Different Mormon sister missionaries from the ones I talked to came to my house to give my landlord cookies, and he brought them downstairs to use the bathroom because his is off-limits for some reason. Cue them asking if I'm in the ward and me telling them I'm not a member because I don't lead with telling people that I've already been part of and rejected their religion, though I'm probably overthinking it because every Mormon their age knows twenty people who have left. My landlord actually isn't a member either, and he joked that he'll get baptized when he's ninety, but I took the missionaries' side and reminded him that he doesn't know if he'll live that long. They asked if he's talked to me much about the church, and I laughed, and he joked that I don't know anything about the church. They asked if I'd been to any church meetings, how long I'd been here, where I'm from, whether I was raised religious in New York, what religion I was raised in, and whether my church records are in New York, and next time I'm just going to tell them everything up front instead of looking like I have something to hide.

Because the conversation took this trajectory, these missionaries (by which I mean the one missionary who did most of the talking) asked a different question than all the other missionaries I've talked to since 2022. Instead of asking why I left the church, they asked why I had my records removed. Those questions have different answers. Perhaps I should have acted like a Mormon apologist and answered the question they should have asked, but I didn't. I gave them a brief summary of the child sex abuse scandal that broke less than three months after I had fully stopped believing, which certainly would have made me fully stop believing if I hadn't already, and in any case removed any lingering desire to be affiliated with that organization. Out of tact, I only told these innocent young women that Paul Douglas Adams "abused" his daughters, not that he frequently filmed himself raping them and uploaded the videos to the internet, which is how he was exposed by police in New Zealand seven years after his bishop in Arizona didn't report him. I can imagine the progression of thoughts that I would have had if I were them listening to the story:

Oh, you removed your records because one LDS guy abused his kids? That's dumb.

Oh, the church's lawyers told the abuser's bishop not to report the abuse because it was against the law in Arizona, which wasn't true? Um. I mean... I guess they're just lawyers... The Book of Mormon says that lawyers suck...

Oh, the church as an institution - which, to recap, claims to be led by Jesus Christ himself - fought against the abuser's victims in court instead of using a fraction of a percent of its massive wealth to compensate them for what happened under its watch, which would have been a more Christlike thing to do even if it had no legal liability?

...Shit.

In any case, I'm certain a switch turned in their brains as they realized they had no chance in hell of reconverting me. They expressed condolences, said I was welcome to come to church stuff anyway, and didn't pursue the conversation. I never wanted to cause them cognitive dissonance, but now I hope they're experiencing cognitive dissonance, because if they can just not worry about what I told them, they're not good people. I kind of wanted to be like, "Yeah, so I dare you to tell me I was deceived by Satan." Why do missionaries even ask those questions? They aren't trained to deal with the answers. I'm positive nobody has ever said, "I left because I stopped reading the Book of Mormon enough, but now that you're here, you can challenge me to read it again!"

After they left, my landlord launched into arguing with me about feminism again, which is a thing he's been periodically doing as a result of me sharing stuff on Facebook like a Salt Lake Tribune article about why women are now leaving the LDS Church at a higher rate than men. Being from India and having converted to the LDS Church, he has a more "traditional" view of gender roles and what constitutes equality, and he also keeps pointing out the ways that men get screwed. Those are valid. They should be fixed. I personally don't prioritize that. I'm aware that I get screwed in various ways because I'm a man, but the thought of what it would be like to be a woman horrifies me. I regularly walk wherever the hell I want at night with headphones on and zero anxiety, so I can live with the fact that I had to register for Selective Service before I could access some of my civil rights. So he launched back into this debate even though he knew I was in the middle of work. I tried to find common ground by expressing my disgust for the batshit insane women who support Lindsay Clancy and insist that her husband did it because female intuition and astrology told them so, but that just set him off about how the justice system is more lenient toward women. Of course I don't support that either. To me, feminism means treating women as equals in every respect.

Across these debates, my landlord - who, I want to note so you don't get an unfair and one-sided picture, mostly leans left, hates Trump, and has no problem with women having careers or being presidents of things - has sometimes brought up the same points and asked the same questions as if he thinks it's for the first time, even though he can remember something I said around 2014. The gender wage gap was one of those. I have also heard that the gender wage gap is a myth when you break down the math, and it's not something I've ever devoted energy to complaining about. I'm more concerned about women being treated differently from their male colleagues despite having equal rights on paper, e.g., being seen as "bossy" or "bitchy" if they don't preface their contribution with an apology. But the second time he mentioned the gender wage gap, he first mentioned that his friend had mentioned it, and then he'd explained to her why she was wrong. I knew this friend, but nothing about her. Now the implication that she was a feminist despite being a Mormon made me want to know more.

