Hello and welcome to Elias Loudmouth. I'm Kim. I'm Jane. And this is where we are learning to speak up and reach out, making our world a better place. Because each of us is a part of it. Welcome back. And today's topic is saving souls versus saving lives. Also eternal happiness versus finding joy in our own mortal existence. We are going to talk about how we privilege church membership over the lives and happiness of children and families. We are going to go over all the different ways that we push out family members or paniquin. There are religious thoughts and feelings stop aligning with ours. So today I'm going to start off with an extreme example. But please bear with me here. A few years ago our elders quorum president told a story in a fifth Sunday lesson of a time he was a home teacher for an active family who never let anyone into the home. Even when things were scheduled. And so one day the man telling the story said that he came to visit and the door was answered by a kid. And he pushed his way into the house without an invite because the smell behind the door once opened was like really bad. He said that he went from room to room and discovered it was a hoarder's house with trash everywhere. The kids were in dirty clothes and unkempt and the mom was around but unconcerned as to her own kids' needs. Without even talking to his friend who was the dad of the house, he left and soon after leaving the house and being kicked out by the mom of the house that he judged barged into, he called CPS. This resulted in the kids being taken away and they didn't come to back to church after that. Our elders quorum president said that years later he ran into this man who told him that he was angry at him for a long time but was glad that he did call CPS. This man ended up divorcing his wife and fighting the courts for a few years to get his kids back. But now everything was okay. I understand that CPS was needed to be called but couldn't get over the fact that our elders quorum president was supposedly friends with this man and didn't try to talk to him with concern and give him a chance to "repent" and fix things before calling CPS. I heard this story probably three years ago when church was coming back in from COVID. It was kind of a shock. Now rewind in my own life to being 27, newly married in the Santa Monica/Venus Beach area in Los Angeles. I had my favorite calling ever as the second counselor in the young women's. There were only four girls in our young women's this total and a particular beehive of 13 years old pick me as her favorite leader and I was told to lean into it. So I did. This girl, a color D, I loved her. I was the cool young aunt or much older sister to her. We hung out and I took her to a lot of places. Much of what was to either get away from her terrible life at home or to get away from the controlling older couple in the war who opted to take her in with her mother's permission. This mother lived on section 8 in the housing projects in a dirty, hoarder home with cockroaches everywhere. D was the second oldest of six at the time and every sibling saved her older sister had a different dad. I never got to meet her older sister because she was just kind of like gone. I remember sitting on so many different war councils at the time to talk about D's family. D's family was actively involved with getting as many kids out of D's house away from her mom as possible with the more responsible father at the time of whatever kid we were talking about. Most of these men were local and willing to work with a church and promise to allow the kids to come to church if someone from the local ward would take them. This tactic worked for like two of D's younger siblings but not her brother Ray and not her infant sister. A different tactic was worked out for D and Ray to live in the house of an older couple in the ward with permission of D's mom Sandy. I tried to come in with Sandy but only discovered how mentally ill she was when she told me she took Vicodin and Morphean for her quote fibromyalgia. I remember going through the dosages when we were moving them because Robin was helping us move. When they had to move Robin and I were helping and Robin was just like holy cow shit can kill a horse man. D told me Sandy spent most of her days asleep while D was forced to take care of her siblings or just try to escape the house altogether. I had to choose to play ball with Sandy but support NBD's friend and mentor. D and her brother Ray who was 10 at the time spent a lot of time at our apartment escape, escape the weird control games of the older members they lived with, the greens. Eventually Ray got sent back to live with his mom because his personality wasn't willing to go along with the greens control issues. My husband and I talked several times about taking care or taking on one or both of the kids. I was sure we didn't have the room and that would also mean giving out my sewing room and putting all those things in storage while we bought a bunch of furniture for a kid's bedroom. We had the discussion again when we moved to Van Nies and D moved into a house with one of her friends and her friends dad gave off really bad to catch bread or derives. Again, I said no because I didn't want to interrupt her school year by moving her to a new school or make my life harder by getting up extra early every morning to take her in rush hour traffic to get to school while pregnant or dealing with an infant. Eventually we moved across the country after my son was born. He stayed in touch with me through Facebook and moved to Virginia to pursue a political science degree which was quickly kind of fell to the wayside with no familiar support and she pursued a career in daycare to support herself. Dee would come visit us every now and again. There were signs that things weren't right in her world. All the men she dated were like 9 plus years older than her and then she got pregnant from a guy she claimed was abusive and decided to keep the baby after breaking up with the guy. The last time she came to see me she brought her 14 