In this week’s episode of Mormonism Live, we will investigate the integrity of the not only the President of the Church but also the integrity of the Quorum of the 12. Once one grasps the systemic issue within LDS Leadership, One’s trust in them becomes anything other guaranteed.
RESOURCES:
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media/video/2016-01-1000-worldwide-devotional-january-2016?lang=eng 45:35 – 46:38 Time Stamp
https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2019/04/10/mormon-land-lds-churchs/ 4:47 – 5:46 Time Stamp
In his memoirs, An Abundant Life, Elder Hugh B. Brown explained “the Apostolic Charge” that every apostle is apparently given upon admittance to the Q12. It reads as follows: “Always be willing to subjugate his own thoughts and accept the majority opinion not only to vote for it but to act as though it were his own original opinion after it has been approved by the majority of the council of the twelve and the First Presidency.”
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The juxtaposition of perspectives among the last callers was striking and bears a deep look.
The penultimate caller who wept about the lives lost because of the POX stood in such striking contrast to the final caller, who says one of the most shocking things I’ve ever heard a parent say in response to her daughter’s coming out to her [minute 1:39: “Why does she have to be gay? Why doesn’t she just kill herself and just be done with it so she doesn’t have to have this struggle?” as an intitial response to her daughter coming out to her. My god. That elicited agony in me. The caller lays bare the reality that the institution could make a parent question the existential value of their own children.
Obviously, since the caller referred to the church’s pogrom and perpetual gaslighting, she has come some way from that perspective, and she chose her kids first and began questioning god. But to hear on a public medium that any parent had that response to a child’s coming out hurt my heart.
I can bear my own agony. I’ve borne it all my life, and my hard-won self acceptance as an LGBTQ person had solidified by 2015–but I still had not found the gift(s) in it. But when I watched that policy emerge on reddit that fateful night, I cried myself to sleep. I knew people would die–my people would die. I did not know that another result of the policy would be that parents would wish their own children dead. Another toxic, life-threatening layer of the policy surfaced.