I thought she was my roommate's girlfriend after they came home late together on my first night here and she, startled to see me in the backyard looking at stars and assuming I was her friend, the landlord, yelled, "Don't do that!" My roommate and her are clearly close, but now I don't think they're dating because they don't do touchy stuff and he spends almost every evening at home playing computer games with his brother. Anyway, she came over on Friday morning for him to help her assemble a shelf for her fish tank, and they did that on the patio, where I was already working, and they barely talked to each other except to discuss the instructions, so I had my chance to broach the topic. She was not particularly pleased that my landlord had mentioned her in that way. Oops. But this got us talking. Yes, I virtue signaled. Normally I hate virtue signaling so much that I get embarrassed when women compliment my Ruth Bader Ginsburg shirt. In this case, though, I simply wanted to communicate that we seemed to be on similar wavelengths and could maybe get along well.

My roommate also chimed in a little, and when he said, "I don't want to sound sexist, but -" he had his back to me, and his probably-not-girlfriend looked at me with a big grin, and I cherished that moment of bonding. I didn't think what he said after the "but" was that bad, though. It makes perfect sense to suggest that a majority of women tend to be certain ways and a majority of men tend to be certain other ways, as long as we acknowledge individual variation and cultural conditioning and don't tell either group that they're not allowed to do certain things regardless of their actual qualifications. His probably-not-girlfriend pushed back a little, and he said it could even be 70-30 or 60-40, which sounds fair to me. If he hadn't been there, I would have gone ahead and asked her how she feels about being denied privileges and positions in her church due to what it claims are all women's innate eternal traits, but hopefully I'll get to that another time.

My virtue signaling worked. I was all but invisible to her before. Now she became very friendly toward me, and we also talked about her career and interests, and after she left and came back for the lunch that my roommate does with church people every Friday and has never specifically invited me to, though he has mentioned that I'm welcome to join whatever is going on, she invited me to it. Naturally, most of the conversations were related to the church in some way. I was fascinated when the guy next to me said that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lobbied the state government to let them ban firearms in meetinghouses and that it was stupid. So on the one hand, he felt a need to use the full name of the church in accordance with the recently deceased prophet's personal pet peeve, which most Mormons in this age group don't even bother with, but on the other hand, he didn't hesitate to tell a bunch of other Mormons that something the church did was stupid. I think this is an illustration of how the LDS Church is screwed because people across the political spectrum don't take it as seriously as it demands to be taken.

My roommate's probably-not-girlfriend, who is thirty, accidentally referred to the new Young Single Adult ward bishop and his wife as "the only adults there," then said that she hated how the YSAs get treated like children. If I wanted to deconvert her, I would have taken notice of that and filed it away under possible avenues of approach alongside the feminist stuff. But of course I wouldn't attempt that because it would only validate Mormons' belief that I was deceived by Satan and am now being used by Satan to deceive others. Satan isn't real, by the way.

Sometimes MAGAts claim that normal people will oppose everything their cult leader does just because he's the one doing it. An example I've seen more than once is "if he cured cancer," and that's a spectacularly obtuse example because he literally cut funding for cancer research, you morons. The phrasing I saw most recently was "if he developed a vaccine for cancer," so that was extra stupid coming from one of the people who don't believe in vaccines. Anyway, to prove that this line of thinking isn't true, let me say that Trump did good things by rescheduling marijuana and expediting research into the healing effects of psychedelics. These are probably the second and third best things he'll ever do. The first, of course, is to stop breathing. Maybe if he used marijuana and/or psychedelics himself, he would learn not to be a piece of shit.

The Democratic contenders for the new congressional district in Utah were rocked by scandal last week. First, someone found out that Nate Blouin wrote anti-Mormon comments and joked about sexual assault on the internet over a decade ago when he was in his early twenties. I didn't much care about the anti-Mormon stuff. The other stuff was icky. Frankly, though, I think we need to make allowances, within reason, for people to grow out of being pieces of shit. I'm a completely different person than I was in my early twenties, and I believe the same is true of Nate. He's the only candidate I've ever seen attending or speaking at protests. If he had actually assaulted someone, that would be a dealbreaker for me, but if the left insists on crucifying people for past mistakes after they've become better, they won't have much incentive to become better, will they? One of the other candidates, city council member Eva Lopez Chavez, condemned his remarks, which irritated four women enough to come forward and accuse her of restraining them while she made unwanted sexual advances. Good Lord.

