I don't know about you, but I believe that every time we have a mass shooting here in the United States of America, one's first and only response should be, "Don't you dare take my guns!" Once you've gotten that out of the way you can take a few seconds to pretend to care about the victims, but really, it's probably best to not even bother. That just distracts from what needs to be our highest and only priority. We know that liberals are going to immediately politicize every mass shooting, so we have to beat them to it every time.

Look, just because every other civilized country on the planet has done something about this doesn't mean we can do anything about this. First of all, gun laws won't stop criminals from getting guns. Secondly, gun laws will stop criminals from getting guns, but they'll just use knives instead. And that's just as bad. It's just as easy to kill twenty people at once with a knife as with an AK-47. Makes me wonder why people even bothered inventing AK-47s. People will always find ways to kill people, okay? One time a few years ago somebody drove a truck into a crowded marketplace, and that proves that gun control doesn't work.

The reason gun control doesn't work is that gun violence actually has nothing to do with guns. It's all caused by atheism, mental illness, and violent video games. This also explains the discrepancy between the United States of America and everywhere else, because obviously none of those things exist in Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, or any of the other places that don't have mass shootings every week.

In particular, mentally ill people like me and others I care about deserve to be further stigmatized after every mass shooting. In fact, as our beloved President says, we should be involuntarily confined for the protection of normal people. This is actually a very old idea and I'm not sure why we stopped doing it a few decades ago, but the consequences of stopping are clear. Now it may seem like I'm arguing against my own interests here, and disregarding the actual facts that clearly show zero correlation between mental illness and mass shootings, but I recognize that the Republican Party needs to protect its gun fetish at all costs, and if my quality of life is necessary collateral damage then so be it. At least I'm not yet one of the people getting shot.

Of course, I can't complain too much regardless. I can only try to imagine how it must feel to be a Latino in this great nation right now. But let me be clear that our beloved President bears no culpability for what happened, or for the climate that engendered it. He has never said anything ever that could be interpreted by any reasonable person as fanning the flames of American racial hatred and divisiveness. I mean, he even admitted that some undocumented immigrants aren't drug pushers or rapists. What more could you ask for?

I bring this all up because we need to be ready to have this discussion again, and again, and again, so we can make sure nothing actually changes. Nothing needs to change. There are lots of other causes of death that kill more people than mass shootings, so anyone who acts outraged over white supremacists and other scum going on killing sprees with impunity in this country is a fearmongering hypocrite and a moron. In fact, they're also a liar. They don't really care about the victims, they just want to take our guns. That's why we need to rise up, ignore the victims and shout "Don't you dare take my guns!"

I'll start off with some good news that has no relevance to the main topic. Although some high-ranking people in Utah's education system were determined to prevent children from learning accurate science, they've now officially lost. If they had succeeded in putting creationism in schools, they would have been sued like Kansas and then lost, so Utah has been spared some considerable resources and embarrassment here. And since I wrote a letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune about this some time ago, I'll take credit for science's victory. You're welcome.

The main topic is not the most pleasant one to read or write about, but I think it's kind of important. Trigger warning: sexual assault.

​Mike Norton is not a friend of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I believe there are very few people on the planet who hates the Church more than he does. As far as its critics go, he's one of the nastiest, most unstable, and most willing to cross ethical boundaries, which is saying something. He likes to purchase temple recommends from equally unethical church members and record the ceremonies and post them on YouTube, except now he has to have helpers do it because the temple workers know who he is. So when McKenna Denson claimed that former MTC president Joseph Bishop attempted to rape her decades ago, and sued the Church for allegedly covering it up and not doing anything about it, Mike Norton was a natural ally. He happily filmed her harassing and embarrassing Bishop, and in return, she showed up to support him when he recently went to court for violating the Church's restraining order. It was a beautiful friendship. How could one not be touched watching them sing "Won't You Be My Neighbor" on the way to Bishop's ward to disrupt fast and testimony meeting?

But it was not to last.

