While its an outsiders prospective I am suer the mormans havent changed that much on respect to women...I travle to Orem for work on occasion, last tiem I was out there I was talkign to a young woman (22) who was lamenting that she was an old maid woh would never marry, as all her friends had been married for four years or more with kids...
Sweet Jeebus, this stuff has been going on for a long time. Boccaccio (the father of the dirty joke)wrote about it back in the 14th century, and Mr. Chaucer also had a few things to say on the subject. Seems any authoritarian organization, be it a massively structured ediface like the Catholic Church, or a lowly individual Baptist franchise, nurtures this sort of abuse. I kind of think that in the 50,000+ years modern humans walked the earth, that even the ancient animistic shamans got more than their fair share of the nubile young flesh of any gender. Having risen to a position of perceived power in my own organization (not religious), I can't emphasize enough how easy it was (however, I was not dealing with children).
Wow, Jesse, I can always tell when GNB has linked to my site -- traffic goes wild. Thx.
And, even more, thanks for writing this. All of your story -- especially the recovery. I feel starved for recovery stories.
There's been an interesting thread at Dykes to Watch Out For in response to a comic touching on how adults deal with young folks' needs, at Just Say Yes. I just hopped on there and directed folks to come read your post and watch that amazing video. Hope it adds some clarity to what is often a bunch of young people there who think our generation have been utterly discredited when it comes to thinking about sex. They keep making us re-invent the wheel each generation, and while I can see progress, it's not the bottle rockets I'd have hoped for.
Anyhow, it's close to my bedtime, I'm bleary. Thanks for doing what you do, Jesse, every single livelong day. And for making it.
Ronzoni the problem is with all buracoraciys. any where that there are positions of power there will be peopel willing to abuse thatpower.
The trick here is to acept the enevability and gaurd agenist it...first step is to nver blindly fallwo authority.
forgive my ignorance, but what's SDO?
i grew up in rural arizona. then, as now, it was very mormon territory. i was also on the apache rez, and mormons have some very strange beliefs regarding native americans (when they aren't organizing civilian militias to exterminate them).
i have always been quite conflicted on the mormon church as an entity. they have this whole janus mask duality thing going. without the mormon charity we would have starved to death. plain and simple. nobody else was bothering to try and help. the mormons heard that there were hungry families and they drove out with food. they also helped significantly with the education on the rez. that came at a price. along with a basic 3r's there was a hefty (like 60% of class time) dose of mormon dogma thrown in. but, if it wasn't for the mormons i would have had a harder time learning to read.
i went to an off rez high school because of a mormon program. again, there was a spiritual price to pay. i had to endure the religious stuff in order to get a high school diploma.
and yes, mormons are bizarre when it comes to sex. yes, if they ever are exposed they will be exposed as being as corrupt sexually, as abusive, as vile as every single other theocracy.
i take my mormons as individuals. many good mormons that i know are very good people. even some of the bad mormons do good things almost in spite of themselves.
i too doubt that the practices you are talking about here, which, i concur, have happened, are happening and will continue to happen. will ever be exposed. the mormons still operate on a system that was forged in a crucible of relentless and ruthless violence against them. they fled to utah to escape fully armed death squads. they keep very much to themselves and will not speak with "gentiles" about many church practices.
and yet, no matter how monolithicly scary i can find them, i can never forget that when my people were starving they were fed by mormons, when i needed an opportunity for education it was provided by mormons.
i guess they aren't the only ones walking around with cognitive dissonance.
diji jooni (walk in beauty)
ya'll.
In religions tolerance does not sell. Steadfast authoritarianism and an acceptance of one unifying truth does. In the most "religious" parts of this country the devil is real and he is a force to be reckoned with. He makes people go into sin and only a rejection of the Devil-this independent and outside force- can cleanse the soul of the person who has been wicked and gain his acceptance back into the fellowship of the believers.
Religious people in these communities never take personal responsibility for anything cause to them it was the dark forces that caused them to do it. We would be much better off for these authoritarian structures to crumble and crash down. The sexual deviancy is one aspect that while evident in the larger community, is given safe haven in the Church bureaucracy where laws of society are seemingly superceded by Church law. If anyone needs evidence of this see the Catholic priest scandal.
Is Jesse Wendell a psuedonym? Neil is. You're about one year older than me. We both grew up in Amherst, MA.