I went to the Democrat convention again yesterday to help choose a candidate because I thought it was my civic duty, not because I felt like spending my Saturday at something that's like Comic-Con minus all the fun parts. I now feel like the whole process was a waste of time. I spiraled into a bit of depression when I saw that I'd missed multiple Signal messages from the lady I came with, asking if I wanted to just go home and vote online, which would have given me up to four hours to do literally anything else, such as make money from my remote job. I had Signal notifications turned off because I used to get two hundred a day. Anyway, through the ranked-choice voting system, Liban Mohammed emerged victorious. Now he's the Democratic nominee, chosen by people whom I have no reason to assume are representative of voters. I know I'm not. I became the vice-chair of my precinct because I was one of the two people who showed up to caucus. And three of the losing candidates will also be on the primary ballot because they got enough signatures, so I don't see the freaking point of what I did.

I like Liban just fine, but I don't think he'll win the primary because he's young and has no direct political experience. I think Ben McAdams, the Republican Lite career politician who came in a close second, will win that. Some people at the convention booed him and yelled "FREE PALESTINE!" - two of them were sitting by me, which was a stressful experience - but ordinary Utah voters don't likely care that much about Palestine, or the minimum wage increase or public land protections or union protections that he voted against. I'd love to be wrong. The people near me also yelled "RESIGN!" and "WE BELIEVE WOMEN!" multiple times when Eva was on stage. It's nice that they don't have a double standard for lesbians of color. Unlike Nate, she didn't address her recent controversy; she just brought her family onstage and asked us to vote for her grandmother's future. We had been asked to treat all candidates with respect even if they weren't our favorite, but only one person in the front was removed for yelling at Ben, so that made the event organizers look pretty impotent.

Is this overly negative? Perhaps. I'm just tired of all this political crap, and I want to take a break, but it won't pause. Ever. Despite my exhaustion after this apparently pointless convention, I went to a protest at the governor's mansion against the proposed ICE concentration camp in our city. At least that had music, and I let off some steam by writing him a postcard. I didn't mean to add the part at the bottom, but someone mentioned Prop 4 while I was writing, I got pissed off, and my fingers moved faster than my brain.

If you're in Utah, please sign this letter, "A Statement of Utah Values," to register your opposition to the concentration camp. If you're not opposed to the concentration camp, please go play in traffic.

I, my roommate, and our landlord all spent Christmas at home alone, but at least I did fun things while my landlord decided it was a good day to paint the empty rooms and wash his car. I watched a 1933 short film called The Mascot, which is a live-action fever dream version of Toy Story. It follows a toy puppy on an adventure to get an orange for a little blind girl. It's not a cute children's film, though, because one of the toys gets his head run over by a car and the others spend an inordinate amount of time in hell with Satan and various monsters for no adequately explained reason. Artists, am I right? I loved it, though. The stop-motion effects look phenomenal, and in shots where the toys interact with the real world, they're integrated flawlessly. It's sure to become a Christmas classic in my household.

I'm thinking about this part of the Christmas story:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.
But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. (Matthew 1:18-20)

When I heard this part of the story at church as a kid, this is how I understood it: "Joseph didn't want to marry Mary, but an angel told him he had to."

I reminisce about this amusing anecdote because now my former church is teaching children, "Joseph [Smith] didn't want to marry thirty women and teenage girls, but an angel told him he had to." (paraphrased) That narrative sounds absolutely deranged to everyone else in the world, but it's what they're going with. Joseph, the new illustrated scripture story on the church's website would have us believe, was like, "Oh no, God, please don't make me cheat on my legal wife with all these other women and teenage girls. Anything but that, please. This is the hardest thing ever. It's so hard. It's really hard. I really, really, really don't want to do it, but I will be obedient because sometimes God tells us to do hard things. Did I mention that it's hard?" Yes, the captions use the word "hard" so many times that it seems intentional. And the images depict beds more often than necessary. What they don't depict is multiple wives. Somehow the images remain almost entirely focused on men and how hard they were finding polygamy.