Before this week, I would have regarded the possibility of Mike Norton teaming up with the Church of Jesus Christ against his former ally as only slightly more likely than Donald Trump expressing his admiration for Mexican Muslim women. Yet it turns out that he does have a shred of integrity. When his friend McKenna Denson claimed that three attempts on her life were made earlier this year, he naturally was concerned and wanted to help investigate. But in the course of his investigation he found some disturbing revelations. Now, some of this was already pointed out by the Church's legal team, and they got crucified for it. How dare they investigate the trustworthiness of someone who's suing them for a crapload of money? Don't they know they're obligated to roll over and accept whatever abuse is heaped on them? But Mike Norton found all that and more, and now he's quite literally and deliberately helping the legal team of his most despised religion in the world, because if possible, he now despises McKenna Denson even more. And he's getting applauded for it by most of the same people who crucified said legal team.

To sum up: McKenna Denson, or June Hughes as she used to be known before her criminal record under the latter name got inconveniently big, has a decades-long history of forgery, shoplifting, deliberately injuring herself or her property to file fraudulent lawsuits, extorting money via false rape/assault accusations (sometimes against actual men, and sometimes against imaginary men who are always black because it turns out she's racist too), and soliciting donations by pretending to have cancer. This last bit is what really set Mike Norton off and made him decide she's the worst person he's ever met. In a recorded phone call, he subjected her to a hefty dose of unhinged but not undeserved verbal abuse and told her that the people she scammed will now be less likely to donate to real cancer victims, so she's literally taken money away from children with cancer. Throughout the 14-minute phone call she denied none of his allegations and showed no remorse. She remained calm and implacable as he promised to end her career of lies and put a bullet between her eyes if she ever sets foot on his property again. (Trespassers are the worst, eh Mike?)

And it does look like McKenna Denson is finished. The vast majority of her supporters turned against her overnight. True, most of them are disgusting hypocrites who whined about the Church "persecuting" her when it pointed out her criminal record, but that detracts very little from my schadenfreude at watching her go down in flames. I originally formed no solid opinion on her claim against Joseph Bishop because it wasn't my place to do so, even though a helpful stranger informed me that I was "promoting rape culture" by holding him to the same standard that all accused persons are entitled to in the United States of America. Of course I didn't want it to be true, but it's by no means impossible for a high-ranking church leader to do something so terrible. They're not Jesus. I wrote a blog post over a year ago summarizing the details of the case, but I had to update it every day as more details came out, so I soon gave up and left it unpublished and just hoped the people who actually have authority in these matters would get at the truth. I'll probably publish it in the near future anyway so all that effort doesn't go to waste.

The clear fact now, though, is that McKenna Denson has been lying about being raped, and various other things, since before she even went on her mission. That's actually impressive. And the police know about this. So the fact that she isn't already in prison for life demonstrates that something is very, very wrong with our society. At the very, absolute least, the police should have stopped listening to her long ago. Anytime she goes to them for literally any reason, they should laugh in her face and tell her to take a long walk off a short pier, because for forty years or so she's been one of the least trustworthy people in the human race. She has repeatedly and voluntarily thrown away her right to be believed about anything whatsoever. Sorry not sorry. She never should have been allowed to file this bullcrap lawsuit against the Church, but since her one charge that didn't get dismissed already is moving forward, it looks like she'll be getting additional comeuppance, this time with nobody supporting her, and in fact with her previous most prominent supporter testifying against her on behalf of the Church. We live in strange times.

False rape accusers, which McKenna Denson/June Hughes demonstrably is several times over even if by some small chance she happens to be telling the truth this time, are every bit as wicked in my book as actual rapists. They put their victims through hell and they make it more difficult for real rape victims to be taken seriously. And her other lies and lawsuits took money from innocent people too. And pretending to have cancer is a garbage thing to do even if you don't take people's money, which she did. I don't care about the forgery and shoplifting. Nobody's perfect. If that was the only thing on her criminal record I would disregard it. But all of this taken together is why I would rejoice in her fall from public approval even if she wasn't targeting my religion. The judge will come to his or her own conclusions, but as far as I'm concerned the Church's only error in judgment was letting this monster serve a mission after she had already started her career of lies.

