Social Workers Helping the Mormon Church to Embrace the LGBT Community

Friend or Foe ?

My dear friend and LGBTQ ally, Jennifer Carey inspired me to write this blog article and gave me permission to share a part of her narrative.  Jennifer grew up in the Mormon church and she has witnessed first hand:

I have witnessed myself the public and familial shaming and ostracizing of gay children, siblings, friends.

I have been friends with Jennifer for four years now and she is an amazing and humble ally for the LGBTQ community. As Jennifer pointed out to me, “One of the great internal debates of the church right now is its attitude towards homosexuals.”

Helping the Mormon Church look at and reflect upon its attitude toward the LGBTQ community is Dr. Caitlin Ryan, a medical social worker and self-identified lesbian. Ryan recalls her disappointment and despair with the passage of Prop 8 as she witnessed how the Mormon Church revealed itself as the wealthy, homophobic political and machine it is.  The Mormon Church wielded so much political power and economic power that it had a huge impact on the passing of Prop 8.

Dr. Ryan connected with Dr. Robert Rees, a Mormon and a religion professor, to address the homophobia within the church. I would say this is a lot to unpack, because it means also unpacking hundreds of years of established misogyny. Now in 2014, six years after Prop 8, Rees is working with Mormon families at ways to embrace LGBTQ family members.  Rees is working with Ryan’s Family Acceptance Project. Sadly, too many Mormons found themselves in the untenable position of feeling that they have to either reject their family members or reject their faith.

While I am not a person of “faith,” I do realize that the LGBTQ community needs the support of religious communities, especially of those religions that have done great harm to the LGBTQ community.  The Public Religions Research Institute found that the Mormon Church was second only to the Catholic Church in its hostility towards the LGBTQ community.

We clearly have a long way to go regarding addressing homophobia, which is enixtricably tied to misogyny.  I am hopeful that the work of Dr. Ryan and Dr. Rees will help move conversations that create more space for different people.  If you know of any LGBTQ person that is expressing suicidal thoughts or feelings please contact the Trevor Project.

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Bigot of the Week Award: May 31, Roman Polanski

Bigot of the Week

I need to send out a huge thank you to my friend and LGBT ally, Jennifer Carey for her nomination of this weeks’ bigot! Outspoken director Roman Polanski managed to add to the wrong side of his legacy with some very misogynistic comments this week. Speaking to the press at the Cannes Film Festival, Polanski offered bizarre non sequiturs, medial nonsense, and vicious sexism–I suspect we need to up his Haldol dose significantly!

I think it’s a pity that now offering flowers to a lady becomes indecent. […] trying to level the genders is purely idiotic. I think it’s a result of, like everything else and I will be Marxist here, of progress in medicine and these are outcomes of it. I think that the Pill has changed greatly the woman of our times, masculinized her … that chases away the romance from our lives and that’s a great pity.

I’m not sure where to even start with this. The most innocuous bits are the strange idea that offering flowers is anti-feminist (perhaps he needs to work on his delivery…) and the nonsensical claim that anything he said is vaguely Marxist. (Remember, Marx was a  defender of women’s rights!)

Far more troubling is his absolute dismissal of any attempt at gender equity. Does he not understand oppression? This isn’t about all people being identical, it is simply about social justice — ensuring that all people have equal opportunity and access. Apparently he’s getting his science from the modern GOP, too, claiming that birth control masculinizes women and destroys romance. That manages to be a mix of medical lies and outright lunacy. One would think that a man who built his career on movies exploring sexual freedom — including the S&M picture that got him to Cannes — would be a bit more celebratory of science that makes sex more free from consequence.

Polanski may have directed a couple of classics and suffered some significant personal tragedies. One would think that being a Holocaust survivor and having his wife brutally murdered would have endowed him with a greater sense of empathy and the human condition. Alas, it has not. He also skipped town the day before his sentencing on unlawful sex with a minor after raping a 13-year-old. He’s been a fugitive from justice for nearly 40 years. It seems he’s also a fugitive from common sense and basic decency.

Hero of the Week Award: May 24, Eileen Peterson

I need to say a huge thank you to friend, activist, and LGBT ally, Bruce Kestelman for nominating Eileen for HWA.  Honestly, Bruce needs to also be celebrated as HWA also for many of the same reasons we are celebrating Eileen.

