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!