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! 
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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.

An Unexcused Absence

It’s not right, it’s completely not right, and if I weren’t absolutely schooled in grief, bereavement and loss, I wouldn’t take it.

“I’m going to go on a hunger strike until you return,” I tell Lady, who has the temerity to wander off to France for a month, for no good reason except that her husband is French and her daughter is half-French. Soooooo?

“Montalvo, are you going to join me in the hunger strike?” He’s joined us, my young son and less-than-accomplished parrot purloiner, in walking Lady home, since we’re savoring the farewell.

“I don’t think so,” says Montalvo.

“Not the right answer,” I tell him, “and if you’re going to be my son, you’ve got to know when I’m talking nonsense, which is most of the time.”

“Yes, Father,” he says.

“Father? That’s what he calls you? I like that….”

“So do I,” I tell her. She’s leaving for a month in three hours, and has she packed? Of course not!

“It’s a clear sign that you’re ambivalent,” I tell her. “It also completely portends that you shouldn’t go. Montalvo, kidnap Lady.”

“OK, Dad….” He’s picking it up nicely.

“Well, they have stores in France,” I tell her.

“Yes, but you need francs.”

Well, I don’t have francs but I do have—thanks, Taí—one Trinidad and Tobago dollar, as well as 40 Eastern Caribbean dollars. So I give her those, and she asks how long they have been traveling in my wallet. Over a decade.

“Hey, that’s wonderful! It’s got your energy! So every time I’m missing you, I’ll just take out the money and smell you….”

“It won’t be the same,” I tell her. I’m still having a hard time with it….

“Hey, can I take your backpack with me? It would be perfect for a carry-on….”

Right—so yesterday she had invited me to France—“hey, why don’t you come to France with us…”—and now it’s my backpack. And how is my computer supposed to get home?

So we unload the backpack, discovering an uneaten cookie from March of 2013 (I know this because the cookie was accompanied by a playbill), and guess what? In over a year, the cookie was miraculously unscathed by any passing microbe. Should I eat it? I decide no….

And now Lady is telling us about her mother, who had given her a manila envelope to open on the plane, since Lady was having major anxiety even thinking about boarding the plane, much less being trapped in it for eight hours. So what was in the envelope?

“It was filled with clippings of airplane crashes! Can you believe it? There wasn’t even a little note inside! She did it to get me to overcome my fear!”

“One tough bitch,” says Montalvo, admiringly.

“It’s simple,” I tell him. “We go to the hardware store, buy a padlock, and put it on the gate to their apartment building.”

“But then we’ll trap everybody in the building,” he points out.

“Not a problem—we can throw hummus wraps up at their balconies,” I say. I learned to think on my feet at Wal-Mart.

So now we’re at her apartment building and does she have her keys? Of course not, but she does her cell phone, as well as her husband in his underpants at home. So he comes down, and I take a good look at him, since how often do you see Frenchmen in their underpants? OK, maybe you do—and I bet Lady does—but I don’t….

“The fact that you don’t have your keys is a clear indication—as well as a major portent—of your ambivalence. You definitely shouldn’t go to France.”

“Don’t stop saying that,” she cries, and then tries to get us to believe that she meant, “Don’t! Stop saying that!” Ha! Montalvo and I aren’t buying it.

“What’s ambivalence?” asks Montalvo, a definite candidate for vocabularial supplementation. So we jog through the park of “ambi” words, and then begin to make up new words.

“Ambisexual,” I tell him. “There definitely should be an ‘ambisexual.’”

“But what would it mean?”

“Of both sexes,” I tell him. And then we meet Carlos, in full pirate regalia, who invites us to join him in his piratical pursuits: some days he makes ten bucks!

“I still can’t believe what Nico told me,” says Montalvo, “back there when we were saying goodbye.”

“What was that?”

“So I’m kissing Lady, and giving her your backpack and what does Nico say? He looks at me and says, ‘Don’t get arrested!’ Son of a bitch! I want to kick him in the face, the bastard.”

I can’t help laugh, and then consider—would a good father do that? So I throw him a bone.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him.

“He can’t help it,” I say.

“He’s just French….”

