Real things that happened to me when I was mormon:
When I was thirteen years old, my bishop (Mormon pastor basically. Mormonism likes to steal vocabulary from other religions and then use it incorrectly) called me into his office.
Strike one: I, a thirteen year old little girl, am alone in a closed office with a middle aged man.
He proceeds to tell me that he has had a “prompting” (basically he’s claiming that he had a message from the Holy Spirit) that he should tell me that I am going to serve a mission. I am 13, so I’m already eight years too young to serve a mission anyway. I tell him that I don’t think I want to serve a mission. His response was, and I quote: “it’s not about what myrtle wants. It’s about what god wants.” Ten years later I can still remember that quote exactly because it was that invalidating and that disturbingly dismissive of my wants and needs in MY OWN FUCKING LIFE
The other aspect of this is that Mormon women aren’t encouraged to serve missions. They’re encouraged to marry young and a mission isn’t conducive to that. So you would ONLY tell a girl this if you literally thought she was so ugly that she wouldn’t get a husband if she wasn’t spiritual enough to make up for her looks. This is a well known, though unstated fact.
I’m going to let you ruminate on the disgustingness of not only evealiating women on their looks as a matter of course, but the particular impropriety of evaluating a literal pubescent child in this way, particularly when a middle aged man is doing the evaluating.
Basically:
Strike two: telling me what I’m going to do with my life without allowing me to give any input
strike three: evaluating the attractiveness of a literal child
Strike four: grooming me to accept instructions without complaint or question.
This is all also coming from the same bishop who, when he taught seminary: (another stolen word, I’ll write more about seminary later)
Told us that 9/11 was an inside job as if it were a fact
Told us about how he found dead mice in his mouse traps with graphic details of the state of their corpses
Described how he used to be forced to drown puppies on his grandfathers farm (you have no idea how much I wish I was kidding about this, I know it makes him sound like a cartoon villain, but he actually, literally said that he did this.)
In the interest of clarity: is every Mormon bishop as royally fucked up as mine? No. Not even close. I personally had better bishops than this both before and after this wack job.
But the fact that he was allowed to retain control of my congregation for as long as he was is still an indictment of the Mormon system of assigning completely untrained and unvetted men to leadership positions. As is the completely unacceptable practice of having individual interviews between middle aged men and young children, with no chaperones to protect the child. (If you want to know more about that I strongly suggest researching Sam Young and his organization protect every child. Sam was literally excommunicated for publicly condemning these closed door interviews.)
If anyone’s interested I might tell more stories from when I was Mormon? Let me know what you think.
