization’s bylaws were borrowed from the Puerto Rico Legal Defense and Education Fund. Nor did I know—though I may have forgotten it—that the organization had to fight for its very existence. Here’s the site again:

A panel of New York judges turned down our application to be a nonprofit organization because, in their view, our mission was "neither benevolent nor charitable." With pro bono help, Thom appealed to New York’s highest court, which finally allowed Lambda Legal to exist as a nonprofit organization.

Since then, it’s easier to list what they haven’t done than what they have, since short of bringing down DOMA and Proposition 8, they’ve done it all.   

In addition to the two lawyers from Lambda, we were joined by a constitutional lawyer from the University of Puerto Rico School of Law. Then, two more lawyers came in, from the staff of the president of the senate, Eduardo Bhatia. ‘It’s come at last,’ I thought, ‘I finally have a legal team….’

We were there to join the lawsuit brought by Conde to force the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to recognize her marriage to her wife. And by doing so, we would become the first state / territory in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Why? Because for reasons I’ve never understood, Puerto Rico belongs to the First Circuit, which lives in Boston and comprises the New England states, all of which have sensibly adopted same-sex marriage. So it’s up to Puerto Rico to carry the torch.

And Puerto Rico, as Pedro Julio reminded us, has every reason to be proud: we are by no means backward in legislation regarding employment and hate crimes, and most of the work has been done by volunteers who have gotten out there and shouted.

And Pedro Julio should know, since he’s the founder, in Puerto Rico, of Puerto Rico para tod@s and the communications manager for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, in New York City. So Pedro Julio has a foot in both places; this weekend, he’s on the island.

“What was that thing about the death threat,” I asked Raf after the meeting. I remembered vaguely that somebody had tweeted a death threat to Pedro Julio, and that they had found the guy. But whatever happened to the guy?

Thanks to Google, I can tell you: Pedro Julio had intended to go to the march celebrating the Día Internacional contra la Homofobia y Transfobia, when some guy—whose name I know, but why give it?—tweeted that Pedro Julio could end up like some guys had in the Boston Marathon. The FBI found the guy, he was tried in federal court and sentenced to three years in prison, three years probation, and three years of being Twitterless.

In fact, Pedro Julio had warned the public, in January of last year, that he had been receiving more death threats:

“Durante mis más de 15 años de activismo, he recibido innumerables amenazas de muerte, pero nunca en la cantidad y la hostilidad de los últimos días".

(“In over 15 years of activism, I have received innumerable death threats, but never in the quantity and level of hostility as in recent days.”)

‘There are levels of “out,”’ I thought, ‘which is funny, since I thought I was pretty—sorry about this—far out. But I’m a piker next to Pedro Julio or Ada….’

And one of the things about being out is that it gets normal after a while. A man I know was once asked by his new boss, “and what’s your wife’s name?” The boss was trying to prep for the Christmas party.

“John,” said my friend, who is also named John.

“That makes it easy,” said the boss.

This is the stuff we do every day, until it becomes no big deal. So it’s easy to forget how very, very important, as well as difficult, being out can be.

“I think I was put on this earth to fight this fight,” said Yolanda, meaning the fight of the night: getting Puerto Rico to recognize same-sex marriage. The whole room inhaled.

“She’s been in tears four times this evening,” remarked Ada, “and now, it’s five.”

The night had started being somewhat routine: a meeting to go to, some people to meet, then bus back home and hit the sack. But it changed with Yolanda’s remark.

‘It is a big deal,’ I thought. ‘And there’s a reason why we drive the fundamentalists nuts, why Pedro Julio has two pages boycotting him on Facebook: we are a threat. What we’re proposing is fundamental, too. There is nothing more fundamental than the right to declare who your husband or wife will be, and have that decision respected by the state.’

I looked around the room and began to wonder—how much extra struggle had it taken each of us, and each couple, to realize that she or he was gay, to embrace it, to announce it to family and friends, to bosses and—now—to the public at large?

In the week of my mother’s death, I was sitting on a miraculously beautiful spring twilight talking with my brother John.

