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.

Nine Cowards

OK—I admit it. I’ve spent most of the morning contemplating this one sentence, drawn from The New York Times:

In the trial court, the state had argued that restricting marriage to a man and a woman would make heterosexual couples act more responsibly when they had sex.

The state is Utah, which for two brief weeks allowed—well, was forced to allow—1,300 same sex couples to marry. In a state that is heavily Mormon, that didn’t sit well with the majority of residents, and the attorney general of the state lost no time getting up to the US Court of Appeals for the 10^th Circuit. And they said, “no dice—we’re not giving you a stay until you can appeal.” And why? Here’s The Salt Lake Tribune:

According to the order, the state failed to demonstrate it was suffering "irreparable harm" as a result of the legalization of same-sex marriage and also failed to show it had a "significant likelihood" of prevailing in its appeal to the circuit court.

Right—that’s pretty clear. So then the state, desperate to get the ruling on hold, went to the Supreme Court. Nor is that word “desperate” only mine: google “Utah desperate” and you get the following Christian Science Monitor headline:

Utah, growing desperate, to ask Supreme Court to halt gay marriages

The request went to Sonia Sotomayor, who oversees the 10^th court. And she had the choice to rule on it alone, or give it to the entire court. And what did she do? Turfed it to the entire court. And they, late last week, finally gave Utah what it wanted. So for less than 20 days same sex marriage was legal.

And then it wasn’t.

In the process of getting to the Supreme Court, Utah dropped its insane contention that barring same sex marriage would force heterosexual couples to “act more responsibly when having sex.” Instead, according to The New York Times, they fell back on the old argument: children do better when raised in father / mother household.

What was the problem? Well, here’s the Times itself:

 Lawyers for the couples challenging Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage responded that the assertion “is not true.” For evidence, they cited “the scientific consensus of every national health care organization charged with the welfare of children and adolescents,” and listed nine such groups. The view of the groups, the challengers said, “based on a significant and well-respected body of current research, is that children and adolescents raised by same-sex parents, with all things being equal, are as well-adjusted as children raised by opposite-sex couples.”

Utah responded that it would not be swayed by “politically correct trade associations,” referring to, among others, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. “We are not ruled by experts,” the state’s brief said.

OK—I agree with the last line….

Finally, Utah cooked up one last argument. The Supreme Court had ruled in favor of diversity in deciding who could attend public universities, and so they announced something called “gender diversity.” Scratching your head? A man and a woman—that’s diverse. Two guys or two women? Not so much.

The three arguments are breathtaking in their absurdity. But does it surprise me? Of course not—the state is hardly going to come out and say the truth, which is that the idea of two men or women married is repugnant to them. But what does bug me? Well, here are the first two sentences of the Times’s article:

The Supreme Court’s order last week halting same-sex marriages in Utah was two sentences long. It was provisional and cryptic, and it added nothing to the available information on where the Supreme Court stands on the momentous question of whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Well, who am I to tackle the Times, and especially Adam Liptak, the author of the article? But I think this stay tells us a lot about the Supreme Court. And tells us that the court, like Utah, is also desperate. They know perfectly well that all of the states who have passed laws defining marriage as between a woman and a man have disenfranchised five to ten percent of the population. They know perfectly well that history will find it amazing that we could have believed in such a thing. They know that all but the most conservative of them would have to find the defense of marriage laws unconstitutional.

In fact, the “victories” in June were anything but. What did the court do? Nothing—they ruled on technicalities. And they’ll do it again—because the 10^th Court of Appeals put it pretty plainly: Utah didn’t have “a ‘significant likelihood’ of prevailing in its appeal to the circuit court.”

They’re buying time. But here’s the question: how will they get out of it this time?

My Crazy Country

It’s one of those weird things about living in a place that is and isn’t my country.

I ran into the story on El Nuevo Dia’s online edition. So I read in Spanish the story of an eleven-year-old kid who took a gun to school in Utah. He was brandishing it in the playground at recess, and threatening to kill a group of kids. They took the advisable step of alerting the teacher, who, along with several others, approached the kid and asked for the gun. The child gave it up, after saying that his parents had suggested the idea—never too early to keep a kid safe!

Right—so now we have parents giving guns to their eleven-year-old kids?

My original reaction was ‘nah, can’t be.’

Now, I think it’s probable.

Until you meet one, it’s impossible to imagine the depth of craziness of a gun fanatic. Or the level of fear and suspicion that they exude. And for anyone wondering whether the fabled frontier mentality—trust no one; shoot first, ask questions later; hate those bastards in Washington; you get the picture—is dead, I can tell you, it’s not.

And it leads to the question—will we ever change? How long has it been since the Pilgrims, whom even the Dutch couldn’t put up with, came over to a virgin land, and here we still are, centuries later: just as extreme, as antisocial, as suspicious and untrusting as they.

Look, there’s a lot to like in my country. Living in another land, another place, gives you that perspective. And—a nod to Mr. Fernández here—the fifty states manage to weld some very diverse cultures. Rural Iowa versus Las Angeles Watts, for example.

But there’s a group of us that are very, very fearful. They really think they’re under attack, that their existence is threatened. They’re convinced that Obama was born in Kenya, is a Muslim, and that their kids are gonna be forced to watch Satanic sex films in kindergarten, the way things are going. And suggesting that anybody put any limits on arms is psychic castration.

Right—so we have the crazies. The rest of us? We’re tiptoeing around them.

Maybe it’s sensible—these guys do have guns, after all.

But when an eleven-year-old takes a gun to school because his parents—gee, was it his mother or father?—suggested it, and I read about in Puerto Rico but not on CNN, and nobody apparently is talking about it or discussing it, well, maybe we have gone too far.

It’s a serious question in my mind. Should we stop being reasonable? Or rather, should we start?

I had thought, earlier in the week, that we could at least have a dialogue on assault weapons, background checks at gun fairs, psychiatric evaluations, etc.

But now I think having a rational discussion with a true gun-lover is impossible. And maybe it’s time just to say fuck it, this is crazy. In other words….

You don’t have a right to own a gun. Period. And the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to individuals but to the right of the people collectively—you hear that?—to form militias to protect themselves. And guess what? That applies to hunting, because listen—man is not the only living creature on this earth, and no, you don’t have a right to kill them either. So right now we have a choice between protecting children and mollifying a bunch of crazies who are seriously armed and whom we’ve put up with all these years.

And guess what?

I’m going with the children.