and when we finally get around to it, they are so intent on throwing it in my face and not granting me an inch.

The topic this time around was Savannah, the twelve year old who had her mic turned off in the middle of bearing her written testimony that she was gay and believed that God loved her as she was.

So many screwed up points were made by Team TBM.
- A 12 year old is not old enough to really put herself out there like that, meaning that
- She was most likely put up to this by her parents, who must be apostates intent on hurting the church by using their daughter as a prop to publicly shame it.
– Excommunication is a loving thing, meant to help members take the next step in their repentance process (At this point I lost my cool and said "bullshit, excommunication is spiritual execution").
- There was a tangent about how "the white male is the most oppressed demographic in America" (I kid you not, those were the exact words).
- Gays and other minorities have it so good. They get instant sympathy, free college, etc and etc. And all these politically correct talking points are just used as ammunition to disenfranchise the white male. Team TBM just wants everyone to stop talking about the rights of minorities already.
- Since I have resigned and am no longer a member of the church (they know about this), my opinion is irrelevant. I'm obviously just using this, as all the apostates do, as an arrow in my quiver to prove the church wrong.
- Finally they tried to make some kind of point with the following logic: I used to be anti-gay like everyone else. "You, at one point, would have held up the pitchfork like everyone else," one friend said. I agreed, "Yes, at one point that was me, but that was before I knew any gay people." "Right," my friend continued, "So can you comprehend learning something new that completely invalidates everything you think you know right now." I was rather dumbfounded by this logic. Could I learn something that causes me to un-empathize with the LGBT community? I brought up blacks and the priesthood and how the Brethren have been completely wrong before even when they insisted they were right. So could the Brethren be wrong about gays?

*****

The exchange really pissed me off. We're friends who live under one roof, and as long as politics or religion don't come up we all get along fine. But it inevitably happens. I was turning on an episode of the Mormon Mental Health podcast by the Open Stories Foundation, the one where they interview Savannah. I wasn't two minutes into it before this above exchange took place in our living room. They had passionate opinions about this incident. I think they are ignorant AF about this incident, but they think they have it all figured out. I went for an angry drive (I had lots of those while in Rexburg) and listened to Savannah's interview all the way through. What a brave young girl! I did not get the impression that she was pressured into it by her parents. She knows who she is and she took a step to cut through the silence that empowers the bullshit that makes the Mormon community stupid about LGBT rights, in the hopes that it might help someone else in the ward who is gay and who does not have the confidence she has and will probably never have if all they listen to is official church pronouncements on the issue.

One final thought: do I have any right to tell Mormons how I would like Mormon culture to be? I don't believe any of it anymore and I get rather peeved with it all most of the time. I am no longer Mormon on paper, so what right do I have to lecture them about in-house issues? Well, I feel like one reason I left is because the culture is so screwed up. TBMs freely admit that "Mormon culture" is a menace that no one likes, but they try to lay it at the feet of the members while holding the the institution of the church itself blameless. "The church is true, even if the people aren't." It bounces off their dumb culty foreheads that the members' collective behavior is a direct result of the things they are taught to believe. How long will they admit that the Brethren do not have a perfect track record in the past but somehow insist that everything the Brethren teach NOW is correct and reflects the will of God? I left because of this stupidity. I left because this is not a religion of truth; it's a religion of 'do whatever the Brethren say in this day and generation and ignore the past'. Praise be to the living Q15. Spiritual death to all dissenters, and may their imminent life difficulties drive them back into the arms of the Lord's living mouthpieces as tithe-paying, temple-going sheep. But as much as I am frustrated by all this, I desire the church to be a more loving, less stupid place. As long as I am around family, I must be around Mormonism. And so much of my own past is colored with the religion. It must needs be that I deal with it in one way or another. I'm tired of being told that I have no right to comment and that I should just 'move on' and 'get over it' when it still dominates so much of my life. I studied it hard and knew it better than many others, but now I get talked to as if I know absolutely nothing about it.

Early on in my faith transition I was hoping to stay. The church was my home and all I ever knew. Maybe there was a path forward as a liberal or secular Mormon. But there is not. The 2015 policy change is really when I had had enough of the Brethren's manipulation of the membership. Mormon culture sucks, it is all the Brethren's fault, my dissenting opinion isn't worth anything to them, and the religion isn't even true, so why stick around to be used and abused by it? Perhaps, though, if the church was something more like the Community of Christ, a tolerant atmosphere where diversity is celebrated and the empathic and charitable parts of Christ's teachings are emphasized more than condemning certain groups of people to hell, perhaps I would have stayed a member. But my values and the values of the church have diverged so greatly that to both of us it appears the other has no values anymore.

One thing that I've learned to let go of is the attitude that I have to win an argument. Sometimes it's enough to just make your points. In this case, I might have stuck with, "CNN is carrying this story nationally, and it doesn't make the Mormon church look good to outsiders." Not much to argue with there. Mormons want to be peculiar people, AND to have everyone love their church and their opinions, and that's just not possible.

And of course you have a right to your opinion. If they try to cut you off, I would just smile brightly and tell them, "Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one, even you."

Your story is a familiar one to most of us here. Sounds as if you should put some distance between you and your so called friends at some point. Can you find room mates who are more compatible or at least won't drive you as crazy? And why do I have this sneaky suspicion that once you all part ways, there is a very high probability that these TBM "friends" will drop you like a hot potato? Trying to change your room mates collective self-righteous, judgmental, not to mention warped thinking is an exercise in futility.

LDS 'religion': Any good concepts, principles, or values have been diluted or lost in their focus on Mormonism.


there's very little 'Pure Christianity' coming from SL or any of the franchise holders (local congregations).

You are wasting your time bantering with Mormons who believe they have a testimony of the truth. Either stay off church subjects for the sake of your friendships or find a new place to live. There's an old saying, " if you roll with the pigs, you're gonna get muddy...and the pigs love it". Don't waste your emotional energy and get stressed over situations you can't change. "Angry drives" are not a good idea.

Maybe, that is why I live alone, for now, anyway. And, when my friends and family are here, we have quite short conversations...

I knew at 12 that I liked girls.
That I *really* liked girls.
That I quite easily could get highly sexually aroused around them (often embarrassingly obvious).
And that I had zero sexual attraction to boys.
And I didn't make a "choice" to be attracted to girls and not boys.

Why should it be any different for Savannah?

They're just making rather silly excuses to try and justify their own ignorance, bigotry, and irrational beliefs in mormonism. It angers them that this incident ("staged" or not) is embarrassing for the church. They want to pretend it's trivial, or irrelevant, or made-up -- that way they're not threatened.
Keep pushing their buttons, gently and occasionally. Someday one of those pushes may "click."

My BF would give you this advice, "If you find yourself yelling at an idiot, make sure he is not doing the same thing."

I would shrug and tell them it's so fabulous they have it all figured out in their narrow little worlds at *such* a young age, but their experiences don't apply to the rest of the world.

The fact they find the incident humiliating proves they are not totally brain dead. They know it hurts their cause and they know why.

The white male resentment is worth a giggle. I once worked for a software company in Utah where one of the software engineers got on his soapbox about that. The irony was that every single high paying job in the company (35 of about 50 employees) was held by a white male. All but 2 of the lower paying jobs were held by white women. There were zero minorities in the company.

Mormons just aren't good at recognizing irony.

Yet an 8 year old is old enough to commit to a lifetime of crap and has a full understanding of that commitment. Yeah, right.