The Annual Rite: Provo Pervs

Provo police on alert for peeping Toms – Salt Lake Tribune

Apparently BYU, the college of the Utah faithful, suffers a plague of pervos every fall when students return, move into housing or apartments, and don’t know enough to close the curtains. Peeping toms are a perennial problem in prissy Provo. Best comment from the Trib website: “Abstinence makes the church grow fondlers.”

A Rest Stop Development: Nekkid Man at Scenic Viewpoint

Here’s a way to get yourself noticed: strip and jump in front of cars. In remote eastern Utah. On a Sunday.

Honk! Scenic view included nude man, police say – Salt Lake Tribune

Police in eastern Utah arrested a naked man they say was jumping in front of cars on a highway.
About 11:50 p.m. Sunday, Uintah County Sheriffs deputies and a Vernal officer found the naked 24-year-old from Austin, Colo., at a scenic viewing spot along U.S. Highway 40. Sheriffs Lt. John Laursen said motorists reported the man was jumping in front of their vehicles and as deputies arrived he jumped in front of them, too.
Laursen said deputies do not know how the man arrived at the scenic view or why he stripped.
He was booked into the Uintah County jail on suspicion of indecent exposure and trespassing.

LTTE: Polygamy From A Modern Girl’s Perspective

The Salt Lake Trib’s letters to the editor often contain some interesting insights into life in Utah; I haven’t lived there for more than 30 years, and I feel I know the place because I can read the opinions of the cranks and the apologists and the activists and the completely whacked-out religious nutcases.

This time, it’s a teenage girl’s perspective on the Texas FLDS polygamy case. She starts well, but I don’t think she can really imagine what it’s like to be raised in that society – no “modern girl” could, because essentially these are girls who are living in a Pioneer Village bubble.

But I do agree that they might secretly yearning for a trip to Great Clips and the mall. For some of them, it’s not too late to be teenagers.

Unshackle FLDS girls – Salt Lake Tribune
I am a 15-year-old girl with a cell phone and iPod. Call me spoiled. I like sports, boys and dancing. I still play with my dog. It wasn’t that long ago that I believed in Santa Claus and gave my mom painted rocks for Mother’s Day.

I can’t imagine being married at this age, let alone having a baby. I’m pretty sure those FLDS girls are just like me in most ways. They want to enjoy their youth, friendships and all that modern life has to offer, and not be handed over to some gross old guy and forced to sleep with him. Helloooo?

Hooray for the Texas authorities who raided the Yearning for Zion ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Maybe they can take the girls to Great Clips hair salon and then to the mall for a new pair of shorts. It’s about time someone stepped in to stop this robbery of precious childhood.

Vatican: LDS Church’s Practice “Detrimental”

Catholic bishops told to withhold parish information from Mormons – Salt Lake Tribune

The Vatican letter calls LDS baptisms for the dead a “detrimental practice” and directs each Catholic diocesan bishop “not to cooperate with the erroneous practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” CNS reported.

It annoys me that in 150 years, someone will baptise me according to the LDS doctrine of baptism for the dead, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, other than mark the heavenly post “refused due to erroneous practice.”

Unnatural Natural Women

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Say what you like about the religion, it’s not natural for women’s faces to be this lean. Even for nursing mothers, these women look like they’re not getting enough to eat. The one in the middle is becoming famous on Flickr for that monobrow, by the way. Their body language is weirdly out of synch with modern life, too. It’s as if they’ve adopted some kind of backwards-engineered emulation of the way women hold their bodies in old, old photographs from the pioneer days. They also remind me of the faces of hardscrabble farmers’ wives from the 30’s Dustbowl photographs – the kinds of photos where you think of words like “famine” and “drought” when you look at them. These women look famished.

From descriptions in stories about the kids, the children have never eaten processed food – I find that pretty hard to believe! They’ve been shopping at Costco, after all, and I don’t think they were growing their own wheat (although I’ll admit that they might have been buying wheatberries and grinding their own flour, it’s to do with the commandment to store up food).

In all the photos, none of the younger women appear to have any meat on their bones. The older women look pretty bony around the eyes and cheeks, too. There’s only a couple of them that look to me like they’re well-nourished or rounded. One of them has red hair… and you can bet that red-headedness is extremely rare in this inbred of a population. With recessive genes, it’s kind of all or nothing, so there either would be a ton of redheaded kids, or almost none. The redhead has the tallest hair of them all except for the one with the monobrow, so she must be especially godly. Maybe she’s a convert; it’s the way of converts to go to great lengths to show they’re just as pious as everyone else in the group.