Mike Norton tells her to "rot in hell" even though he doesn't believe in hell. As tempted as I am to concur with that request, I must remind myself that I am not her judge. I am not either of their judge, and with that disclaimer I make this observation. Mike Norton is an amazing illustration of moral complexity. He's done some very crappy things and there's no indication that he intends to stop just because he's in a momentary truce of sorts. Yet this week he demonstrated that he has some ethical boundaries and gives a crap about innocent people, including those affiliated with what he considers his worst enemy. McKenna Denson/June Hughes, on the other hand, appears to give a crap about nothing and nobody but herself. Her lack of reaction to Mike's accusations paints her as totally amoral and unconcerned with the harm she's inflicted on so many people. This may be an indicator of mental illness, or it may just be that her conscience has fallen silent after decades of her willfully ignoring it.

Mike Norton's video where he discusses the police reports on McKenna Denson/June Hughes (with a bit of swearing toward the end):

Mike Norton's earlier phone call with McKenna Denson/June Hughes where he majorly flips out on her (with much swearing throughout):

First, some unnecessary backstory. Pretty much everything I know about Tinder I learned from a classmate's essay in my Creative Nonfiction Writing course. Like all the creative writing courses, it was uncensored and unfiltered, but this was the only piece of writing I ever heard from a classmate that shocked me and made the professor be like "Um, that's kind of offensive." The questionable parts of the essay were her claims that she looked on Tinder for guys "who don't look like rapists" and that "Mormon men with beards look like they're part of the Taliban". I think I wrote in my comments, "What does a rapist look like?" But it was an informative essay nonetheless, and the only meaningful increase in my knowledge came a couple weeks ago when I was forced to take the first sick day of my life and spend it on the couch waiting to die. I somehow got to reading screenshots of funny, weird, and/or creepy Tinder profiles and messages, and that made me think about Mutual.

Mutual, from what I understood, was like Tinder but only for Latter-day Saints. It was named after the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association and the Young Women's Mutual Improvement Association (formerly the Young Ladies' National Mutual Improvement Association, formerly the Young Ladies' Cooperative Retrenchment Association) because I presume the far superior name "Tinder Mercies" would have triggered an unwinnable lawsuit. I thought about this app because I was reading about all this scummy stuff on Tinder and I presumed that Mutual wouldn't have this scummy stuff. I'm sure it has some scummy people, but I presumed they had to behave themselves while on the app. And then I wondered if the app was free and then I figured it was probably free but with a Premium version required to actually make it useful, and I verified that and then, being very ill and bored, I downloaded it for reasons I still don't know. And I had another learning experience.

So of course you have to start out by making a profile. You have to have at least one picture, and that's where I hit my first snag. I couldn't find any non-group picture taken of me within the last year that I didn't hate, and even if I could have, I would have considered it misleading. I could concievably get a picture taken at just the right pose and angle and lighting to make me look moderately handsome, but I can't stay at that pose and angle and lighting all the time in real life. Nightmares flashed through my mind of women from the app meeting me in person and being disappointed by my mannerisms, voice, facial expressions, and outlook on life. So I ruled out that route right off. I used the picture of my dead dog (who wasn't dead at the time it was taken). I knew nobody would swipe on that and I didn't care because I just needed a picture so I could move on.

You have to set your profile somewhere on a scale between "Down for Dates" (because alliteration) and "Relationship Ready" (ditto). I couldn't be honest because "Just Browsing" isn't an option. I set msyself toward the former end of the scale but since I wasn't planning to get swiped, I didn't stress about the precise placement. You can say whether you've served a mission and if so, where. I said "Korea Pyongyang North" and got away with it. You can select some interests, hobbies and such, from a list and write a bit about yourself. There are a few prompts, but you can only use one. "Most embarrassing moment? Downloading this app." I should have tested to find out how much you can write but I didn't feel the need to duplicate information already available on the internet. So I just put an invitation to my website, but I didn't get a spike in traffic and I didn't expect one anyway so that was fine. And of course there are cool things you can only do with the Premium version, but I wouldn't have sprung for that even if I could afford it. That would be like paying Spotify every month with no guarantee that I would actually get to listen to music.