Standing up for Social Justice seems like it would just be obvious and easy.  Working to ensure space for equity and equality and treating all humans with dignity and respect feels like it should be a no brainer.  Sadly, this is not the case.  I suspect all of us have too often witnessed very ugly behavior on different social media sites around human and civil rights issues.  I know I have seen my fair share of awful, nasty, ugly behavior on Facebook and on LinkedIn around the issues of racial equity and marriage equality.  Garbage that I will not bother to repeat here spews forth from the foaming mouths and frantic fingers of bigots everywhere.

Delightfully, within all of this muck there are gems I find that need to be celebrated.  People with tenacity, grace, and perseverance that gracefully — and at times with great wit — work hard to interrupt oppression.   Eileen Peterson is someone who does not shy away from social justice issues.  I admit that there have been times when comments get so ugly, I throw my hands up in despair and walk away from interrupting oppressive comments.  I recently read a thread on LinkedIn regarding marriage equality and I have to say that Eileen Peterson won my heart over.  She does not use accusatory or inflammatory language, but she does try to hold people accountable for their behavior and she asks great clarifying questions that help to expose they hypocrisy within people’s arguments.

Today I felt the need to celebrate the individual and collective voices that work with great respect and dignity to interrupt oppression.  Everyday people like Eileen, Bruce, Jennifer Carey, and the amazingly large list of friends I have had the honor and privilege to know in the past two years, need to be celebrated for their dedication to social justice and fierce determination to eradicate racism, homophobia, misogyny, and poverty. I applaud you all!

Honorable mention this week goes to the Peace Corps. Reversing a long-standing discriminatory practice, the Corps announced this week that it will allow same-sex couples to apply for joint service. Married heterosexual couples have been able to do so all along. The Peace Corps could have waited for DOMA to fall; instead, they took a proactive step and will usher in equality starting next month. Nicely done!

Bigot of the Week Award: January 18, National Rifle Association. Again. Really.

Bigot of the Week

In the month since the Sandy Hook shootings, the NRA (Nasty Repulsive Arrogant) has exceeded all its previous behavior and shown its true colors at every turn. Somehow, they managed to top themselves AGAIN this week. In a clear preemptive strike against President Obama’s upcoming press conference — at which he discussed VP Biden’s gun task force recommendations — the shoot everybody ‘casue some of ’em are bound to be guilty organization released their most odious and racist advertisement yet.

The spot, titled “Elitist Hypocrite” targets the President, presumably to undermine his credibility before he even presented his plan. The sick, tragic core of the ad is an attack on his parenting skills based on gross misinformation about his daughters and their school. (The ad is here if you can stomach it.) An ominous voice asks “Are the President’s kids more important than yours?” The rest of the ad talks about the security given to the President’s children and mentions the security staff at the school they attend. It then calls the President a hypocrite for protecting his kids and opposing armed guards at every school in the country.

This is so vile on so many levels that I don’t know where to start. What happened to the simple decency of leaving presidential kids alone as innocent members of an important family? Oops! Did I just expect decency from the NRA? Silly me.

They also neatly overlook the fact that these two children are at massively higher risk than most other kids and that providing security for the families of dozens of high-profile political families is common sense and long-established practice. Whatever the NRA would like us to believe, they also lie about the Obama girls’ school. It has NO ARMED PRESENCE. The security officers carry no weapons, making the hypocrisy charge an ugly falsehood.

Can we also talk about racism here? Need I really remind the NRA that people of color are profiled unjustly in such horrifically disproportionate ways?

Can anyone take this bloated lobbying whore seriously? Well over 90% of Americans (including 90% of gun owners) support common sense gun reforms including background checks. Of course those who only profit from more gun sales don’t care who is safe or what anyone thinks. They just lie their way to the bank.

Thanks go to my friend Jennifer Carey for this week’s dishonorable mention. Mike O’Neal (R), Speaker of the House in Kansas, sent an email to his colleagues calling for the death of President Obama. Lifting a passage from the bible (Psalm 109, calling for the death of a leader), he gleefully wished of the President

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

O’Neal refuses to apologize and insists the comment was taken out of context. How exactly a direct bible quote with the observation “At last — I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president!” is out of context he didn’t bother to explain.  What kind of monster is O’Neal? It will take a lot more than prayers to help this man.