When the Polygamists Came to Town – TIME

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They’re all thin as rails, and their stomachs are totally flat – why are so few of the women visibly pregnant? Are the pregnant ones (that aren’t teenagers, that is) deliberately keeping out of view? The dresses are designed to be worn right through multiple pregnancies, I think; note the front pleats. I can’t believe it’s because the dresses are deliberately made to fit loosely – they all look like they’re seriously underweight. They’re all flat-chested, too… I wonder if this is a consequence of nursing (probably right through the next pregnancy) and not being able to build up fat reserves?

I’d like to know what their BMI percentages are, I’d bet they’re on the low end (where it begins to affect fertility). But it’s doubtful we’ll ever hear anything concrete about medical histories

And look at how tightly they hold their shoulders, and they don’t make eye contact with the big sheriff. Actually, by comparison, he looks huge and menacing (which no doubt makes the FLDS lawyers happy).

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Note how they all hold their hands close to their mouths and adopt similar poses. In all the photos, the poses and facial expressions and body language all look like something out of the 19th century – in some photos, women speaking to reporters seem to duck their heads and look up in an almost stereotypical “submissive wife” way. There’s another photo where the women are stepping about the buses with their kids, and one girl’s head is ducked really low to avoid the gaze of a tall, black state trooper. The odd thing is that this community looked and dressed much differently back in the 50’s, when Short Creek was invaded by the Arizona state police and everyone was rounded up. It’s almost as if with the mandated clothing- and hair- styles for women that were a reaction to that, they decided they had to completely enact the role of the hardy, super-frugal pioneer wives that were their models. They speak in an oddly stilted cadence, probably because they’ve never heard radio or TV, and their only prior experience with public speaking has been giving their “testimony” (faith-promoting stories) in church services.

The final irony: the original phone calls from Sarah, the teen-aged mother that called an anti-polygamy activist and the local women’s shelter, were probably a hoax.

FLDS Polygamists: No Records of Births, Deaths, Abuse

One thing to remember: the FLDS compounds are as self-sufficient as possible. Medical care is handled “inhouse.” State mandated reporter laws for suspected abuse cases and records keeping: forget about it.
More Clarity About Abuse, Intermarriage, Child Breeders, and the Fundamentalist Church of Later Day Saints | PEEK | AlterNet

Of Course I Had To Comment

I had to comment on the Salt Lake Trib’s forums on the following column:

Guy: Overcoming the bigotry inside myself

Two teenagers, a 16-year-old female and an 18-year-old male, vandalized a local church, causing $1 million in damage. They broke in and ran amok, destroying things with a baseball bat, spray-painting epithets and sacrilegious symbols on the walls, and, finally, lighting the building on fire.
The members of this church, which has seen more than its share of persecution, were shaken and heartbroken.
For 16 months the congregation relied on the hospitality of another church that rearranged its schedule to accommodate their friends. For nearly a year and a half, both churches shared one building for worship and myriad meetings during the week.
When the vandalized church was ready to reopen, they threw a big party to celebrate, including the whole neighborhood on the guest list. My husband Chris and I got a nice flier on our porch inviting us, as did other neighbors who, like us, are not members.
I didn’t give a thought to attending, but I was glad for them. If I was invited to a party for the Jewish synagogue, Muslim mosque, or Hindu temple closest to my house, and if one of those congregations had been vandalized, had been victimized by people motivated by hate, I would never pass up the opportunity to celebrate with them as they returned to worship in their own renovated, resanctified building.
Yet I have to admit that since the wronged congregation was of The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I was less interested in attending their celebration.
For most of my life, especially that crucial early part, I couldn’t have imagined Mormons as people who had been persecuted. Quite the opposite; they were persecuting me. Ask anyone who grew up non-Mormon here in the ’60s (for example) and you’ll hear the same.
We all had a few friends who were Mormon, but the scars inflicted by Mormons as a whole run deep. So I’m predisposed to have a bad attitude about Latter-day Saints. Like any form of bigotry, I try to resist this, to rise above it.
I’ve made my peace with much of what happened back then. I’m grateful for the painful interactions that caused me to strive to befriend people who are different. I am happy to have become in some small sense someone who speaks out on behalf of other people. However it happened, Mormons gave me that.
Nearly 30 years after I left public school, Salt Lake City is a different place. The world has arrived. Even my old suburban neighborhoods have evolved past the time when a brown-haired non-Mormon white girl constituted a level of diversity, if not outright novelty.
Today, there are LDS people whom I love like family and my unpleasant experiences have dwindled until they mostly involve the most ridiculous members of the Utah State Legislature, the type who spend their time worrying about issues like “discrimination toward the white, family-oriented Christian male.”
Late last month, the phone rang and I got a special invitation from my friend Carolyn to attend the party at the ward house. For a lot of reasons, it would have been easy to skip it. But sometimes when a bell goes off like that, it’s because someone needs to learn a lesson. This lesson: You can encounter a group that’s different from you in some way, yet you can find the faces of friends and friendly faces there. That day, that lesson was for me.
Congratulations to the members of the LeGrand Ward and thanks for the invitation. I wish you many years of safe worship.