Scarsdale has a pretty sizable Mormom population but all the kids go off to college and even some of them decide BYU isn't exactly for them, rarely but some. One girl who graduated a year ahead of me is STILL not married and she lives in Manhattan (I think she went to Columbia). And the girls do wind up doing mission work too. Years ago I worked with a Mormon girl from Dallas and she used to go on about the my hometown and when I asked her about where she went for mission she said oh my parents wouldn't let me do that. oh and she was a virgin b/c she had to have a temple wedding. etc. etc.
After linking to yet another story of Catholic horror (which I have never done), I jumped over to GNB to see what's up and run into this. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Of course, I will not get a ride on that golden choo-choo train beyond the clouds to sit next to the bearded white guy...
Great post, Jesse. I was raised in Idaho Falls (70% LDS) and had an apostate Mormon for a mother (she raised us Methodist), so I got to observe a lot of this from the outside but also from within my larger LDS family.
All I can say is: I did not get laid in high school for a triumvirate of reasons: 1) I wasn't very attractive nor particularly popular, 2) the atmosphere of sexual repression extended throughout the I.F. culture, and 3) I had a dread fear of shotgun weddings. I would guess half the Mormon girls in my neighborhood got knocked up before they graduated. That's how ya get your Mrs. Degree.
I pretty much decided: Not for me, nuh-uh. I was pretty intent on escape.
don't drink, don't smoke
what do ya do?
adam ant
Is Jesse Wendell a psuedonym?
Neil -
No. Jesse Wendel is my real name.
We lived in Amherst, MA while I went from 5-8.
I remember my first grade teacher -- even have a photo somewhere with the spelling of her unusual name; we were right across from the Library, 1st graders only. For second grade, I went to the Kellogg West building which has long since been turned into retail stores. I had Mrs. Sanders for my second grade teacher in what I think was her last year before she retired.
Then we moved to Tucson where I went to school from third grade on (except for the year in Austria.)
Thanks Jesse. Your first grade building - across from Jones Library - is now a parking lot. If I'm correct, that was the old Amherst Academy brick building. The colonial home next store to it was put on a trailer and moved to Hadley. The Amherst Cinema, on the other side of the school, has been reopened with funding from the college - they show independent films. I went to catholic grade school in Northampton because St Brigids did not have its own school. My mom still lives in the area, so I do get back frequently. I too spent a year abroad, 1968 in Germany. Wie gehts?
me you are not talkign about hardcor utha mormons...Orem has a median age of 22....and most of them are married. These are teh ritual underware crowd.
minstrel: what you stated is true of all people..this is why you don't steriotype all individuals...but there is a use at lookign at group trends, you can talk about the actions of the group without demonizing andy given individual.
wengler: what you speak about is not limited otp religious groups...all authritarian structurs will draw croupt leaders who will abuse their power...there are two many people who fell that a position of authority absoves them from haveing to falllow the rules. There are also too many people that will blindly fallow authority...this is not constrained to religious buacracys.
I had a long chat last night with a longtime religious futurist who had once been an SBC minister. One of the themes of the conversation, which we kept coming back around to, is that fundamentalist religions don't necessarily need a God; but they absolutely can't do without a Devil. And, inevitably, sex becomes that devil, for reasons that probably deserve a post of their own.
Dave's comment about Mormon girls and shotgun weddings brought back memories. My hometown, like Idaho Falls, was on the edge of the Mormon empire, in the narrow sliver of California where Nevada runs up against the Sierra. And I knew any number of gentile boys who ended up Mormon because some sweet dewy 15-year-old Mormon girl got her hooks into him. By 17, she got pregnant -- and they got married. The poor guy never had a choice, or a chance. His whole life just got swallowed up by that one stupid mistake.
Mormon girls do go on missions; but in past generations, girls who did so were jeopardizing their marriage prospects. No nice Mormon boy would marry them, because they'd already shown an unbecoming independence that bespoke the unwillingness to be kept in their place. By the time these girls got back, most of them were more intent on getting a degree than on getting married; and by the time that was done, they were pushing 24 -- the age at which Mormon girls are considered officially Over The Hill, and the good Mormon boys are all taken anyway.