“You’ve had it so much harder than either Eric or I did,” he said. He meant coming out, struggling with the inner-demon of the cello, facing down my father over my being gay, moving to a foreign-in-a-domestic-sense land, learning a new language, being jobless, losing my mind, and providing the way out for my mother, when she wanted to die. So I thought about all that.

“You may be right,” I told him.

But it was also worth it….

Sam and Company

Now then, having straightened out the Mormon Church—rescind that excommunication, boys!—I can get right down to work on the Walton family.

Full disclosure: I worked for seven years for Wal-Mart, and was treated well, even when they decided to cut me loose (they gave me a severance package that was not legally required). And though someone once described founder Sam Walton as “the world’s nicest guy until he gets down to putting you out of business”—well, why not? This is business, guys, not a Sunday school class: do you think Macy’s isn’t going after Bloomingdale’s?

There were things I liked about Sam. He squeezed that dollar till the eagle squawked, once picking up a muffler he found on the side of the road, since he was mufflerless himself at the time. Did the guys at the shop sigh heavily, throw the damn thing away, install a new one, and never tell Sam? Think that’s how that story went….

There were the reporters who asked why he was still riding around in the famous red truck, which sits squarely in the Walton museum, or visitors’ center, or whatever it is. “Get a decent car, for God’s sake, Sam!” His response? Something like where was he gonna put his four hunting dogs in a Rolls Royce?

Well, I was thinking about all this yesterday, when I read an article Susan had sent me about the Walton Family Foundation. True, it’s from a website called Liberal America, which tells you right off the bat what song this choir will be singing, but the question is: is it true? Because the headline reads:

New Report Suggests Walmart Heirs’ Foundation Is A Massive Tax Dodge

Ouch! And a further ouch when I read this:

An analysis of 23 years of foundation tax returns revealed that Sam Walton’s heirs only gave only 0.04 percent of their combined net worth to their own foundation–not even a fraction of what other wealthy Americans give to charity.

The article goes on to say that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett give over 36% and 27%, respectively, of their net worths to charity. And Rob Walton? You know, chairman of the board, Sam’s eldest son? He hasn’t given anything.

OK—let’s let Walmart speak:

Sam Walton believed in the power of opportunity to change individual lives and communities, and that anyone through hard work and determination can achieve the American dream, something he personally experienced. His wife, Helen, understood the importance of giving back. In fact, one of her favorite sayings was “It’s not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived.” Their combined vision has led the Walton family to contribute more than $5 billion to charitable organizations and causes and continues today to drive the work of the Walton Family Foundation. 

In 2013, the foundation invested more than $325 million in K-12 education reform, freshwater and marine conservation and quality of life initiatives in our home region. Family members carried forward a philanthropic approach of sustained and focused giving, believing that it is the key to achieving lasting change, and they continue to challenge the foundation to find new, innovative solutions as well as measure impact from the individual grant level to the effectiveness of overall strategies.

Here’s a view from the middle, Forbes Magazine:

The Walton family is America’s richest, worth some $140 billion between them and longtime fixtures of the Forbes 400 list thanks to their approximate 50% ownership of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer.

Their Walton Family Foundation, established by the late Sam and Helen Walton in 1988, is considered a heavyweight in the world of nonprofits with just under $2 billion in assets.

Granted, the Forbes article was based, as was Liberal America’s, on a report by the Walmart 1%, which is a project of Making Change at Walmart, which doesn’t sound rabidly pro-Walmart. But it’s still Forbes, which presumably vets things….

All right, how does the Walmart Family Foundation match up with other foundations? According to Wikipedia, the world’s largest fund is something out of the Netherlands called the Stichting INGKA Foundation with a cool thirty-six billion. Next up are Bill and Melinda's, with 34.6 billion. And the Walton Family Fund?

Not on the list…

Yes, that list only covers the top 31 (no idea why they chose that number…) and number 31, with 3 billion—that’s a billion more than Walton—is the Kresge Foundation.

Kresge?

Could it be?