* BARB GUY is a regular contributor to these pages.

I have to admit that I’d feel a similar lack of interest in attending a rededication celebration at an LDS house of worship, over just about any other denomination (including Moslem, Buddhist, Hindu, whatever). It’s a reaction to past perceived hurts that’s almost on an instictive level – I was rejected, therefore I reject. If I were invited to some kind of bridge-building event like this, I’d struggle with the decision. It would really depend on the circumstance and whether I had some personal connection with person doing the inviting.

And here are the comments for that particular piece: very typical of discourse “across the divide” in Utah, but there’s more reason and less lather on both sides nowadays. Still, Barb Guy is accused of being a bigot. For some reasons, this always happens to people who’ve suffered bigotry; they get accused of it if they have difficulty forgiving the hurt.

The Salt Lake Tribune – comments for Guy: Overcoming the bigotry inside myself

Mine starts out on the second page:

I was a red-haired, non-LDS tomboy in the 60’s on the East Bench. I think I was initially singled out for abuse in grade school because of the way I looked and dressed, and the fact that I didn’t have a ready-made group of friends from primary gave my tormentors carte blanche. Otherwise, *how did everyone seem to know that I wasn’t LDS?* It’s the nature of children to pick on loners, but it all gets mixed up with the dominant religion *whereever you are*, and for me it’s still hard to let go of the anger and accept and love family members who converted to the LDS Church…

It goes on from there. Suffice to say, I’d be a much, much happier person if my dad had never moved us to Utah in the early 60’s. Being a “not” kid in Utah guarantees a lot of problems with socialization, self-esteem, and conflict – both interior and exterior. Even leaving doesn’t solve them.

I started out reading the piece thinking it was going in a different direction. I assumed that it would be about a non-LDS church, because I
When I was in high school, some teenage kids got into the nearby Wasatch Presbyterian church building and vandalized it, then started a fire that gutted the sanctuary. It was a huge deal and some of the kids apparently took off via my neighborhood, because I was “sleeping out” that night (too hot to sleep inside) and some kid came through the yard and woke me up – scared the crap out of me, frankly, but I yelled aggressively at him and scared the crap out of HIM in return.

I could hear sirens. He seemed kind of freaked out, and I asked him what he was doing in our yard and who he was. He said he’d heard something “kicking around” (me, sleeping on the yard swing settee thing we had) and had come into the yard from the alley to see what it was. And it came out that he had been up by the church on the hill with some other kids, and now they were scattering for home because “something happened.” He took off and I didn’t get his name. It was all very weird, and then the news of the fire was the big thing the next day. Mom was totally ranting about the vandals and how it had to be “Mormon kids” and all that. She went on and on, and asked me very closely if I’d heard anything the night before.

Well, it had to come out, because a vandalized church was a big crime and so I told Mom about the teenaged stranger kid that came in the yard in the wee hours. Teenager solidarity just didn’t apply. She reported it to the police, but I don’t recall ever talking to a cop or giving a description. The church rebuilt, and then added on, and then more recently they completely rebuilt their education wing again – they seem to be going great guns.

Church arsons seem to happen all over, but in Utah they get all mixed up with the majority/minority tensions across the religious divide.