month old son and stayed with me. There were a lot of alarm bells that went off during her visit that I chose to brush aside while she stayed with me. I was trying to not be judgmental of her quote parenting style. She had a schedule for food or an abs and fed her kid nothing but chips, goalfish or sweets when it came to most solid food. She never cleaned up after her kid when he ate or made messes in general. She left him with soil diapers without checking him or changing him to the point that his butt and private parts were extremely red and chapped and poop was dry and across the nose. She also told me that a coworker called CPS on her before coming to see me and that she have recently spent a weekend in jail for stealing from target and she had a probation officer she had to report to now. The tipping point was when she left her kid alone in her car in my driveway with the car running so he could take a nap after getting back from an in or playground with all the kids. She was supposed to go home so I thought the kid would only be in the car along for like 10 minutes while she got her stuff and left. Surely she wouldn't leave her kid in a running car unattended for a prolonged amount of time. And nine months prior, her son was inadvertently kidnapped because she did the exact same thing and someone stole her car. Imagine my surprise when I got through showering to children and getting each into jammies for bed and she's still in my house cleaning up messes I had complained about and her kid is nowhere inside. When I asked her to bring her son inside she told me no and brushed off my concern and pleading. She lied to me and told me she had checked on him several times. While my oldest had been with her the entire time and told me she had not checked on him once but she had sent my boys out one time to check on her 14 month old son for her. The little boy was out in the car for at least an hour without anyone around. When she finally went out to check on him herself, he woke up, witnessed her about to walk away and threw it all over himself. So she had to bring him inside and bathe them. She told me that she had him ride in the front seat of the car because if he can't see her in the car he gets anxious and throws up. Knowing his history of being left alone in the car for naps and witnessing this, I think I would be safe to say the throwing up is a common reaction to being left alone in the car with it running as a common occurrence even after he was inadvertently kidnapped because the car was stolen. I helped her bathe him and she went home. Over the course of a month I watched her Facebook post confirm my red flags with Nutella sandwiches given as a regular quote "healthy meal" for 14 month old. In post of constant diaper rash, so bad it bled and wept pus. When I finally confronted her about everything over the phone, she told me that she would leave her kid in soil diapers up to half an hour consistently before changing him and didn't think there was anything wrong with it. She told me that she consistently left her son to nap in the car in her boyfriend's driveway while the car was running for quote "no more than 30 minutes at a time." I doubt that was true considering she was not.
super concerned with the time while she was in, while she left him in my own driveway. She admitted against continuing stealing from big box stores because the company's quote "deserved it" but refused to get the government aid she was entitled to as a single mother, any help from the church or help from friends like me. She, on a certain level like her mom, really just liked her ability to complain that she was the victim. I caught her lying to me several times in our conversation and when I caught her in her lies or pointed out what she was doing wrong, she would just backpedal and deny it was as bad as it really was. No responsibility taken whatsoever. Most of her negligence was coded in the phrase quote "I won't let him cry" which really meant quote "I can't stand to hear him cry" and my comfort is more important than my child safety or while I knew that things would not get better with her and eventually called the local CPS authorities who were very interested in what I had to say. Two weeks after my CPS report, I got a text from Dee asking if I reported her to CPS to which I responded just and she told me to have a nice life and block me from her Facebook feed. I have no idea what happened to that kid. A large part of me hopes he was put in a more responsible person's care or she at least was forced to participate in some programs where she can become a better person and take some responsibility for her actions. It's very likely that neither happened and I only caused her to mistrust more people and her bad behavior as a mother gets hidden deeper underground. Looking back, I realized this could have all been avoided if someone from church had the courage to call CPS on these mom all those years ago. The kids would have had a sporting chance at a more normal childhood and the intergenerational trauma might have been stopped in its tracks and not passed on. I sat in so many ward councils and then through all the concerns, why didn't anyone call CPS? And I know deep down it was because we were all victims of being brainwashed into thinking that it's "better to stay in the bad home and stay in the church than to be put in a good home that isn't warm and have their souls be lost." I thought that and that was the overwhelming feeling that was given off in most of the ward meetings. How can anyone soul survive when placed in that home that gave them physical and psychological wounds that may or may not heal? Yeah, I witnessed a story like that, not as extreme as yours, but many years ago when my kids were young, just exiting primary age. I was in a small branch and one of the families had a deaf girl and I interpreted sign language in college years before that and so I volunteered to sign language at Herbert Primary for this girl. And when I first started interpreting for her, she did not really know that much sign language, but