You might think I'd be glad that the church is teaching children about Joseph's polygamy. It never taught me about Joseph's polygamy. I knew about Brigham Young's polygamy through cultural osmosis, but all I ever heard regarding Joseph was Emma this, Emma that. I learned the truth from a secular magazine article when I was seventeen. I thought it was a mistake, but my parents said it was true, so they'd also known about this and never told me, which kind of pissed me off. (My mom hates polygamy so much that she's said she won't discuss or think about it at all, but why she doesn't see that discomfort as a colossal red flag about the religion she belongs to and the god she worships is beyond me.) The church is now being a little more honest because the internet has given it no alternative, but "a little" are the key words here. Its story for children leaves out literally all the actual details of how Joseph practiced polygamy because it's almost impossible to learn about those without recognizing him as a sexual predator. For example, it mentions that sometimes "Emma did not want Joseph to marry other women" and leaves it at that. It doesn't mention that he did it behind her back anyway and told her in a "revelation" that Jesus would destroy her if she didn't quit complaining. So no, I'm not glad that the church is still lying to children.

Rebecca Biblioteca from Mormonish podcast threw together some AI pictures to fill in the gaps in the church's illustrated scripture story. (She loves making AI art. I know that makes her evil in some people's eyes. Artists, am I right?) A lot of people have now gotten hers mixed up with the real ones. They're all based on documented historical facts that the church won't tell children. Well, most of them. The first one is bullshit, but it is a documented manipulation tactic that Joseph used on a least a couple of women.

The other problem with this dishonest indoctrination is that the church is making it much easier for child predators, of which it has no shortage, to copy Joseph's manipulation tactics. "Sometimes God tells us to do hard things," a priesthood leader might tell a child. "Sometimes God tells us to do things that make us feel yucky. Sometimes God tells us to keep secrets." I don't think this is intentional, of course. I think the leaders of the church and the people who design its curricula are just very out of touch with how the real world works and how normal people think. Of course, the part where the church's lawyers protect the church's child predators and fight against their victims in court is always intentional.

Mormon polygamy is weird, but it isn't bad because it's weird, it's bad because it's manipulative, predatory, abusive, and degrading to women and girls. It's indefensible as a divine practice, and the sooner the church gets a clue about that, the better. I don't see that happening for several years, but I think it's inevitable. Just like the church had no choice but to start talking about it in the first place, I think it will have no choice but to come around to the position of Patrick Mason, one of its own leading faithful scholars and apologists, who said that Joseph Smith's polygamy looks like sin and that defending it is like putting lipstick on a pig.

I inadvertently shared political misinformation in last week's post. Trump's nickname for Harris isn't "Laughing Kamala," it's "Laffin' Kamala." We know this because he spelled it out to his supporters at a rally, and they laughed and cheered him for it because they have the mental capacity of slugs. I apologize for misrepresenting the pathological liar.

Speaking of morons... oh, my God. Holy crap.

I can't even with this bullshit about the Olympics. I can't tell you how tired I am of weird right-wing maggots spreading flat-out lies about Imane Khelif long after they lost any excuse for not knowing better. I mean, on the one hand, watching conservatives who have spent the last several years being the genital police suddenly swear up and down without a trace of irony or self-awareness that a person born with a vagina is really a man is kind of funny. But then I remember that a. most of these chucklefucks are allowed to vote and b. these chucklefucks are actively making the world a living hell not just for transgender people but for any cisgender woman who might look a little masculine. So yeah, sorry not sorry, but I don't think the world would lose anything of value if they all held their breath for about ten minutes. I'll admit that's a moral failing on my part. Sue me.

Imane Khelif is not a man. She never was a man. Muslim countries like Algeria hate LGBTQ people as much as Republicans do, and the chance that one of them would put a transgender athlete on any of their sports teams is zero. Imane Khelif apparently has some biological advantages, just like all Olympic athletes have biological advantages over the average person and many of them have biological advantages over each other because news flash, life isn't fair and everyone's bodies are not the same. A boxing association that's run by Russians and not affiliated with the Olympics disqualified her partway through a match based on the unspecified results of some sketchy secret test, conveniently allowing the Russian athlete to win. Many lying right-wing bigots (sorry for the redundancy) claim that the IBA statement says she's a man. It doesn't. It says she was "found to have competitive advantages over OTHER FEMALE COMPETITORS." (Emphasis added for the mentally challenged.) Regardless, the constant bitching about "uNfAiR aDvAnTaGe" from people who have never cared about women's boxing, never complained about any other athlete's advantages, and never heard of the IBA until this week is the reason I have no faith in humanity. And isn't it funny, by which I mean disgusting, how conservatives suddenly care about unfair advantages after all the time they've spent denying or justifying the unfair advantages that people have in society because of their race, their sex, and/or their parents' wealth? Where's their outrage over asshole billionaires like Elon Musk doing whatever the hell they want? Imane Khelif has also lost more matches against other women than she's won, including in the last Olympics four years ago when none of these crayon-eating arse ends knew she existed, so you know, fuck off already.