Can you believe it? Lady deserted us for THIS???

Anybody Out There Got Twenty Grand?

On an island where the improbable happens more often than the probable, it made perfect sense: they were, after all, just across the street from Plaza las Américas (“the largest shopping mall in the Caribbean”, as it never stops telling us.) And everyone knows that Plaza has an excellent air conditioning system, with enough capacity to cool the place down to about thirty degrees in ten minutes. So why shouldn’t the 4000 members of the Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego (UTIER) just saunter over to the mall to have a little protest? They had, after all, just voted to strike.

To those who don’t know, UTIER is the union representing the workers who run the island’s power company. OK—so why are they striking? Because the legislature has voted and the governor has signed a budget that—while still 100 million dollars short—is being declared “balanced.”

Caveat—I’m swimming in two deep waters here, the first being Spanish, and the second being economics. In fact, “swimming” implies considerably more adeptness than I have: “struggling to tread water” is more like it. I can, however, use a calculator. But first, consider this statement:

La deuda del Estado Libre Asociado y sus corporaciones públicas alcanza la cifra de $71 billones de dólares, producto de décadas de decisiones que ponen primero los intereses de los acreedores. La deuda es tan grande que ya supera el tamaño de nuestra economía.*

(“The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and its public agencies’ debt has reached the sum of 71 billion dollars, the product of decades of decisions which put the interest of the creditors first. The debt is so large that it now is greater than the size of our economy.”)*

OK—so we owe “71 billion”. And how many of us are there? Here’s your answer:

La población total de la isla bajó de unos 3,7 millones en 2010 a 3,6 millones en 2013. Las mayores bajas se registraron en San Juan y en el oeste y sur de la isla.

(“The population of Puerto Rico dropped from 3.7 million in 2010 to 3.6 million in 2013. The greatest drops were registered in San Juan and the west and south of the island.”)

So the question of the hour: how much would each of us—man, woman, child, infant—have to pay to pay off the debt tomorrow?

Well, let’s make it simple: let’s say that the debt is “only” 70 billion, and that the population has further dropped to 3.5 million. So how much is it?

Twenty thousand bucks.

Guys—would you buy a bond issued by a government so heavily in debt?

Well, if you said yes, you are considerably more rosy-eyed than the three companies who make it their business to advise investors about such things, since earlier in the year, all three of them reduced out bond ratings to junk status. And so we headed off from being La Isla del Encanto and became La Isla de la Deuda—and yes, that means what you think it means.

Enter the 242,000 people who are “working” for the government—and anyone who has tried to get service from our government knows haw richly justified those quotes are. The governor has promised to not cut jobs, but asked that the public unions make concessions about fringe benefits and payment for sick leave. The unions—reputedly—said yes, but wanted the governor to include language that would reinstate the benefits, once the crisis is over. This, the governor was unwilling to do.

And so, yesterday, the water utility and the power company decided to strike. OK, what have they vowed to do? Well, borrowing a page from the legislature, they’ve resolved to act in secret, as well as at night. Oh, and they’ve vowed to close off the airport, major shopping centers, and also Old San Juan. So what happens if my aging mother-in-law suffers a fall? Will we have to medevac her out?

Oh, and what is this going to do to our economy? Well, here’s one economist:

Una paralización en los servicios públicos como energía eléctrica, el agua, el Banco Gubernamental de Fomento y corporaciones públicas que ya están en situación económica y financiera delicada, esto le puede dar el golpe de muerte a las mismas”. 

(“A paralysis in public services such as power and light, the Government Development Bank and public corporations which now are in delicate economic and financial health could be the death blow for these agencies.”)

Absolutely possible, because what did the head of UTIER advise listeners to do, this morning on WKAQ Radio? Stop paying the light and the water bills!

The announcer stopped to scratch his head.

“OK—so what happens when they come to cut the service?”

Guess what? The answer should be obvious.

“Who’s going to come to cut your service? Not us!”

See? 

_____________

* The author of the first piece cited above uses the term “71 billion” the US way. In fact, the debt is named at 71,000 million dollars (which in Spanish would be termed 71 millardos and is 1,000 times less than 71 billion.)