Mormons at it again

[Sil]

Sermons (we called them "talks") in church on Sunday often took on this fire and brimstone mentality and it was not unusual to hear homosexuality being lumped in with bestiality, child abuse, rape and occasionally even murder by particularly zealous church leaders as heinous sins. If you are growing up trying to make sense of the world and trying to become a good person you don't escape that kind of conditioning unscathed.


At sixteen, as I've said on here before, I met a girl who became my best friend. When I was nineteen I got married instead knowing that I could not then be sent on a mission. I was also racked with guilt over having succumbed to the kind of hetero-curiosity (a bit of kissing and petting) many of us experience and felt that the honourable thing to do was to marry my girlfriend. The guilt I felt for years at having spent that money on something else and the cowardly way I got out of keeping my promise has long since been replaced by anger that I, and many like me around the world, was placed in the situation of having to make that public commitment in the first place along with the knowledge that I took a crazy way out of confronting my sexuality, which has consequently had such a devastating effect on other people - notably my ex-wife and my children.

Sil, I accept what you say. Most Mormons at grass roots want to be good people and many are very honourable. I heard recently that, for the first time, numbers of members in the LDS church are actually declining. This has been fuelled by a dislike of the political activities the church leadership are dragging the organisation into (such as the Prop 8 scandal). The church notoriously continuously revises its texts without informing its members (very 1984) and the teachings of the church are a little more realistic than they once were. For example, bishops were once told to get gay men married off telling them the love of a good woman would cure them. Nowadays they have to be a little more subtle than that! All that considered, though, breaking away is still very difficult. I am delighted to hear that your ex and his parents managed to put human decency and family love above dogma. That may be a little easier on this side of the Atlantic. One of my sons married in Utah and I was not allowed to attend the ceremony through my "unworthiness".

Eesh, nice to see homosexuality still lumped in with rape, incest and bestiality that most natural of associations.

It's funny because if anything they seemed more extreme in that particular part of the world. It was Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and I'll still never forget seeing a large gaudy wooden crucifix ringed with lightbulbs as we entered into one side of town. Some of his neighbours even had bible quotations on wooden boards outside of their doors, not a huge amount granted...but in England this would be enough to grant you 'crazy' status.

I've never known a country be so similar, yet so different.

Thankfully I avoided a lot of the indoctrination people seem to get at a young age, it always knocks me sick how they "get 'em while they're young" when all of us are at our most imaginative, guilt-ridden, and insecure. What a time to instill the fear of god.

I would never condone any behaviour like this, and I'm glad you've found your own path through all of this. I keep hoping that one day there will be a religion that is at worst indifferent to same-sex relations, but I may have to keep on dreaming.