My sixth grade teacher -- one of the handful who really made a difference in my life -- was one strapping blonde Brunhilde out of BYU who went on a mission, came home, and never married. (I suspect now that that was probably a matter of sexual preference.) Miss Ashworth played a mean guitar, spent her summers traveling the world on tramp steamers, and could fly twin-engine planes. I'm sure she was the Mormon Church's worst nightmare of what becomes of young women who go on missions; but I thought she was fabulous, and it was clearly mutual.
These days, that postion may have softened. I hear tell more girls are going on missions now; and today's smarter, more ambitious boys consider this experience to be something of a bonus in a wife.
Wait a minute, do I have this right? You screwed the girls, and then turned around and ratted them out to the bishop?
Wow. Nature's own gentleman.
An open Mormon church, easy with its sexuality, welcoming of people truly in Christ's name, committed to social justice and the ecology, with its already existing formidable missionary skills. THEY could sweep the Western world in a wave of conversions picking up the lost souls from churches too timid to change.
Sorry pal, the infinite credulity required to believe, hell, even begin to consider is the province of, thank Goddess, a limited segment of the population.
Oh, I know the Mormons will do their best to seek out those with the requisite lack of cognition, it's what they're best at.
An open Mormon church, easy with its sexuality,
Oh Jeez I'm sorry! I didn't realise this was one of those heavily ironic posts.
Hey Mooser -
Seriously, go fuck yourself.
You're totally wrong twice, in two, strike that, three successive idiotic posts, and you continue to strain my patience as host of this blog.
You either have no compassion (something fairly evident in your bullshit joke, "The Nazis have invaded my Haloscan!") when the rest of us were being moved by our relationship to genuine transformation, redemption and recovery. Or you have zero, absolutely NO fucking clue what it takes to transform yourself. Either way, be clear we ain't pals.
What is clear is that you don't grasp the true nature of high-SDO relationships and how they work. How one does something "sinful", confesses it, and thus gives the sin away to the higher authority and in doing so, they get control of you again, which as you start to come to think for yourself, only thrusts you deeper and deeper into hating yourself, and for those who never think for themselves, only thrusts them deeper and deeper into the control of the Church. Either way, in almost all cases, the Church wins. The amount of sheer balls it takes to tell the Church to go fuck itself... and walk away... as Maggie did... as Sara did... as I did. As Buddha did. As Christ did. As every fucking authentically religious person of every age has has to do to the Church of their day, in order to find God.
And you, you sorry fuck, stand there and mock and scorn? You have no clue what is involved. No idea of the years of torment and pain and struggle. And even with all that, even after leaving the church of one's birth, then comes years of wondering if you've done the right thing, years of acting out in wild swings the opposite of what you were not to do, years of therapy and rebuilding.
You know nothing. We who have been there and done that, owe you not word one in explanation. You are a waste of space and time.
Further, in your arrogance you demonstrate the worst aspects of the worst parts of the Democratic Party when you say, the infinite credulity required to believe, hell, even begin to consider is the province of, thank Goddess, a limited segment of the population. Oh, I know the Mormons will do their best to seek out those with the requisite lack of cognition...
Wow. The sheer breathtaking certainty of that you know and everyone else is wrong, matches line for line, stanza for stanza, the pure unadulterated fundamentalism of the best Southern Baptists out there. You are SO sure you know the truth, and the rest of us are all SO fucking stupid. And anyone who believes in anything you don't believe, why then, they must lack cognitive skills you and those like you possess.
Let us all bow down and give our lives over to the Great and Powerful Mooser.
Were you not a fucking joke, you would be just as dangerous as the pastors of the Southern Baptists. At least they have the dignity of believing in something. You don't believe in anything except mocking people and telling them how much smarter you are than they are.
Just shut the hell up. I honestly can't remember one single comment anywhere, anytime, which you've contributed anything to, other than lame jokes, and now you're over the fucking line and are one short step away from an invitation to the world.
I've never cared for ignorant opinions, and yours have always been especially ignorant. Shut the fuck up till you learn to think before you speak, and especially till you know something of what you're speaking of.
Prehaps you could enlighten me on a minor theological, or rather doctrinal point. Has the Church of Latter Day Saints ever formally repudiated its right to command (or request) its members are to kill at the Churche's behest?
Ot would be a relief to hear about it.
I'm all in favor of redemption, all the time, and everywhere.
Jesse,
Thank you for taking care of that unpleasantness.
The ignorant are also unaware that the LDS are the fastest growing Christian denomination in the world.