Then the app started bombarding me with other people's, specifically women's, profiles, and I immediately noticed what I regard as a tragic design flaw. Each profile just comes up as the woman's default picture, name, age and location. Sometimes she has more pictures you can scroll through. Then you can tap on it and bring up her common interests with you, DD vs. RR status, and whatever she chose to write about herself. And most of them didn't write much about themselves. A lot of them just listed their Instagram names in that space, so I went and followed their Instagrams where I could see several more pictures of them and, in one case, her boyfriend. Sometimes they had a little quip that attempted cuteness but gave little information. "I'm not gluten-free." Oh, good to know because that would have been a dealbreaker. Definitely more useful than your feelings on vaccines or Donald Trump. I admit that one made me smile, though, and I quote: "Just please don't murder me."

​So the design flaw is this: I believe the Mutual app, whether by design or practice, encourages shallowness.

With so little to go off of, I was basically supposed to decide based on a woman's appearance whether I would bother messaging her. And yes, this is a natural human tendency, and like most humans I am more inclined to want to get to know humans who have certain physical traits that humans have evolved to find attractive in the opposite sex mostly for reasons of genetic fitness, but I feel very guilty about that. I don't want to be encouraged in it. Aziz Ansari in his book Modern Romance acknowledged that Tinder encourages shallowness, but decided that's fine because it's just like real life where people only gravitate to the people they find attractive anyway. Okay, but what if we harnessed the power of technology to make ourselves be better? What if we took the opportunity to look past the physical with greater ease by actually having access to a bunch of pertinent information right off the bat? For example, I would give virtually anyone a chance if she gave the right answers about vaccines and Donald Trump.

I've had the experience, as I'm sure many people have, of talking to someone that at first I regarded as rather plain-looking, only to find that she grows more and more beautiful with each moment of conversation, and before I know it three hours have gone by, and she asks me out, and I'm not sure at first if that's what's happened but I figure "Dinner and a movie, my treat" is pretty unambiguous, so the day approaches and then an hour before we're scheduled to go she texts and says she can't, she's sick, and I try to reschedule but her responses are kind of evasive and it occurs to me that this isn't a postponement but a cancelation, and I ask her directly if that's the case, and she says yes, I seem like a nice guy but she's just not interested, and as you can imagine I'm just a little teensy weensy itsy bitsy bit confused, so I calmly and politely inquire why she asked me out in the first place, and she says something to the effect of "I could tell that you liked me, but I figured you would be too shy to ask me out, so I thought I'd help you" and I feel like the next time she wants to "help" someone she should just, like, not, but after crying for a while I decide to forgive her but then - this is the strangest thing, I don't get it at all, but then her appearance changes again, like she has the same face as always, but now she looks like a literal gargoyle, and I don't get it at all because I'm not mad at her, I don't hate her, and there are plenty of people I do heartily dislike but they don't become "ugly" to me just because of that, so I know this isn't just some psychological perception thing on my part, and when I go with the missionaries to help teach her because she's going inactive I mention that bit to them in case it's relevant to her spirituality, only I try to be polite and call it "almost a physical change" even though there's no "almost" about it, and they seem to know what I'm talking about, and she always seems super awkward and uncomfortable being alive, too, which I never noticed before, and I don't know if she was like that before or I just didn't notice, but I confide in a close friend who happens to be her Relief Society president and shares some probably confidential information about her mental illnesses, and I understand that in her mind she really thought she was being helpful and with that reaffirmed I'm able to let it go completely. We've all been there, right? Right?

So I knew right away that I was in over my head. Unlike Tinder, instead of choosing the right, you swipe up to indicate your approval of someone's profile, and down to indicate that they aren't attractive enough for you. And I couldn't bring myself to swipe down on anyone. It seemed to me such an act of wanton cruelty toward a perfect stranger. If there had been something in any given profile to indicate that our personalities or political views or astrological signs weren't a good match, I could then have passed her by with a clear conscience knowing that it was no reflection on her. But there never was. The only real filter I could get was age. I decided a while ago that most 18-20 year olds aren't really adults and I don't want to deal with their crap, so I swiped down on those, but that still left so many more. And you can't just skip one and move on. You have to make a choice. You can go back to your own profile, you can close the app, you can turn off your phone, but as soon as you return to Mutual the same profile will be in your face demanding to know your verdict on her corporeal frame.