Run back to Wikipedia:

In 1924, with an initial gift of $1.6 million, Sebastian Kresge established The Kresge Foundation in Detroit. Twelve years earlier, he and partner John G. McCrory opened the first 5-and-10-cent store, and parlayed the concept and operations into a chain of stores that were incorporated as the S.S. Kresge Company. Many years later the enterprise became known as Kmart.

What would Sam think?

1001 Excommunications

Readers will want to know: yesterday, Kate Kelly, the founder of a group of Mormons seeking a greater role for women in the church, was excommunicated. She received the news by email and is devastated.

She’s also, as you can see in the clip below, an articulate and intelligent woman. Given that, it’s almost hard to believe that she didn’t see what everybody else could see: however much the church might have been willing to discuss issues in private, it was not going to have the bad press of having a man with his hand held up, barring the entrance of a woman into the tabernacle, and saying, “this session is for men only.”

Kelly was doing what all of us activists in the last fifty years have been doing. Anyone out there remember the Mattachine Society? A group in the 1950’s so fearful that they formed into secret cells, they were one of the first organized groups of gay people. Yes, a generation later we derided them, painting them as Uncle Toms, wearing their Sunday best to go ask the straight o please, pretty please, be not quite so brutish. In the 80’s and 90’s, when we were staging die-ins and throwing ashes of AIDS victims on the White House lawn, it was easy to forget how oppressive the 50’s were.

The church acted as any organization would: it banished the opposition, as much for herself as for a warning to others who might—I suspect will—follow. The tragedy here is that Kelly appears truly to believe in her church, despite having, as you can hear in the clip below, “the most conflicted relationship in my life with it.”

I came upon the clip through the online version of The Salt Lake Tribune, and was curious to know: what was the editorial board of the Tribune going to do about the situation? Because this was one of those issues that every newspaper dreads: come out panning the church, and, in days, your major advertisers are pulling their ads.

I saw my father do it every day at the breakfast table: discuss what should be the editorial policy of the Wisconsin State Journal, the paper he worked for. He was on the editorial board, and with other writers would address the pressing issues of the day. So what has the Tribune done? Nothing, except for a few op-ed pieces, one of which—yes—is generally sympathetic to Kelly.

I suspected that the Tribune might be heavily connected to the Mormon Church: it would be surprising if it weren’t. What I didn’t know, however, was that in its early days, the newspaper had been anti-Mormon, and had a particular dislike for President Brigham Young, who figures high in the Mormon pantheon. Reader, this is the sort of thing you don’t want said about you:

He was illiterate and he has made frequent boast that he never saw the inside of a school house. His habit of mind was singularly illogical and his public addresses the greatest farrago of nonsense that ever was put in print. He prided himself on being a great financer, and yet all of his commercial speculations have been conspicuous failures. He was blarophant, and pretended to be in daily [communion] with the Almighty, and yet he was groveling in his ideas, and the system of religion he formulated was well nigh Satanic. — The Salt Lake Tribune, August 30, 1877       

Don’t know the word “blarophant?” Relax—it seems nobody does, including Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, an edition of which stands on the stage of the sala poética next door. Webster’s jumps from “Blarney Stone” to “blasé”….

What was interesting about the Tribune? Well, I had expected the tabs “Utah,” “World / Nation,” “Politics,” and “Justice.” Then we came to “Polygamy.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practiced polygamy (in fact, polygyny, since, guess what? Guys get more than one wife, but the women? No deal) from 1852 to 1890 when, under pressure from the United States government, it abandoned the practice. And I knew that there was a spin-off group called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and that their numbers were miniscule compared to those of the mainstream church. So I clicked on the polygamy tab, and read a piece titled “Bring Back our FLDS Girls,” which makes reference to an article in a Canadian paper. Right, time to check in on it.

Written by Daphne Bramham, a columnist for The Vancouver Sun, the article concerns the town of Bountiful in British Colombia; she has this to say about the community:

There is no chasm between the beliefs of the Islamist leaders of Boko Haram and the FLDS leaders. Their disregard for the value and rights of girls and women inextricably links them.

For them, girls and women are chattel. Like cattle, their only value is their breeding ability.