as she grew over the years through primary and young women, she ended up knowing more sign language than I did. And occasionally I would suggest to my young women's president or primary president or whoever, that we get a more professional interpreter in for her so that she could really understand what was going on and so that whatever she said could be interpreted correctly in conversation with the English hearing people, which I'm not very good at, reverse interpreting. It always came back like, "No, she's the only deaf person," etc. And then later on as she got into high school, her parents found out about, "I can't remember what denominations, but a different Christian denomination in their area," where they had a whole deaf community in the church. They had professional interpreters. They performed deaf choirs. They had adults and children that were deaf as a group in their church and her parents said, "Maybe we should send her there." And at the time, the the stake young women's president was a friend of mine who also knew sign language and we were going, "Hey, that sounds really cool." And yet all of the other people in the hierarchy were going, "Oh, that's going to be horrible," because she didn't be more, and I'm going, "Well, Alicia, learn about Jesus in her own language." And so it was very frustrating. The cool thing was later, after high school, I ended up going back to college in the same community college that she went to in a ran-in tour in the hall. And she excitedly told me about all of her plans for the future and how she was going to graduate and what she was interested in school and stuff. And I just thought her parents did the right thing. Yeah. Right. So that leads the question, how do we get here? How do we get in the space where we care more about someone's "eternal well-being" than we care about someone's physical and or emotional well-being right now? Brigham Young said, "There are multitudes of pure and holy spirits willing to take tabernacles. Now what is our duty to prepare tabernacles for them to take a course that will not tend to drive those spirits into families of the wicked, where they will be trained in wickedness, debauchery, and every species of crime. It is the duty of every righteous man and woman to prepare tabernacles for all the spirits they can." And that's found in the discourses of Brigham Young. Oh my goodness. Yep. This type of rhetoric was also repeated by several profits down the line, which also included the idea that contraception and family's planning was evil because it inferred with God's plans of having as many spirits as possible to be born into, quote, "righteous Mormon families." 10th President Joseph Spilling Smith said that there is, quote, "nothing that should be held in greater sacredness than this covenant by which the spirits of men are clothed with mortal tabernacles." When a man and a woman are married and they agree or covenant to limit their offspring to two or three and practice devices to accomplish this purpose, they are guilty of a niquity and eventually must be punished. And that's doctrines of salvation. Also another quote from doctrines of salvation from Joseph Spilling Smith, quote, "those who willfully and maliciously design to break this important commandment shall be damned. They cannot have the spirit of the Lord." The same rhetoric was also perpetuated all the way up into the Kimbell era when President Spencer W. Kimbell said, quote, "too many young people set their minds that they will not marry or have children until they are more secure, until the military service period is over, until the college degree is secured, until the occupation is more well defined, until the debts are paid or until it is more convenient." They have forgotten and the first commandment is to quote, "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it." And so, brides continue with their employment and husbands encourage it and contraceptives are used to prevent concession. The church cannot approve nor condone the measures which so greatly limit the family, unquote from the teachings of Spencer W. Kimbell. What Kimbell said may have been a little softened from previous church presidents, but that message was permeated in the Bishop's handbook up until the early 90s and even when it was no longer being openly talked about, the concept of many kids being born into, quote, "righteous Mormon families" was passed down from the boomers to Gen X and older millennials and twisted to make membership in the church the end all. Because we are the only righteous people and it is important to quote, "save as many spirit children as possible from undenrighteous families." We need to have as many children as possible regardless of our time to care for them or our financial situation. But in doing so, we have prioritized this celestial kingdom or heaven over quality of life here. It is written into our church history and the fiber of our religious culture when we continue to glorify the sacrifice and suffering of our pioneer ancestry for the faith and the sacrifice some converts make that put family relationships in jeopardy. Life doesn't have to be suffering and it helps nobody in the long run when we impose that suffering on other people in the name of God or eternal salvation. In Maslow's pyramid, if other needs are not met first, they cannot address spirituality and other concepts higher up on the pyramid. It doesn't matter if the family is supposedly Mormon when they aren't getting their physical, mental and emotional needs met. Amen. Definitely. Kind of switching gears. The ideas of needing to quote, "save family members" and spouses who step away because they are LGBTQIA+ or no longer believe because trying to toe the line in church is just too painful for them. It's hurtful or to our personal relationships and pushes people further away. The rhetoric isn't old either. It continues and persists with the adage "thanks celestial" and that we shouldn't listen to nonbelievers. We make up ideas about why people step away without ever really listening to them with an open heart because it conflicts with what we have been taught, that we are right, because we think we're right. We tell them that they are