​I kept the app for two weeks, up until the day I saw somebody from my stake. I haven't seen her since she left on a mission a couple years ago but now apparently she's back. I've never spoken to her and she's probably grateful for that. I didn't want to swipe her one way or another. But seeing her here now drove home the futility of having this guilt-trip of an app that I had no intention of using for its intended purpose and which I believe is fundamentally flawed in its execution. So I deleted it, but as I type this I realize that what I actually should have done is either a. swipe for an hour and take a shot of Dr. Pepper for every blonde, or b. make a fake profile, an attractive one, to see what caliber of messages it received and test my original hypothesis that Mutual dispenses with the unsavory elements of Tinder. But like I said, I didn't really think this through in the first place.

Happy twentieth birthday to "The Phantom Menace" and eleventh birthday to "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", two much-maligned films that I used to love and still love and won't apologize for loving even though I'm now aware of their shortcomings. I feel pretty freaking old, though, since I remember both of their releases like they were yesterday. Yet Jar Jar Binks and CG gophers are timeless.

I am, of course, no fan of abortion or the absurdly stupid and/or scientifically illiterate arguments so often employed in its defense. However, I regard Alabama's new law with its lack of exemptions or nuance of any kind, and any mindset or legislation along similar lines, goes much too far and is morally wrong. I don't anyone thinking I support that sort of thing. (For that matter, these days I've stopped rooting for anti-abortion legislation altogether, as I think it's far more important to change hearts and minds and provide decent sex education, birth control, and scientific information.) However, I'm not getting super worked up about it because it's going to be struck down, and that's actually the point. The whole thing is a ploy to reach the Supreme Court in the hope of overturning Roe vs. Wade with the help of Trump's more or less conservative appointees. For some reason most people don't seem aware of that. While most of the outrage against this law and the men who passed it is justified, painting them as stupid and/or ignorant isn't. They know exactly what they're doing. I don't think it's justified and I think it will fail, but it's a bold and brilliant maneuver.

I know I'm not supposed to even have an opinion, but I do and there it is and now I'm done. Here's something positive that happened to me this week, not to make anybody jealous but just to prove that I am capable of noticing positive things. I ran into my ex-roommates' mom for the first time since January, and that was just a little nerve-wracking after what they did to me and the lies they probably spread to justify it (a story which will be explained in much greater detail in my upcoming memoir), and I thought maybe she'd be pissed, but she said she felt bad about how things happened and wanted to give me something, and the something turned out to be an envelope with eighty dollars in it. I guess she's been carrying it around for three months just in case. I wouldn't have run into her if I hadn't gone out to buy temple garments that afternoon, so I accepted that as a very welcome tender mercy.

I wrote recently about the movement to change aspects of BYU's Honor Code enforcement that are wrong and have put some students through unacceptable abuse. ​I'm told that others who actually want to rewrite or do away with the code altogether have piggybacked onto this movement, but what I've actually witnessed is self-righteous Latter-day Saints assuming that the wronged students' complaints are a disengenuous smokescreen and that they should have gone to a different school. Now, I don't believe BYU has ever asked random people to defend it from legitimate accusations, and I don't believe it's ever responded to such accusations by saying "If you don't like us, don't go here." So I'm honestly a little baffled by the sheer number of people who think it's their duty to defend BYU by victim-blaming its accusers and saying "If you don't like BYU, don't go there." It now comes as no surprise to anyone with a functioning brain that this week BYU changed its Honor Code enforcement policies.

The main idea behind these changes, which may not be the only ones, is to get rid of the culture of students being encouraged to tattle on other students for trivial violations that are none of their business. So, for example, students making accusations will no longer remain anonymous, and the students being accused will actually be allowed to face their accusers, except in a few vague circumstances. Why this wasn't the case all along is beyond my comprehension. The default anonymity policy was asinine and couldn't have reasonably been expected to foster anything positive, and it didn't. Let me be clear; while I don't like BYU and didn't go there, I believe most of its administrators act in good faith and that the current director of the Honor Code office is a swell guy and that these changes are at least as much a result of the goodness of his heart as the negative publicity. I applaud BYU for acknowledging some of its shortcomings and fixing them quickly instead of defending them.

