Yesterday was the four-year anniversary of George Floyd being murdered by police in broad daylight. I had just written a blog post the previous day about American police murdering people, which of course is a very old topic. I wasn't surprised when it immediately happened again, but I was surprised that this time turned out to be the final straw. In the years since then, the United States has taken a few teensy-tiny baby steps toward putting police officers in their place and holding them accountable for their actions, fought every step of the way by Republicans who distrust the government but believe that police officers should have unlimited authority and immunity. I wasn't too shocked yesterday to see them still spreading the lie that George Floyd died of a drug overdose, making tasteless jokes about his death, and/or asserting that he deserved it because he had a criminal history. If Jesus said "Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone" to a crowd of Republicans, the woman taken in adultery would be a bloody pulp.

The responses to this event accelerated my irreversible alienation from my religious community, which had started with the responses to the you-know-what pandemic. I was mortified that people who claimed to be followers of Jesus treated Covid like a joke and prioritized their individual convenience over everyone else's health, and I was mortified that people who claimed to be followers of Jesus had such ass-backward moral compasses that they couldn't see the problem with a police officer kneeling on a handcuffed man's neck for nine and a half minutes. To be fair, though, I think at the time it was being reported as seven and a half minutes. Regardless, I was appalled that Mormons overwhelmingly responded "George Floyd was no saint" instead of "Murder is wrong." One of them told me that police abuse was a lie by the media, when I already knew firsthand that it wasn't because I'd been on the receiving end of it from Hayden Nelson of the Logan City Police Department that January. (Ironically, since the worst day of my life was in January 2020, the rest of the year was an improvement, though it didn't exactly validate my choice not to kill myself after that motherfucker nearly bullied me into it.) I also later got a crash course in police lies and corruption after Captain Curtis Hooley promised to conduct an investigation and share the results with me and then just didn't.

And despite what many would claim, the institutional LDS Church with its history of anti-Black racism and its unholy love affair with right-wing politics is far from guiltless in fostering these "cultural" problems. Its teachings and policies are directly to blame for Mormons in Utah being overwhelmingly white and conservative and sometimes never even having met a Black person before. The church's "official" response to this social movement was actually on the right side for a change, but it was much too little, much too late. "God does not love one race more than another," Russell Nelson declared in General Conference that October. Why the hell did we need a prophet to tell us that in 2020? Why wasn't Brigham Young telling us that in 1852? So that caused me some cognitive dissonance and added some more weight to my proverbial shelf.

I was thrilled when Dallin H. Oaks said "Black lives matter" at a devotional that same month (followed, of course, by Mormons parsing his words to explain that he didn't mean for us to support the organization Black Lives Matter, which according to them was a terrorist group). Now I don't need an apostle's permission to say "Black lives matter." I don't need to look to men older than my grandparents to validate literally anything. I know right from wrong. Police brutality is wrong. Systemic racism is wrong. Denying that either of those things exist because you've never personally encountered them and you believe in the just-world fallacy is wrong. Derek Chauvin should have been fired and/or prosecuted the first seventeen times people filed conduct complaints against him, and George Floyd should still be here, saint or not. If anyone said "George Floyd was no saint" to me in person, I would punch them in the throat and respond, "Neither am I."

Oh yeah, and then the next year, I was at a church activity where someone told a couple of racist jokes, including one about Black people being afraid of police, and everyone except me laughed. I knew she had no malicious intent, so I didn't want to embarrass her, and I didn't call her out on it. I've regretted that ever since.

First, indulge me while I pat myself on the back.

This new record has been set in large part thanks to my page about Ezra Taft Benson's 1987 talk "To the Mothers in Zion," which a lot of people looked up to verify that the LDS Church's general Relief Society president, Camille Johnson, disregarded the prophet's counsel in the 1980s and is now being celebrated by the church for it. The gaslighting is rather tedious. I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.

Twitter is now completely X, which is a really cool name if you're in middle school. I'll probably just keep calling it Twitter to show my contempt for its owner. It's a dumpster fire of bullying and hate speech, and it deserves to lose all its advertising sponsors, but I keep using it because I have the unfortunate moral failing of really enjoying heated arguments with bad people. I've had a few more civil debates with okay people, but they didn't give me the same thrill. I was going to share several of the stupid LDS-adjacent Tweets that I saw this week, but as this topic probably interests no one as much as me, it isn't worth the effort. I'll just share one. I was one of the first people who saw it, and I couldn't believe my eyes. I gladly helped make it go viral-ish.