What we're seeing here is conservatives' brains breaking in real time as they're forced to stop pretending that intersex people don't exist. There's actually no proof that Imane Khelif is intersex, and for her sake I hate that the internet has exploded into a debate over what she has in her cells and between her legs, but someone at some point said that she has XY chromosomes and that became an accepted fact. So suddenly genitals don't matter and chromosomes are the sole determining factor of biological sex. There has to be a sole determining factor because bigots are incapable of nuance or science. Their worldview has no room for the complexity of sex and gender that exists in the real world. Intersex people have been known to exist for thousands of years longer than Christians have existed, but they're still scary and dangerous to the conservative ones. And now they've forced themselves into a position where people with vaginas should use men's bathrooms if they have XY chromosomes. Good Lord. Too bad chromosomes are harder for bigots to police. It's a statistical certainty that a non-zero number of women who insist that Imane Khelif is a man have XY chromosomes themselves and don't know it.

Anyway, this whole controversy erupted because Imane Khelif's opponent, who appears to have the same body type as her, had a public meltdown about getting punched too hard in a sport that consists entirely of people punching each other. It wasn't her first public meltdown either. And she also happens to be a police officer, so she probably just wasn't used to attacking a brown person who was allowed to fight back. She has since said, "I want to apologize to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke. I don't have anything against Khelif. If I were to meet her again, I would embrace her." This would be a good signal for the troglodytes spreading lies and hate on her behalf to shut the fuck up, but of course instead they said she had nothing to apologize for and doubled down on spreading lies and hate. And that's a perfect illustration of why Donald Trump became president of the United States and why he has a non-zero chance of becoming president of the United States again. God, it makes me ill. Speaking of rapists, a child rapist named Steven van de Velde who only served one year in prison also competed in the Olympics, but conservatives sure were quiet about that. I wonder why.

The good news is that calling these brainless fascist pricks "weird" has turned out to be a surprisingly effective and brilliant strategy. In four minutes, this video explains why.

I'm not gay, even though I was called "faggot" five times a day in elementary school, but in honor of Pride Month, I decided to share the time I was attracted to Rudolf Nureyev when I saw him on the Muppet Show as a kid. It wasn't like the crushes I had on girls whom I thought were pretty. He just had some kind of charisma that I couldn't define. He just fascinated me in a different way than the other guest stars. When I looked him up and found out he was gay, I concluded that gayness must be contagious. I think a lot of straight men have historically thought that being gay was contagious. I think that's why they've used slurs and committed hate crimes against gay men instead of being grateful to have less competition. Today in 2024, morons still think that their children will become gay if they're allowed to see gay people existing, so we still have a long way to go in conveying to Republicans a basic understanding of how the world works. So anyway, that frightened me a little. The fact that he died of AIDS also reinforced my perception that gay people were sexual degenerates. He had fewer partners than Donald Trump, though. And a lot fewer than Joseph Smith.

I've been watching The Muppet Show from start to finish this year to make the most of the overpriced Disney+ subscription that I share with a friend. When I got to the Rudolf Nureyev episode, I realized that people may be skeptical of me saying that my attraction to him wasn't physical. In one scene, he wears tight white pants that leave little of his ass cheeks to the imagination.

Watching the show as an adult has made me realize that Miss Piggy is a straight-up sexual predator. Even in the 1970s, people wouldn't have laughed at the dynamic between her and Kermit if the gender roles were reversed. She's worse than Pepé Le Pew. At least he was sincerely oblivious and never karate-chopped Penelope into a wall for refusing his advances.

But on a more positive note, I was also astonished to learn that the Great Gonzo has been canonically bisexual since 1979. I can't believe I've never heard anyone mention that before. In the Leslie Uggams episode, Gonzo is smitten with Big Bird. I thought the punchline would be him realizing that Big Bird is a boy, but the actual punchline is Camilla getting jealous and dropping a flowerpot on his head. It's never implied that the same-sex aspect of this attraction is weird or degenerate. (Technically Big Bird has the mind of a young child, but Gonzo didn't know that, so give him a break.) In the Roger Miller episode, he finds Kermit attractive after the latter turns into a chicken. Since the film "Muppets in Space" established that Gonzo is an alien, my hypothesis is that all the aliens in the finale were male, and the females of his species look like chickens.

Nureyev feared for his safety and defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 in part because of his sexuality. If he were alive today, he would still have to avoid Russia, because it's still an extremely homophobic country. It's a country that arrests journalists for interviewing gay people. No wonder Republicans think Ukraine is the bad guy.