And this isn't the first time. It's been considerably less than three years since BYU overhauled its policies to stop the Honor Code office from grilling sexual assault victims, compounding their suffering and expelling them if they were found to have violated it. Of course this was an unintended consequence, not the result of administrators deciding it would be fun to punish rape victims, but regardless of intent the approach was poorly thought out and wrong and catastrophically hurtful. During a crapload of national scrutiny and backlash in mid-2016 (which won the Salt Lake Tribune a Pulitzer prize the following year), many Latter-day Saints could be heard to opine, "If you don't like BYU, don't go there." Then an advisory council of the school's faculty recommended 23 policy changes. And then BYU, to its credit, adopted every single one of them. And then its self-appointed defenders completely failed to learn any lesson whatsoever and made complete idiots of themselves again this go-round.

Full disclosure: I am one of those who believes the substance of the Honor Code itself, not just enforcement, needs to change. The beard ban that arose to counter 1960s American hippy culture is desperately obsolete and accomplishes little more than making BYU weird for the wrong reasons. I, for one, have found shaving to be an enormous and unwelcome inconvenience. and the spinny blade things to be highly ineffective at their one purpose for existence, so I do it once a week and use the sideburn trimmer for my whole face. None of my fellow students or faculty at USU could have ever possibly cared less. In fact, some guys grow out their beards just to mock the BYU football team when it visits. So yes, I think that's a stupid policy and will support any protest movement against it, but obviously these things have to come on a priority basis. As in my previous mention, I acknowledge that the vast majority of BYU students have positive experiences. But with these policy changes and hopefully more to come, the minority who don't are being heard, and their future numbers should be much lower.

Oh, here's another positive thing. Please take two and a half minutes to watch it.

Apparently there's some big football game going on today. I don't know, I don't watch football. I attended one football game my freshman year and failed to grasp the appeal of a sport that can't go unpaused for more than five consecutive seconds. It was a game against BYU though, so at one point the big screen in the stadium said "Win or lose, you still live in Provo. Nuff said." That was worth the price of admission. This was back when it was Romney Stadium, before capitalism ruined it. Now it's named Maverick Stadium after a chain of gas stations. I kid you not. I refuse to call it M------- Stadium. In all seriousness though, this is like the biggest weekend of the year for sex traffickers, so... I don't know what I expect anybody to do with that information, but it seems like something we should all be aware of.

As it happens, I am busy all this weekend with unrelated things like moving out of my crappy apartment, so I'll make this mercifully brief. I've kept forgetting to follow up on a post from five months ago where I reflected on how broken and hopeless I felt after being told much too late in life that a. oppositional defiant disorder is a thing and that b. I was diagnosed with it as a child. The only thing I have to add is that I brought this up in group therapy, and I can talk about this because I can talk about the things that I talk about in therapy, just not the things that other people talk about. My wonderful fellow group members were pissed on my behalf about the timeframe and circumstances in which I got this information. My wonderful therapist, who was considerably older than me, said that in his experience the majority of ODD diagnoses are wrong. It's basically a label that mental health professionals can attach to behaviors with zero regard for context or motivation. That's exactly what I thought when I heard the term, but of course I have no expertise to judge. And he said that even when the diagnosis is correct, most people grow out of it anyway.

I'm cool with that. Psychiatrists aren't gods, and frankly the more I look back the more I feel like if the ones I saw were much good they probably would have been stationed almost anywhere else besides St. Lawrence County, New York. So for now, I'm going to go with the assumption that I don't have this made-up disorder after all. Because, as I detailed in my earlier post, it was far too late in life for me to give a damn about overcoming an alleged disorder that nobody could be bothered to tell me about for well over a decade, the only real difference this makes is that I loathe myself a little less than I did immediately after getting the unwelcome news. And maybe it turns out that I'm not quite too broken for somebody to love me someday.

​Nah, that's pushing it.