For them, educating girls must be stopped. Allowing it to continue might mean that some day those girls could challenge the patriarchy that enslaves them.

Strong words, but are they true?

Well, I headed to YouTube, where, sure enough, I discovered a National Geographic documentary on Bountiful, British Columbia, which you can see below. And though the FLDS church refused to cooperate, a split-off group was more than happy to. And they do a remarkable job of presenting their case: they are following a traditional way of life in accordance with their religious beliefs. And the Charter of the Canadian government –which I presume is the equivalent of the US Bill of Rights—gives them every freedom to do so.

Of course there are naysayers: the leader of the group, Winston Blackmore…wait, here’s the Vancouver Sun:

Ten of fundamentalist Mormon leader Winston Blackmore’s 22 wives were underage when he married them; three were only 15.

The former Canadian bishop of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints admitted to it under oath, according to the transcript of his Feb. 28 deposition in Salt Lake City for a civil case involving church property.

Well, if a man has 22 wives, there’s going to be a problem—in fact, several problems. What do you do, for example, with the excess boys for whom there are no wives? The Guardian has the answer:

Up to 1,000 teenage boys have been separated from their parents and thrown out of their communities by a polygamous sect to make more young women available for older men, Utah officials claim.

Many of these "Lost Boys", some as young as 13, have simply been dumped on the side of the road in Arizona and Utah, by the leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), and told they will never see their families again or go to heaven.

My heart goes out to Kate Kelly, a lawyer in her thirties, who has been excommunicated from the mainstream church—a church that has repudiated the fundamentalist sect. Still, excommunication—bringing with it the loss of spending eternal life with your loved ones in heaven—must be agonizing.

But for 1000 lost boys, some as young as 13, some abandoned on the side of the road?

Ouch!

Ring! Salt Lake Speaking….

Well, you’ll be happy to know that I’m definitely having a better Monday morning than are 12 old men in—presumably—Utah*.

These guys have a problem: the world they knew went away somewhere and came back entirely different. Because, in the past, it was easy: you kept everybody busy and isolated. So if you were in small towns in the American west, you devoted forty to sixty hours to making the desert bloom—which they did—and twenty or thirty hours going to church. That didn’t leave too much time for anything else but sleep. Oh, and since everybody else around you was doing the same thing, there was no possibility of dissent.

So that meant that all of the rest of us could—in spare moments—chuckle snidely at the more preposterous claims. Who can forget Mark Twain, one of the earliest and certainly one of the best critics, on the Book of Mormon?

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the “elect” have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason. 

So all of us could sit around and snigger when every other institution in the States had to confront its own racism throughout the sixties and seventies, but the Mormons? Still barring blacks from the priesthood, which is generally given to every male child at age 12, until 1978. And then, as Wikipedia tells us, there came a little problem named Brazil, since it was no problem telling the women from the men. But the blacks from the whites? Right—so Spencer W. Kimball, the leader of the church, went off to his study, and guess what! There God was—in all his white maleness—dishing up a revelation! Wow—all in a day’s work!

But the 70s must seem like the most halcyon of days, since the most potent threat were quaint little things like newspapers and magazines, as well as books, of course. But all of that was easy enough, since it was easy to brand any criticism as that ol’ debil, the Eastern liberal intelligentsia. Oh, and do you think a librarian in Provo, Utah, is going to be putting seditious books on her shelves? Not likely.

So change, when it came, arrived as the gentlest of mists, not as a gale. And then?

Someone invented the Internet.

Which one person described as the gateway drug out of Mormonism, ‘cause how are you going to keep them down on the farm, once they’ve clicked on Google? And there’s another problem: since all the rest of us can fritter away the time with vices like drinking and smoking, the Mormons? They’re grimly, and soberly, sitting in front of their computers, writing blogs.

Yes—it seems that the Mormons are writing blogs to such an extent that a term had to be invented: the bloggernacle. Right, my computer doesn’t know it—nor will I teach it—but Wikipedia does:

The Mormon blogosphere (often referred to as the Bloggernacle) is a segment of the blogosphere focused on Mormon issues.[1] The term "Bloggernacle" was coined by individuals within the LDS blogging community as a play on the name of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; however, not all LDS-themed bloggers like or use the name Bloggernacle, or even consider their blog to be part of it. Furthermore, not all bloggers within the Mormon blogosphere are Mormons themselves.

