You know, the idea that Mormon leaders are actual prophets of God, revealing God's words and will to the faithful is ... sickening.

I'll never forget the Mormon teenager who wrote me a few years ago, telling me how she cried almost every night when she was excluded from group activities with her peers because she had come out as gay. I'll never forget how she told me that she needed people to "be good, not nice."

She told me that all her Mormon friends and leaders were sickeningly nice to her even as they excluded her and pushed her away from them.

That's the reality of life for lots of LGBTQ people born into LDS families.

And the so-called prophets at the top of the hierarchy are working their asses off to keep that reality real.

I'm thinking of Jeffrey Holland, the grifter who styles himself a prophet of God, giving a speech at Brigham Young University in 2021, in which he used violent metaphor after violent metaphor against gay people, going so far as to trash and disrespect of BYU student who had come out as gay.

I'm remembering that this year, in 2024, BYU is requiring freshman to read his violence-inciting speech. Because evidently God wants Mormons to have violent thoughts against LGBTQ people like their beloved "prophet."

I wasn't raised Mormon like you. I was raised Baptist, born in the early 1960s. My father was a pastor, as a matter of fact.

I grew up hearing the most nauseating racism in church, and I grew up with extremist homophobia, often expressed in violent terms, and always in religious terms.

Of course, Baptists are, in general, as superstitious, ignorant, and cruel as Mormons. Baptists and other Evangelical Protestant Christians routinely deny even the most basic science and reality. They don't have a Noah's Ark museum and a creationism museum for nothing. They're proud of their ignorance. They exalt it.

Just like they're proud that they treat queer people, like me, like shit.

Because God told them to, apparently. Or rather, their religious leaders who claim to know God told them to.

That results in the same heinous outcomes in the Evangelical world as it does in the Mormon world.

Anybody paying attention to the LDS churches founding documents would know that the founders of the church were grifters and charlatans. That the founding documents are fantastical, intentional forgeries. I really don't know why people choose ignorance in the face of such obvious nonsense.

But as a queer person, I'm sick and tired of religious people embracing astonishing levels of ignorance to treat me and the people I love like shit.

What is it about religion that turns people so cruel and disgusting?