Chief, my youngest brother, had a sad moment yesterday where he saw news that the president had gutted LGBT protections in Health and Human Services. I’ve been trying to break through to him that this guy ain’t friendly to LGBT rights, but since the family loves Trump and says he’s not anti gay that was enough for Chief to hold no strong opinions on the man.

Chief cried all day at work. He texted me and said he was going to send screenshots of the news to the family chat. He did. There was no response except for father saying he needed to look at the facts, which probably means he’s gonna go to some URL like patriot.Murica.freedom.truth.whatever to have wax put in his ears. Chief says mother texted him privately and said that whatever the “mainstream media” said probably isn’t true so “don’t sorry about it.” She said she doesn’t trust anything they say anymore. Chief said it was real if she doesn’t stop supporting this “agent of chaos” who wants to take away his rights, then he doesn’t feel safe or supported by his family.

I called Chief and we had a chat about codependency and individuation and enduring bad emotions. We both grew up needing mom and dad’s approval like oxygen, because they controlled everything we did, everything we thought, who our friends were, etc., from a very young age, and its easy to think we need that as adults too. When we don’t get it, it feels like nothing matters and it’s easy to self-destruct through cynical self-neglect.

Mormonism and Trumpism blend together in our family. It’s therefore all the same thing to me. I get to watch my parents refuse my input on Mormonism and watch them instead rot their brains out with #StopTheSteal YouTube videos and #QAnon stuff. When my father used George Soros’ name for first time, it was demoralizing, cuz I’ve been to that part of YouTube before. I could have walked them through so much. Instead of taking anything from me, they wrote me off like I feared they might and instead they soak up every word spoken by charlatans and imbeciles. It’s been hard processing that. Chief hasn’t been processing any of this until just now: he’s been people-pleasing and ignoring flaws and shoving bad feelings deep down. He has had no strong opinions on their Trump worship until yesterday. He didn’t want to offend them, only it finally dawned on him that they don’t care about him in the same way. They say they support Chief, but then their vote and their excuses for Trump’s anti-LGBT moves say otherwise.

I don’t know why president Trump thought it was necessary with a week left in his presidency to give a middle finger to gay and trans people. It pleases his evangelical base, sure, but what does that do for him now? This new rule change scraps an Obama era rule in favor of wording from the Freedom Restoration Act that will make it ok to discriminate and still get government funding. Biden will likely reverse it. The callousness of it, though — just why?

It reminds me of when the church tried to throw families with two mommies and two daddies out by banning their kids from the rites of the church, a cruel shame tactic implemented for no reason in the world except to set up a loyalty test that purges the “impure”. The only damage these families might have done to the church is carve out a lane for gay people to exist and be Mormon in every single other way. No one who “comes out” is also announcing with the same words that they want to leave and take as many with them as they can. It usually starts with a simple desire to ignore the church’s teachings on this one thing, but to otherwise be chaste and pay tithing and do all the Mormony things that Mormons do and thereby not disrupt their social lives but also be who they truly are. But, when that doesn’t happen quite the way they hoped, when the diehard members start foaming out their mouths and murmuring about the gay agenda and the fucking liberals ruining everything, that’s when you just leave instead of putting up with their petty bullshit anymore. I believe the church harmed itself more by refusing to budge on this issue than if it just made a little room. It didn’t even have to be much.

I figured out how I was able to scoop the homophobia out of my brain. I came to believe that gay people really are just born that way, and then I found a parallel in my own experience where you’re mind-fucked with impossible standards that burrow deep down in your psycho-sexual development which from there affect literally everything else your life to one extent of another which can further lead to depression. I figured being gay and Mormon was kinda like that, and it filled me with empathy.

Chief will be ok. It would be awesome if his mother knew how to be a mama bear instead of saying “don’t let politics come between our family relationships.” She doesn’t get it. She’s in a cult, and her resistance to having the first one questioned has led her into others, so now she can’t be corrected on anything even when there’s a policy happening that hurts someone she loves. She has biases and she has no mental tools for checking those biases and no desire to receive any. She thinks Joseph Smith was a prophet. She thinks liberals are evil. She thinks the election was stolen. She thinks the COVID vaccine is a plot to put microchips in us. And she either thinks Trump wouldn’t harm LGBTs or she expects him to and just wants us to shut up about it. Her brain is mush.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/15/2021 03:50AM by Cold-Dodger.

You write very thoughtful, very emotional, very good posts. Your brother is, and we are, fortunate to have you.

On Trump, there is an element of Samson at work. He's been rejected, humiliated, and so is trying to tear down the temple and destroy all who oppose him. It's the weak, vengeful action of a child--or of a man whose moral development ceased during childhood. Yes, Biden will reverse the particular insult but it will take months or years to undo the institutional damage. We have to live through that process.