So on 17 March 2013, Kate Kelly, a lawyer and devout Mormon—she did her year of missionary service in Barcelona, and why does that feel ever so slightly bogus?—created a website, ordainwomen.org.

Hmmm—let’s see: who was it that said there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come?

Answer—Victor Hugo….

Astonishing, really, how all the world’s media has followed this blog’s lead in championing this story! Not just people like me, but little guys like The New York Times, and Yahoo, and even way down south in Australia—anywhere, in fact, where they have Mormons (everywhere) and women (also everywhere). So yesterday, we were all sitting around scratching the collective head: some of us at home, but 200 people or so with Kelly in a vigil in Salt Lake City. Oh, and there were vigils in seventeen other countries—eighteen, if we count little Marc down here in San Juan, Puerto Rico. And why were we all vigiling?

OK—return to your seats, fasten your seat belts and lock your tray tables onto the seat in front of you: it turns out that ordainwomen.org advocates for the—deep breath, here—ordination of women! And that, to the twelve “apostles” of the Mormon Church, is apostasy, another word for which is heresy. So Kelly’s local leaders called her in for a trial yesterday.

Except not—since Kelly is now living in Utah, and had requested that the church transfer her records there.  Here’s what Kelly wrote in the first paragraph of her letter:

I beg of you not to impose any form of discipline during the trial you will hold on Sunday. I also request that you do the right thing and revoke the “informal probation” that was placed upon me and remove the “move restriction” placed on my records so that I can participate in the ward where I currently reside. Please reconsider this punitive process and allow me to continue to worship in peace.

In theory—and Salt Lake is playing this trumpet as loud as Gabriel ever did—discipline is entirely in local hands, and the central hands have nothing, nothing, to do with it.  But it is interesting that the big boys from Salt Lake had visited Kelly’s stake—the words blogging teaches you!—and then, boom! Oh, and the same thing happened to another blogger, John Dehlin. Stay tuned—his trial is next Sunday….

Well, if the French word for a bluffer is bluffeur, am I—on this issue—a scoffeur?  Because of course I know what has to be done. Tom Monson, the current president, needs to be sent to his room, in order to be served up God’s most recent revelation: the Internet, and especially Google, is the work of Satan himself, sent to snare the faithful and lead them to perdition!

Easy for me to laugh—but in one sentence, which of course I can’t find now, Kelly pleads not to be excommunicated and deprived of spending the rest of eternity without her family. Because that, you see, is what she / they / if-not-I believe. When she dies, she will—if in good standing with the church—spend all eternity with her loved ones. If not, not.

The church asked her to take down the site and sit down and be a good girl, and in her letter she makes it clear: no dice. So the trial was yesterday, and then the three judges announced—they were stumped! So they fired off an email—guys, is an electronic transmission an appropriate media to announce loss of eternal life? Shouldn’t the local bishop drop by to break the bad news? Right—the judges announced that they would sleep prayerfully on the matter, and let Kelly know in a day or two.

Why do I think there are a lot of calls to and from Salt Lake this morning?

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*Ever faithful to my bloggerly vocation, I calculated the total years of the twelve, and guess what? It’s 940, or almost halfway back to Jesus himself! Oh, and the average age is 78.3….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_of_the_Twelve_Apostles_%28LDS_Church%29

Two Bloggers and Twelve Old Men

OK—here’s what I hadn’t considered. First of all, the people are really nice: friendly, cheerful, and definitely hard working. Second of all, the church keeps you busy, going from meeting to prayer groups to God-knows-what-all. Remember that they had organized everybody so much that they had to declare a special night for everyone just to stay home? Also, the church takes over the smallest details of your life—even down to that famous underwear….

You’ll know by now that I’m talking about the Mormon Church, which fought like Tasmanian devils against marriage equality in California, then backed off and pretended to get more inclusive when Mitt Romney was running for president, and which now is accusing two of its members of—ah, the horror of it all!—apostasy.

