About me: I'm a former Mormon who bemoans the fact that he wasted two years of his life peddling a shoddy fiction to people on another continent. I spent two years wearing the suit, tie, and nametag trying to sell some Disney version of the Mormon faith. So I am all too familiar with how the Mormon Church, like most corporations, is obsessed with its public image; it has even employed a Madison Avenue PR firm. And the Mormons have largely succeeded. It is a testament to their success, built on ad campaigns and a strategy of "laying low", that such a wacky, extreme religion has had a generally positive, or at least a bland/mild/harmless public image.
But perhaps no longer. Perhaps the public is now beginning to see the ugly underbelly of LDS, Inc. First there was the Church's over-the-top passion for Prop 8 that is hard to view as anything but mean-spirited and at least partly motivated by homophobia. And now there's the story that's the subject of this diary (I'll get to it soon, I promise). Now don't get me wrong, the Mormon Church is full of great people. But they are great in spite of the Church, not because of it. Yes, the Mormon religion is wacky and extreme, and the proof is below the fold.
Wacky and extreme primer:
First, the superiority complex. Mormons believe that everyone must be baptized a Mormon to get into the best part of heaven. To this end, the Mormons not only send out missionaries throughout the world to try to convert everyone, they even baptize dead people as Mormons so that they can give them the chance to accept the Mormon religion in the Spirit world. See the current controversy about the Mormons' continuing to baptize Holocaust victims, despite objections from their Jewish descendants.
From whence the superiority? One big reason for it is that Mormons believe that they have a latter-day prophet who speaks to God, thus giving them special insight into God's will that other religions lack. Let's take a look at one of these prophets - Brigham Young - as a way to provide some context for some of the more wacky, extreme Mormon doctrines.
Brigham Young and marriage: "The only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy." (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 11, page 269).
That's right, this is from the same Church which bankrolled the misleading campaign in support of Prop H8 to preserve traditional marriage. The only people who can become Gods (the highest eternal reward for Mormons) are polygamists. Not a man and a wife. A man and his wives. Such hypocrisy!
And while we're on the subject of homophobia, lets not forget the use of electroshock aversion therapy at the "Lord's university", BYU, to try to cure homosexuals.
I could go on and on about crazy Mormon doctrines and Brigham Young (for example, Brigham Young taught that "no man or woman in this dispensation will ever enter into the celestial kingdom of God without the consent of Joseph Smith." (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 7, p. 289)), but the one that really gets to me, and the purpose of this diary is the following:
Brigham Young and racism: "Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so." (Journal of Discourses, Volume 10, page 110.)
This racism, codified as God's law, never really has left the Church - it was just swept under the rug. This is the same Church which denied full membership rights to people with even a drop of blood from African ancestors until 1978. 1978 people!! The same Church that has never apologized for its institutionalized racism under the guise of "God's law."
We saw the homophobia and hypocrisy regarding marriage surface in the Prop 8 battle. Are we now seeing the racism surface again? To this diary's subject story we go (with full apologies for the detour through Mormon country).
Children in Madison County, ID - 95% Mormon and the reddest county for George Bush in 2004 (93%) - have been chanting a little song on the way to school lately: "Assassinate Obama, assassinate Obama!". See the story (with video) here. When questioned by a concerned teacher, the students said they didn't know what assassinate means. Now where do you think these children, presumably Mormon, get this little chant from?
Sickening. The Mormon Church made a mistake taking such a vigorous stand for bigotry. Too many skeletons in the closet, too much ugly history, too much current ugliness. This is one case where the old adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity" does not apply.