Spending a little time studying religious sociology to understand why that is so is worth some serious skull sweat.
And you are certainly correct, Jesse. I am very implacable when it comes to giving up moral agency. One doesn't, at any cost.
My experience has been that people may struggle to hold on to a lot of things, but theu give up moral agency when they want to, because they see an advantage in it.
Not when we are children, Mooser. Not when the roof over our heads, the food in our bellies, and the approval of our all-controlling parents depends on doing exactly as we're told.
It takes several years, and considerable space and time, before we even get to where we can step back and take an objective look at all that, and begin to make other choices. At 22, Jesse was just coming up to the place where that had half a chance of happening. Having walked in those shoes, I'm not inclined to blame him. My own sexuality was a pluperfect mess when I was 22, too (frankly, it's a better thing we didn't know each other then), and I was only that year beginning to get the glimmer of a clue about straightening out.
Moral agency belongs to those who can define their own boundaries, exercise their own power, and make their own choices -- independent of anyone else's agenda, or childhood programming. Jesse's right: it must have come easily to you. How lucky you are. But that wasn't an option for us. People raised as we were had to summon the courage to question everything we'd been taught, risk alienating everyone who'd ever cared for us, and set out in search of something we didn't even know existed -- our own authentic selves.
It's an insult to people who've been through that process to suggest that our hard-won moral agency is likely to be thrown away for mere advantage. That may be true for people who came by theirs cheaply, and thus aren't inclined to put much value on it.
But those of us who risked everything we had and everything we were to acquire such a pearl in the first place aren't inclined to let it get away from us that easily. The fact that you don't get this says a lot more about you than it does about us.
My own sexuality was a pluperfect mess when I was 22
brilliant stuff ma'am. bloody brilliant.
Jesse, if you haven't read Martha Beck's terribly beautiful account of her growth away from her LDS life, Leaving the Saints, you must.
I can't bear to read it again, so if you'd like I can mail you my copy.
Screwing the girls is one thing, but Mooser is right that ratting them out afterwards was an incredibly horrible thing to do. That doesn't mean that you are a horrible person now, but you dont seem to feel very guilty about it.
There is also a problem with responsibility here. Nobody in America is responsible for anything anymore. Bush and Cheney get blamed for everything, as if roughly half our population didnt enable and support them. The high-ups in the Catholic church catch all the shit for covering up the Priest sex abuse, but all the people who support the church are completely innocent, even though the church has been abusing its power for it's entire history.
I know this will piss you off, and Im sorry about that, but I just can't understand how you can go through all this, learn all this, and still support the LDS in any way.
And of course there is the concept of a God who knows all this, enables all this, creates all this, but somehow is not responsible for it, and still requires everyone to join the LDS or the Catholic Church or one of the other religions, otherwise they will be punished in some way before or after death.
Im sorry you had to grow up in that environment. Mine wasn't quite as bad, but I still took a lot of shit for rejecting this stuff at an early age.
Melanie -
Precisely.
The LDS are growing as Islam did.
If they simply got rid of their prohibitions against sex and instead, embraced it and embraced the social issues Christ was genuinely concerned about, they could sweep the fucking globe.
With their focus on family, on taking care of each other, with their top-down hierarchical order which still allows current revelation from a Living God through his Divine Prophet. Shit... that's truly a recipe for taking over the world with love and joy and family happiness.
ALL that is stopping them is they are blinded at the top by their historical prohibitions on sex. But Jesus never actually preached against these things. All it takes -- this is a Church (not a religion) -- which genuinely can turn on a dime. And you really ARE with them or against them. That is their strength and their weakness. They are also, after the Catholics, the second richest church in the world. With only 11 million actual members, and many of those are frauds, people who should be off their books.
Let a genuine leader get in front of them, and they will be unstoppable.
Sara -
Yeah. Dead on all the way. Thank you.
PhoenixRising -
That would be very sweet, thank you.
Please email me. My contact information is at the bottom of every page.
Jesse
WMass --
I think you have me confused with some other Jesse.
I'm not pissed off at you. Mooser has a history, which is why he got the shaft.
What do you think guilt does for you, this guilt you think I should have? Guilt in my book, is often used by people who don't fully understand genuine recovery, genuine forgiveness, to let people off the hook. "I'm guilty ENOUGH, I know I did wrong ENOUGH, I feel bad ENOUGH, therefore don't hurt me, don't punish me, I'm already in pain."