It's public knowledge that this man has a traumatic brain injury, and it's very obvious from his posts that he's delusional. I've tried to tell him that a few times. I know there's not a nice way to tell someone that they're delusional, but I tried not to be a jerk about it, and I hoped he could make the connection since he's aware that he has a traumatic brain injury. But no. Given the circumstances, I don't think he's guilty of the same intentional evil as most of his right-wing Mormon buddies, and I want to be sympathetic to him, but he's such an insufferable ass that it's impossible.

Most Mormons are, of course, as shocked and horrified by this man's belief as I was. Even on Twitter, many decent Mormons told him he was wrong. (The horrible ones were strangely quiet.) He claimed that only apostates and "progmos" were telling him he was wrong, and he doubled down.

So this is the nonsense of a mentally ill man who does not accurately represent what most Mormons believe. Nonetheless, I have no hesitation in using it to humiliate the LDS Church, because it is what the Book of Mormon teaches. It's what I was taught as a kid. It wasn't made into a big deal, and I didn't give it much thought, and I didn't realize how horrifically racist it is until I was in college - and then only because I stumbled, quite by accident, upon an article by Mormon apologists arguing that the skin color in the Book of Mormon is metaphorical. They presented a surprisingly sophisticated argument, and it persuaded me for several years. But it makes no sense in the obvious nineteenth-century cultural context of the book's origin, it isn't what Mormon leaders taught for most of their history, it isn't what was depicted in decades of visual media based on the Book of Mormon, and I'm pretty sure that even today it isn't a mainstream Mormon belief. I suspect that most Mormons, like me, honestly just don't think about this part of the book very much. I bet a substantial number of them don't even know about it because they've never read the whole book. One apologist got raked over the coals recently for suggesting that the skins in the book were the animal skins that people wore, and that's what Mr. Plumb is mocking in his Tweet. Ironically, he's correct about it being ridiculous.

Here's Spencer W. Kimball, a Mormon prophet, seer, and revelator, teaching the same thing in General Conference that this delusional man believes, because it's what the Book of Mormon says:

This was in 1960. Notwithstanding the widespread virulent racism that existed in 1960, normal people had at least figured out by then that skin color was not caused by curses from God. But Kimball also taught that masturbation led to homosexuality and women having equal rights led to divorce, so I'm not positive that he wasn't delusional too.

Kimball does deserve some credit for lifting the LDS Church's racist ban against full participation by members of African descent. Here's prophet, seer and revelator LeGrand Richards in an interview with Reverend Wesley Walters a couple of months later. Walters asked him if Mormons still believed that Black people were less valiant in the previous life. Richards said,

That was in 1978, in case anyone forgot. Mormon leaders don't say that stuff anymore, but I have yet to hear any of them endorse the "it's metaphorical" hypothesis.

The obvious nineteenth-century cultural context of the Book of Mormon's teachings about skin color is the racist Mound Builder myth. Many European settlers believed that the Native Americans were too primitive to have built the mounds and earthworks that dotted North America, so they speculated that those things had been built by an earlier race of light-skinned people before the darker-skinned people wiped them out. Many European settlers, without the benefit of modern anthropology or DNA science, also believed that the Native Americans were descended from Israelites. Lo and behold, both of those ideas became essential to the narrative of the Book of Mormon, and since neither of those ideas has the benefit of being true, it strains credulity to regard that as a coincidence. The argument that the skin color is metaphorical relies on the book coming out of an ancient Hebrew context without the modern concept of race, but it didn't. It so obviously didn't.

But that's not the worst part of the Book of Mormon's racism. The worst part of the Book of Mormon's racism is its assertion that the Native Americans deserved to be displaced and decimated by the Europeans because their ancestors abandoned God. And this is an absolutely core part of the narrative that can't be downplayed as "metaphorical." Over 20 times the book paraphrases the teaching, "Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land; but inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments ye shall be cut off from my presence." Even the chorus of the children's song "Book of Mormon Stories" (which has its own racism problem) repeats "Given this land, if they lived, rye-chus-lee." (emphasis in original) Few things could make it more obvious that the book was written by a man of European descent putting God's stamp of approval on his ethnocentric worldview. But this is an abhorrent thing to teach anyone, especially the descendants of the people who were displaced and decimated.