Well, it’s a highly charged word in Mormon circles, since the Mormons, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists, believe in the Great Apostasy. You’ll want to know: it’s the belief that everybody and every religion was wrong from the death of Jesus to the birth of their own church.

So what have the two Mormons done to get this label thrust on them? Well, John Dehlin advocates for the rights of LGBT people within the church. Kate Kelly set up a group that advocates for the ordination of women, as well as for increasing the role of women in the church.

Both have gotten letters from their local bishops, advising them that they will be tried and face either disfellowship or excommunication. Disfellowship may take various forms, but excommunication is dire indeed: you are erased from the church as if you had never existed. And though the church doesn’t officially practice shunning, your social calendar will definitely be much lighter. Oh, and all those business contacts? You might be leaving a lot of voice mails, and getting fewer returned calls.

And so for these two, excommunication is a major, and perhaps terrifying, possibility. Consider what one writer had to say:

Mormonism is an "all or nothing" commitment, Rosen explains. "If Pandora's box is opened regarding questioning one policy or mandate, it leads to more, because it's all connected. It's not like other religions, where you can accept some parts and reject other parts. You have to accept the whole kit and caboodle. You have to accept every [church-mandated] 'calling.' You have to go to every three-hour church meeting. If I didn't go [to synagogue] for six months, the rabbi would be like, 'I am so happy to see you.' You can't do that as a Mormon."

Ready for the next paragraph?

Utah has the highest rate of clinical depression out of any state in the country, and the seventh highest suicide rate, according to a report by Thomson Healthcare. Rosen believes the LDS stance on homosexuality contributes to these statistics. One third of her patients are homosexuals who grew up LDS, and many of them were kicked out of their homes.

Well, it’s not surprising that Utah has the highest rate of depression, since wouldn’t you be depressed, attending up to thirty hours of church activities weekly, and having to smile all the time?

Right—that’s unfair, and especially wrong since Dehlin, who is straight, has taken a big risk for those of us who are LGBT. Besides his website Mormon Stories, he also has another site advocating gay marriage. And he’s finishing up his doctorate in counseling at Utah State University—not a particularly easy time to be butting the twelve elderly white male heads that run the church. But you have to admire a guy who can write, as he did in his website:

I believe in many of the central, non-distinctive moral teachings within Mormonism (e.g., love, kindness, charity, forgiveness, faith, hope), but either have serious doubts about, or no longer believe many of the fundamental LDS church truth claims (e.g., anthropomorphic God, “one true church with exclusive authority,” that the current LDS church prophet receives privileged communications from God, that The Book of Mormon and The Book of Abraham are translations, polygamy, racist teachings in the Book of Mormon, that ordinances are required for salvation, proxy work for the dead).

So on 7 June 2014, Dehlin got the letter that he must have been dreading. And the following day, Kelly got the letter as well. In her case, the trial will be this Sunday. In Dehlin’s case, it will be 29 June 14.

And while neither one could be criticized for losing some sleep over the matter, Kelly’s case seems to be particularly acute. Consider, for example, that she got a whole group of women together and tried to enter a male-only meeting on the priesthood at the tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Here are her heartbreaking words:

I suppose I didn’t realize until I was at the door and physically barred from entering the Tabernacle just how hopeful I was that we would indeed get in. I told the man who blocked us from entering, “I understand that all men, even men who are not members of the church and have no investment in Mormonism are permitted to attend. I am a returned missionary and a faithful Mormon woman and I would like to listen to the prophet in person.”

He simply said, “this session is actually for men only.”

And as difficult it is to read, it’s infinitely more painful to see the clip below.

I’ll never know—which would have been better, to be (as I am) a non-believer, or to grow up in some faith, have it enrich my life, rage against it when I came out, and then, perhaps, make my peace with it? What I do know is that believing in the church, wanting to be in the church, and then being expelled would be infinitely painful, especially in Utah.

And while I very much hope that these two courageous souls can prevail…

…I’m not putting money on it.