I think it is unmitigated bullshit of the highest order. It lets any asshole come to Jesus, claim they feel GUILT deep down in their soul for their SINS, and their SUFFERING, and thus if they look like they're in pain, they get off. But if someone else doesn't look as if they're in pain, burn the mother-fucker to death with a tire necklace around their neck.
Horseshit.
Guilt has NOTHING to do with forgiveness and NOTHING to do with redemption. In fact, guilt is a big roadblock to forgiveness and redemption (recovery), because to the extent that you're still feeling all guilty, you can not begin to take active steps towards being responsible for your own actions (like cleaning up the mess if you can, without making it worse.) Your guilt absolves you of the responsibility, and especially the responsibility to either stop it, or to fix it. "It ain't my fault... it's the LAWD's. It's my parents. It's 'cause I was molested. 'Cause I was sexualized young. 'Cause I was raped. 'Cause I was beaten by my parents and my sister AND my brother, jesus christ, how can you ever understand how it is/was/will ever be for me, why can't you just leave Brittney alone!"
Yeah, what the fuck ever.
I think it's both true and not true. I think it is true in the sense that, eventually, people in their own time and space get to come (and may even work hard to come) to what ever level of responsibility for their life they can... and that's good. At the same time, it's also totally so that the overwhelming majority of this shit, this vicious lethal destructive shit goes from generation to generation and people are absolutely not responsible for that. You are not responsible for what happened to you at 5 & 6 & 8 & 9 and even 10 & 13 & 15.
My old man used to beat me with his hands and with his feet and with boards, big fucking boards out in the woodshed. I went to school sometimes bruised for weeks after a beating, all the different colors turning beneath my clothes because he knew better than to beat me above my neck, but my back, my arms, my stomach, my legs, were a mass of purple and orange and yellowing so tender and painful color. His dad, my grandpa, I know used to beat him. Although I never met the fuck. A German immigrant. He did. My dad got the living shit beat out of him when he was just a kid. Just like me. Age 8 and out in the fields in Utah, the strap and the boot and the belt and the fists, and absolutely nothing ever good enough for that fucker, and tell me now... How in the hell do you defend against that? How does a 9 or 10 or 12 or 13 year old kid defend against a 35 year old man beating the living fuck out of him in a fully expressed rage?
How does a family of younger sisters not get finger-fucked by an older kid who suddenly has access to three, one two three all tight, lined up and available? "Me, touch me, do me."
When it's beaten in to you, how do you not suddenly just up and beat someone, more than one someone, near to death when they piss you off -- even if they're older than you. Even plan it. No warning -- just BOOM, you put them on the fucking ground. And make sure they never, ever get up. Like Daddy used to do to you. (And people wonder why you ALWAYS, 30 years later, ALWAYS know when someone is behind you.)
One moment you're the bottom; the next you're the top. And then you go to your Bishop because since birth you've been trained to confess EVERYTHING sinful to him (and damn near everything IS sinful; how do you think they keep control) and you tell him everything (like a good boy.) And he questions you about stuff you'd even forgotten. So you tell him that. And he asks even more detail, stuff which is so personal and intimate it's like Letters to Penthouse. But you tell him.
He blesses you and sends you on your way. And you want to know if I feel guilty about ratting out the girls? Shiiiit.
All your question shows is you don't understand the culture. It's simply how it worked. I'm 48. Why in the hell would I feel guilty about stuff which happened a quarter century ago? That would be insane. To still be living inside those upsets, now. Truly, that would be crazy.
Finally, where you got me as defending the LDS church -- you made that up. My two best friends from childhood are LDS. But I don't defend that church. I left the LDS church precisely because I couldn't defend it. As for the concept of God you mention, it is your concept you are speaking of, not mine.
Take care,
why can't you just leave Brittney alone!
[sob]Why can't you just just leave Chris Crocker alone???[/sob]
Mrs R --- the 24 being over the hill --- that is precisely why that nice girl from Dallas was so frantically trying to find a nice young man to marry. She had rescinded an engagement during her senior year in college (the guy and his brother were each given one of a pair of diamond studs of their grandmother or such and such and he literally put the stud into her hand and said something like we're married. Who said the engagement process needed to be classy?) Anyway she toiled on Wall Street as an assistant and worked hard at dating until she found her guy and vowed to put of children, after all she wanted to continue working. WRONG. She got knocked up almost immediately after getting married. That was over 10 years ago. BTW her parents had 8 children...
