Our Thoughts

Hey, LDS Church. Can we stop using the phrase same-sex attraction? It pathologizes being gay.

Exmos have been sharing this letter sent to LDS church leaders recently. I've stayed quiet because I am trying to chill after a successful, exhausting conferenc...e- but mostly I just don't want to add more misery and despair to social media. There is plenty to go around. I will say this: this is unsurprising and sad. Exmos share this because it hurts them. Because they care. Because this is dangerous. Because it's outrageous in the context it was shared in (Chad Daybell). At first blush, it's about not letting leaders get involved where they shouldn't. That's progress. I want to celebrate that. But here is why I can't celebrate. Here is why I'm skeptical- The letter focuses on this subject, except their policies and procedures don't change. If you are still reporting your abuse to your ecclesiastical leaders, be prepared for this letter to show up in your experience. This letter is about protecting the headlines, not the victims. I've long stopped trusting the institution to protect and/or care about the safety of its members. If you want to pick this fight with me, I can just go through and give you a bulleted list of the thousands of times the church has failed victims and enabled perpetrators. This isn't new. In fact, it is very old. The church, so deeply ingrained in its own persecution narrative, will allow for no other victims except itself. As a whole. As a peculiar, persecuted people. Victims are not only not believed, but there is an entire infrastructure of cultural and doctrinal scripts that make sure no one believes the victim. We have entire communities of apologetics around it. To discredit the women in Joseph Smith's history, in Brigham Young's history and so on and so forth. The conclusion is always the same- someone else must have been wrong. Imagine seeing it as an act of faith to devote your life's work to explaining away the harmful things leaders did. To justify the practice of turning our grandmothers into child brides, who then raised us with their unprocessed trauma. To helping to sweep all the terrible ways boys harm one another under the rug, and then passing on that trauma to their own children. We pass on our unprocessed shame like its some pioneer quilt. A trophy of our fortitude and strength. I am surprised at how, still, it is so deeply-dyed in me that I want to defend the church and its leaders first. Every time. I want to believe our early leaders had a spark of divine in them without the darkness. I want to believe the men in my community are safe. I want to feel safe and because our community is not safe, I have to build myths around it to feel safe. It doesn't have to be this way. We could try and resist our heritage and carve out space to listen and to support. But as it stands, if you acknowledge victims, you are a heretic. To support the victimized in the LDS church means to be a radical dissenter (again, I can give you a bulleted list, you'd like, or you could just ask Lavina F. Anderson who was excommunicated for making such a list). The institution is too big, too bureaucratic, too focused on money as a moral value to have any incentive to change. I've stopped trying to persuade it to do the right thing. When you confuse profit over people as moral high-ground, god help us all. But I do want to say to all my fellow beloved Latter-day Saints, be safe. Fight for your own. Get protections for your families and put them into place. Do not trust policies over your gut. Do not trust obedience over your gut. Do not look for the institution or its leaders to help or protect you. That's a dangerous game of roulette that too often damages the victims. If you're lost in some fantasy otherwise, practice empathy and see it around you. Abuse is real, it's systemic, and it's encouraged in Mormonism by our modesty rhetoric, our sexual narratives, our transphobia, our homphobia. By our racism. People's failures to dismiss these larger problems signal a giant empathy problem, one where the only victim allowed is the church. And I'm absolutely talking institutionally, not individually. Faith being questioned is the only acceptable form of harm for someone to feel victimized. Everything else is seen as a character flaw. The evidence I need for this is that most people I know who disagree with me have a similar thing in common. They think victims are weak and less than. They don't want to assume the victim role, and they certainly don't want others to either. This is such an ugly symptom of trauma. We think that acknowledging our pain is weak, rather than brave. Perhaps shining the light on someone else's pain forces them to acknowledge their own, and there is no language for that in Mormonism. There are few pathways but out, when you've been harmed. It's unacceptable and probably immutable here. The church will not protect you. And it will try hard and make sure others don't as well. Or if they do allow you to be a victim, you have to be seen worthy enough, pathetic enough for their sympathy. I don't know that it's deliberately cruel, I think it's just a system we were all trained up in, so we've completely normalized the ways in which it harms people. But it is cruel just the same. We all participate. This doesn't mean that my church or Mormonism is all bad, but it doesn't mean it's all good either. It just means this: it's not safe. I don't care how many pastel hallways and pictures of Jesus there are. I don't care how sweetly we say things. I don't care how many flowery ways there are to pinterest general conference talks. It is not safe and I sincerely, desperately hope you never learn that the hard way. I don't think that will every stop making me sad.