I'm thinking about a young Mormon man I interviewed along with his mother for a story I never wrote.

They lived in a wealthy suburb of Salt Lake City, and almost all of their neighbors were Mormons like them.

In the weeks after his high school graduation, this young man was out in his driveway quite late at night with his boyfriend. They were holding hands and looking at the stars, talking about their future. Both had serious university plans, and they were trying to figure out how they could try to keep their lives together while they pursued their separate dreams. A common story of young love!

Then, a car drove by, several heads poked out of windows, and shouts of "queer" and "faggot" rang out.

A few more minutes went by, the car returned, and a group of guys in their late teens and early twenties jumped out to punch and kick the young men. One of the assailants told them that the neighborhood has no room for faggots like them.

Family members called police — who arrived and took a report.

The reason I was interviewing them is that the family reached out to me complaining that the LDS-dominated police department and local government seemed to be doing everything in their power to protect the assailants — who were members in good standing of important, powerful Mormon families.

This isn't the point of my comment, but it's worth noting that even though one of the young men had to be hospitalized overnight because of the attacks, no meaningful criminal consequences ever ensued.

I'm writing about something different here in this comment. I'm writing about why I didn't write the story. Both young men asked me, despite one of their mother's request, not to write about it.

Both of them had already decided they had no choice but to leave the LDS Church. Both of them are anxious to leave Utah. Not from fear of getting beat up again, but because of the community exclusion they've already experienced.

All the friends they grew up with are active in the LDS church, most of them going on missions now. Social activities center around that.

And these two young men are out of the loop, out of the community in actual effect, despite talk of welcoming. They are unwelcome scapegoats now.

The mother who reached out to me is very conflicted. She describes her ward as fairly accepting of queer people. She describes her neighbors as "wonderful." She describes her LDS faith as one of the most important things in her life.

Even as it cuts her son off from meaningful community.

It's beyond sad, really.

The same thing happened to me, a lifetime ago when I was cut off from my Baptist community for the same reasons.

It's one of the reasons that I instinctively hold faith and religion in extreme disdain. That's how I resolved my cognitive dissonance.

Obviously, that's not the answer for everybody. Sometimes when I'm falling asleep at night, I think about this lovely woman (I spent hours talking on the phone with her), this wonderful mother who embraces a faith that treats her son like shit.

And I despair.

I understand the human impulse to scapegoat and stigmatize. It's a very unfortunate element of typical human behavior. But as a member of a traditionally stigmatized group, I can't understand why good people like that mother continue to take part in religious traditions that are so harmful and awful.