Wow.... just wow...
I was raised in the Baptist Church, ABC, not SBC, so I missed some of the nuttiness, but not all. Basically, the weirdness over sexuality kept me in the attic with a blanket over my head, absolutely terrified, for many years. Finally, I came out at 27, actually, thanks to a progressive Episcopal church that had one hell of a raucous and freewheeling Bible studies. (St. Paul got a critical poke).
Anyway, after being in denial for many, many years, coming out was absolutely liberating. I did go through a second adolescence, but it quickly passed. In many ways, only after I came out did I grow up.
It's why I think authoritarian religions infantalize their adherents. You never can take responsibility for sexuality because you're too busy being terrified about going to hell.
For those who've not experienced this, (and remember--our parents/guardians exposed us to this crappola out of love), you need to take a deep breath and see life through the eyes of a terrified child trying to do the "right" thing in a very confusing and terrifying situation.
Church hierarchies, especially the most bureaucratic and authoritarian, are dominated by conservatives. They seek to bring more power and prestige to the church and themselves, and they exercise their authority by promoting very overt religiosity and extolling a very firm code of beliefs and practices.
LDS won't sweep the world as anything other than the form it is in now. Jesus(or Joseph Smith) doesn't have the market cornered in espousing good, virtuous things. The current success of the LDS in my estimation is by having large families and a firm commitment to mission work to get converts.
The people of the world instead need to embrace values without labels or clubs, and they should do it because it makes rational sense, rather than due to mystical influence. Since those claiming to be closer to the mystic will always be able to use that power to make their followers kill and be killed.
forgive my ignorance, but what's SDO?
I need to get out more, 'cause I'm with preznit giv me turkee: What's SDO?
Even my favorite acronym decipherer isn't helping.
me: she must have been away from utah...22 seems to eb the age of the old made there..on the pluse side, if you are lookign for attractive young desperate women. utah is the place to go...i would recomend Orem but realy anywhere works.
wengler: So your big hope is that people will act rationaly....good luck with that.
Jesse, for a guy who got that much pussy, you're awful grouchy.
But you are right, we couldn't be friends. We'd probably kill each other over the last oxycodone pill. That wouldn't be good.
Anyway it has been my experience, that when it comes to relationships and sex, a person either does or does not have some internal decency and base-line morals. I don't think religion has too much to do with it.
It may have something to do with being raped at an early age, or repeatedly.
Anyway, I'm glad you are all better, but me I get the feeling that when it comes to recovering from fundamentalism it's just like alcoholism, there's a dry drunk stage, and a long one.
In the meantime, if you need my home address or phone number please feel free to e-mail me.
bartcopfan
SDO: Social dominance orientation
basicly its the mesure of ow willing a group is for group based dominance. its closely tied to authoritism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Soc...nce_orientation is a good explanation. It gose in more detail then I can, social psycology stuff (I was a sociology geek and never paid much attention to the social psycology side)
I think you have to be in a religion at a credulous stage to grasp just how deep the hooks sink, and how painful it is to tear them out.
Most of us get it as children, but anyone, driven by madness and despair into a full body conversion, can fall into the Pit and then struggle to escape.
Of the major religions, I can think of only two which allow a person to reach escape velocity without serious harm; Judaism, with its lack of interest in converting heathens, and Buddhism, which is a guide, not a stick.
The rest seem to be marked by virulent, violent, get-me-the-hell-out revulsion on the part of their enlightened escapees.
That says a lot, I think.
Mooser --
You just don't get it.
I genuinely at am a loss for what to do with you. You may think you are offering help. But you're not. You're attempts at help are insulting. And there you go again, telling me how I am, how I should and shouldn't feel and what my experience was like, what it meant, and how I should be today, when you say what happened to me was rape. I never said that. I said I was sexualized. Don't put fucking words in my mouth.
This is what there is to get. You don't listen. You put your opinion out there as if it is the truth. KNOCK IT OFF. Your opinions are not facts. They are opinions, and mostly ungrounded at that. You fail to understand people very well. This is an extraordinarily well grounded assessment of your behavior on this board.
