Cause and Effect

When I was a little mormon kid, the mo-church used to hand out these cheapola copies of the book of momorn. It was illustrated with copies of paintings by Arnold Friberg. The paintings had a certain homoeroticism to them. This one is a scene from the rather boring book but illustrates my point. While we were supposed to be motivated to keep the commandments, fight for the right, and a bunch of other crapola, I had a very different reaction. It was puberty and I was a gay kid. The fact that no one ever considered that some 13 year old kid might find the pictures erotic illustrates one of the fundamental concepts I learned about mormonism. It is a religion for stupid people. Now that does not mean that all of them are stupid, no rather that is is designed and marketed to people who have the intellectual curiosity of the moderately cognitively impaired. If you have ever watched the South Park episode, it is more accurate than any one is willing to admit...dumb da dumb dumb indeed.

What has struck me recently is that the folks who leave mormonism, especially some of the folks who post on one of several websites such as Recovery from Mormonism (www.exmormon.org) tend to be a rather intellectually diminished bunch as well. Far be it from me to poke sticks at the spiritually wounded, but these folks are so busy self inflicting perceived injury that it is hard to hesitate...so I won't.

One of the things I most apprise in my leather brothers is their strength. These are guys who fought the world and won. Not always, but often enough to make my journey through life a lot easier. They are strong and I derive strength from them. They have struggled and been refined in the process. The folks leaving mormonism tend to whine so loudly about their voluntarily inflicted misery that they cannot see that one way to end that misery is to leave and try to be happy. These are folks who seriously need a safe word but seem unable to recognize that STOP or LEAVE ME ALONE might just be sufficient to end the mormon tendency to plague those who try to leave with unwanted attention. Common posts on Recovery from Mormonism question "What do I do when the Bishop calls?" These are people who cannot even imagine that telling these invasive douchebags to get off the porch and leave them alone might just work. They are so used to acting like eunuchs that they can't even find their balls let alone use them. NO WONDER they never figured out that those damn Friberg paintings were giving some us a hard on.