So again, I have no moral qualms about using Mr. Plumb's deranged Tweet to humiliate the LDS Church, because he's a more solid believer in its foundational text than its own current leaders are. I don't doubt that he causes more problems for them by saying the quiet parts out loud than I do by criticizing them on my blog. But if you're struggling with how to continue believing in the Book of Mormon as a divinely inspired ancient text despite its blatant nineteenth-century racism, don't worry, he has a solution for that too.

I have nothing to say about this except that I don't want to watch it because I hate my voice and my mannerisms, but I request that both of my blog readers at least mute it and play it in the background to drive the views up. And then also buy my book if you haven't yet.

My page that includes the full text of LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson's 1987 talk "To the Mothers in Zion" has undergone a significant spike in traffic in the last couple of days. I can guess why. General Relief Society president Camille Johnson spoke on Friday, and she talked about balancing her education and career with raising a family, without mentioning that she was in direct defiance of the prophet at the time by having a career at all. Countless other Mormon women sacrificed their career ambitions because the prophet told them to. He didn't say, "Make your own decisions based on your individual circumstances." He didn't say, "Motherhood should be your highest priority, but you can do other things too." He said, "Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother’s calling is in the home, not in the marketplace." He was not ambiguous. He was not open to interpretation. This was only six years before I was born, and when I grew up in the 2000s, I was still being taught at church that married women shouldn't work outside the home if they had a choice. My YSA bishop was also very adamant about that as recently as 2021.

And now, as anyone familiar with its usual lack of transparency and accountability would expect, the LDS Church is quietly pretending that didn't happen and celebrating a woman who disobeyed the prophet. But of course many people are seeing through that and calling it out. And apparently some of them are using my copy of the talk as a source. Glad I could be of help. On the flip side, several Mormons are lying that the church's vendetta against working mothers was just "culture" or the "interpretation" of a few zealots in your ward, and that's also infuriating but not unexpected. I understand all too well the cognitive dissonance that comes from facing the reality that the men you've been taught to revere as mouthpieces for God were as misogynistic as they were racist.

Anyway, I formally joined the Unitarian Universalist church today because it's been a good spiritual community that shares my values. It's been at the forefront of social justice movements in the United States instead of getting dragged kicking and screaming behind them like some churches I could mention. I first became aware of it over a decade ago when I had a friend who'd converted to it from the LDS Church, and then I visited it for a religious studies class. I thought the building was weird. It's literally a house. And I understood the appeal of the whole "Love everyone and believe whatever you want" shtick, but I didn't like it. That's exactly the sort of liberal claptrap that I'd been taught to dismiss. Love isn't enough, I thought. You can't just believe whatever you want, I thought. There's objective truth and it matters. At some point, a random woman stopped me on the sidewalk, and I don't remember what she said exactly, but basically she sensed a lot of stress or anxiety in me and suggested I check out Unitarian Universalism, which I didn't. In hindsight, maybe she was led by the Spirit. Or maybe she said that to everybody.

Long story short, my perspective has changed. A lot of what I thought was objective truth was actually bullshit, and I have a lot more humility about how much I don't know and probably never will. I still value truth and I still intend to seek after it for the rest of my life, but I no longer think it's the most important thing. I think love is the most important thing after all. Why should God be more concerned about what we believe than how we treat each other? I've increasingly noticed that people who think that way are insufferable if not horrible people. After I lost my faith, I shopped around a little for a new one because I desperately needed the community. And I ended up sticking around with the Unitarian Univeralists, and after a year or so they asked me if I wanted to formally join, and I saw no reason not to. I don't believe it's the "one true religion," and it doesn't claim to be. It's just a community that works for me and a tool for doing good in the world. My imminent departure from Logan puts a bit of a damper on things, but I'll love this congregation while I'm here and then maybe I'll find another in Salt Lake. Things don't have to last forever to be worthwhile.