Regarding the church, I think the ban on child baptisms was well intentioned. The Q15 thought that putting kids through baptismal interviews and then the usual sexual teaching would drive a wedge between them and their parents, so taking baptism off the table would be kinder. That the children would then be alienated from their friends and that the sentient world would think the new policy heartless are considerations that did not pierce their adamantine hearts.

More generally, my comfort with gay people came gradually. In college I realized that some of my high school friends had probably been homosexuals, and I knew they were good folk. And as I met more people of all sorts, I soon realized I didn't care about my interlocutors' sexual identifications. As I once said to a gay friend, "I don't care who sleeps with--"

My words had been meant as the opening clause in a longer sentence, but my friend thought that I'd said all that mattered. And he was right. Emotional maturity means letting others decide who they are for themselves. I have neither the right nor the interest to have an opinion on people's gender or sexuality. All I care about is whether a person is honorable, loving, good.

But you know that already. As I said, your brother is lucky to have you.

I’m far more cynical about what the church intended. Remember the church was caught with their pants down — the news and the document containing the policy proposal leaked before most people had any idea. It was a bishop who leaked it to Mormon Stories. The apologetics that came afterwards was purely reactionary. To the extent that it came from the top down, it was knee jerk damage control. To the extent that it happened at the grassroots as Mormons scrambled to justify themselves and their cult, it was self-contradictory self-justifying nonsense that wasn’t fully formed yet. I think the Brethren were only ashamed at first because they didn’t know how their conservative core and the largest part of their tithing base would react. But after the first day of two when those voices had started to prevail among faithful Mormons, instead of the voices of liberals and apostates, that was when they started to say it was inspired and it was here to stay. The Q15 realized, I think, that this doctrine that there’s nothing wrong with having a same sex couple at the core of a family unit had not spread as far as they had feared, and they only had to cook something up that the fence-sitter Mormons (I mean any Mormon who felt that this was wrong but who can never articulate such a feeling in a way that rebukes the Brethren in any way) could believe. So they said it was because we love them. We don’t want to poison their relationships with their families, they said, and we generally don’t wish evil upon them so pardon us while we continue to insist that every single toxic thing that’s been said on the subject before still stands. Anyone who knows a gay tbm who was struggling to make it work with this backwards culture knows that what the Brethren did is signal to worst of the saints, the very worst, the ones who make up the core of Mormon Trumpism later, that liberal nonsense and delight in sin was not going to penetrate any further into God’s kingdom than it already had. That was the point: stop the incursion, carve out the already-infected, shore up defenses to prevent its return.

I have very strong opinions about this, because I watched the cultiness of Mormonism on full display in Rexburg. Everyone was equally shocked on day one. On day 2, the attempts to self-justify from the more conservative half of the church started crashing against us like waves on the rocky shoreline, but it was not yet aided by the brethren’s armies of public relations goons, so it was all over the place and contradictory. The more liberal half was pleading with them not to do this, not to defend this position, because on day 3 the word came down from on high that this was a blessed policy from the Lord and the acolytes found a shoe that fit: it’s because we love them. Once that footing was found, just like every time that footing is found, the mainstream current of Mormon consciousness edited its collective memories of the past so that those first two days of doubt and self-searching never happened or at least were far more nobler a process than they actually were — with fasting, praying, and scripture searching eventually leading to a good feeling that the policy was of God. On day 4, no liberal in all of BYUI dared say anything further on the subject lest they come out in rebellion against the priesthood, but we mourned privately. What I witnessed as a student at BYUI was the Mormon quality for blind obedience embodied in the story of Labon’s beheading, that ability to quiet one’s inner light in favor of the nonsensical impulses put there by one’s leaders and thereby commit or at least consent to something egregious. It was the second time I’d watched it happen with my eyes wide open, actually, the first being the picture of the rock in the hat. But this one hurt people, and I knew I had to leave after that. There’s no reasoning with the main body of this lot. They resent you for trying.

I agree with LW, he and we are lucky to have you, Cold-Dodger, for you clearly think deeply, intelligently and empathically (which is just as important). Thanks for your thought-inspiring and MOVING post.

Tom in Paris



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/15/2021 08:07AM by Soft Machine.

OMG. Your parents. Omg.

You are the best brother.

Your post means a lot to me personally as my elder brother was so the opposite. To this day he is beyond homophobic as suits an MP, Area Seventy, and Temple Pres.

My family is extreme republican and voted for Trump. Only my mother sees Trump now for what he is. However to this day she thinks she has hid well the fact that she has a gay son. This, at 92 in the year 2021. Of course she is fooling no one.

At a certain point you have to see your parents for who they really are. You do. I hope Chief gets there. It is important.
Doesn't mean you can't love them, but you don't have to respect them and you can realize you have outgrown them.

What a mind, heart, and soul you have.

I agree wholeheartedly with both Soft Machine and D&D :)

Oh my !