And I'm not especially interested, frankly, in helping you understand, as everything I've said so far, you continue to misconstrue and use to offend me with. Further, your language is offensive. Nazis in a thread about redemption. Pussy. STOP IT.
You truly need to shut the hell up in these kinds of threads. Your conduct is not acceptable. You are not listening to what I and others have said.
Everyone else: This is not the "what's wrong with Mooser" thread. He needs to figure it out for himself. We don't do therapy here.
RE: SDO
Thanks, moonglum!
Jesse,
Two links to noteworthy sex scandals in the LDS church came to mind when you said you weren't seeing any of it in the news:
Jessicazi at A Seattleite... is *years* into an abuse lawsuit naming the LDS church for shielding a relative.
And 'Scout's Honor' was a lengthy series that won Idaho Falls' Post Register awards for their deep reportage on the local Boy Scout Council and LDS church ignoring/fighting young men who reported being abused.
The former wasn't a young friend or cousin but some father figure (stepdad, I think), and Jessica won a 7-figure lawsuit against the church if memory serves; her lawyers are now marching thru appeal after appeal by the LDS church.
The latter involved Brad Stowell (sheltered by his mom's involvement in the LDS church and the scout council), Jeff Hardin (LDS, attended Ricks College) and Dennis Empey (LDS, attended BYU). Stowell's case shows clear signs of what you describe: he was first caught around 18, received treatment, and resumed his abuses thru his 20's. I don't know history or facts w/r/t the others.
Having said all that, I'd be shocked if this was a strong commonality or a sociological chain reaction. There are just too many other variables: Repression bends the brain all sorts of ways, for starters. Individual nature pops in. And the stereotype is that Bishops' kids are either hedonistic fiends or straightlaced to a fault. That's what I saw: variety defying any simple patterns even within families or neighborhoods.
As for Elders and 'early teens', I'd argue that would have kicked off alarms in my staunchly-mormon hometown (Pocatello, ID: roughly 50% mormon). But I also went inactive instead of going on a mission, so I exited the church just when I'd have been best-positioned to observe anything like this, and have been blissfully spared the ravages of any further enlightenment on this theme of cross-generation sexual interest.
Now, 'scuse me while I go have a double scotch and contemplate my daughters' least-hazardous path thru their next decade.
d2 --
Thanks for these great links.
I'm talking more like returned missionaries (who could be as young as 21) and high school freshman and sophomores, not kids in Jr. High (I guess pretty much everywhere today the trend it to call it Middle School.) About a 6-7 year gap.
That was allowed while I was growing up. Nothing was said. It just... happened. Because "he" was a returned missionary, and thus could be expected to keep control of himself, even if she couldn't. Note, of course, that the woman is considered unfit to control her own sexuality, and the man has to do it for her.
I personally know a number of friends who as high school freshmen at 14, were finger-fucked by returned missionaries at 21 & 22 who'd not even looked at them before leaving on their mission when these same girls were 12, were in Jr. High, were six inches shorter and had no breasts. But what a difference two years makes and all of a sudden they were tall, lankish, with just a trace of baby fat left, and a curiosity about boys (not men, really, but these were returned missionaries, and the girls gained status when they were asked out, so they went.) These girls who were allowed to double-date at 14 with the RM's were pursued like a pack of baying dogs tracking a wounded doe dripping blood across the desert till they bring her to tree and wait for her to be taken by their master. And taken, in one way or another, all of them were. Repeatedly.
I have absolutely no doubt -- none -- this still is the case today. The cultural patterns are too deep.
d2: worse thing that ever happened to the scouts was teh mormon takeover. I bearly recognize them any more and am not sure that I will let my sons join. I am a second generation egal scout, second generation vigil member of OA, Youngest vigial member ever in my lodge, Former national comity chair for verious commites. THe mormons have distroyed the scotuting that I loved .
Word, Moonglum. My dad was an Eagle Scout, and I always dreamed someday I'd have a son who followed in his footsteps.
But by the time we got there, all the local troops were either Mormon or fundie. And the national BSA was going through all of its bullshit inquisition on gay scouts (while shielding pedophile scoutmasters), which in the late 90s culminated in huge tiffs with both the Unitarians and Pagans. As someone who identifies as both, I could not subject my son to that and remain true to my own religious principles.
I still feel badly about that. By the time we moved to Canada, where the Scouts are still the inclusive group we'd like to remember them as, my son was too old to take an interest.
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