quote, "Just got offended when others repeatedly hurt them and those people never take responsibility for their actions." Even when confronted, we tell them, quote, "They just want to sin," or they quote, "Don't have enough faith when policies doctrine in history don't line up with what they have been taught or how they feel things should be in a church with Christ's name in it." - I'm afraid that I have to admit that I have done that in the past when my ex-husband decided he was no longer gonna go to church. I was a little upset, but I'd seen it coming for a while. And although I never pressured him to go back to church with us, I took my kids. I allowed my kids to miss every other church meeting that they had to go to if they wanted to because they had one parent that went and one parent that didn't and that worked out pretty well for my kids. But I realized as I looked back over how I behaved toward my husband, he was a convert and I married him like three years into his church membership. And so I knew, quote unquote, what a good Mormon family looked like. And he used to talk about how he wanted to be all of that. And I thought I was teaching him how to be that way. But as our marriage kind of deteriorated long after he stopped going to church, and now looking back, I realized that he felt like I was bossing him around, that I wasn't letting him be him, that the church was right and anything that he had problems with. And so I kind of embarrassed and looking back that I had tried pushing him too hard to be somebody he wasn't. When one of my trans kids, Jamie, was still trying to be a good member of the church and going to the singles world after their mission, I went with them many times to be their emotional support mom. And for about a year, I believe, they were doing quite well, quote unquote, they were one of the relief society teachers. They got to give talks in church. The bishop was very supportive. The relief society president was super supportive. But one day toward the end of when they were going to church, they were there by themselves, not with me. And one of the speakers in the saccharomyting was speaking and saying some very transphobic things. And Jamie left the meeting to go crying, the bathroom, obviously. And the relief society president went in and left the meeting and went in to comfort Jamie. But in the process of making all the right noises, we love you, blah, blah, blah. She finally said, but Jamie, I can't ever accept gay people because I believe what the church says at their lifestyle is wrong. Jamie told me that I just wanted to go, "No, I better not say that." But anyway, I just wanted-- I wish, OK, I wish the relief society president knew what that felt like to Jamie. Because it was so hurtful. And Jamie never went back. OK, so overall, it really is really hard for us to kind of come back from what we've been taught forever. True. And so I think in this way, we need to figure out, how do we do better? That's a good question. How do we do better? I think these particular ones are a little bit more personal. And then some of the ones we've given in the past. If you know that a child is in a home, that there is abuse, neglect, or negligence, and the ward has tried to, quote, "fix things," but nobody has had the courage to call CPS. Please be the one to do so. It takes several calls before a child might be removed. But it might be the wake up call someone needs for them to get the services they need and might have refused previously. Also, as a caveat, maybe try and talk to the people before you go ahead and call, you know, so-- But if they're not willing to go get help themselves, yes, protect the kids. Definitely. And also, if you or someone you know has stepped away and you want to improve the relationship with person on the other side of the religious aisle, please maybe see a therapist either individually or together who specializes in religious trauma. And my caveat would be that maybe isn't Mormon. So everyone feels safe, huh? That's a good idea, especially if it's a family member that's stepped away. And even if your family member that has stepped away isn't willing to go to therapy with you, if you can afford therapy, if you can get therapy, get it for yourself. Because the more you are secure with yourself and come to grips with the feelings that you were probably trained with as a child, you'll have a better relationship with all of your family members or friends. Going in, yeah. I think that having good relationships really is one of the choice of life. And as much as the people in the church have different ideas, one of the main doctrines of our church is that the families can be together forever, that the family is the smallest unit of the church. And as I have always told people as my younger two have stepped away from the church, families come first to me. That's the way I was raised in the church. And just because some of my family is not in the church anymore does not negate that on my part. If the church comes between me and my kids, I'm gonna choose my kids every time. - Yeah. And if your family isn't working out for you, chosen family is always wonderful. - True. (laughing) - Definitely, Jane and her kids are my chosen family. They come for every Thanksgiving in my home. - And we love you, as we love all of our family. - See, thanks for listening. That's a wrap and we'll see you next week or in the next two weeks. We'll see you next time. - Next time. - Thanks for listening to the end. If you enjoyed our show and would like to hear more, please follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this program. So you can be notified whenever the next episode drops. - Hey, if you have any comments or suggestions for future topics, please send them to us at LDS Loudmouth
[email protected]. One really long word, no spaces. Thanks to Lynn for editing. See you next time.
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