Many of you are mothers, and that is enough to occupy one’s full time.
You are housekeepers ... a job it is to keep a house clean and tidy.
You are shoppers ...
You are the family chauffeur ...
They drive cars, they run computers, they attend the activities of their children, they cook and sew, they teach classes, and they speak in Church.
… Get on your knees and ask for the blessings of the Lord; then stand on your feet and do what you are asked to do ...
Some of you, unfortunately, will never marry in this life ... If that happens, do not spend your life grieving over it ...
Now I speak to you single mothers whose burdens are so heavy because you have been abandoned or have been widowed. Yours is a terrible load. Bear it well ...
Do whatever the Church asks you to do … Gordon B Hinckley, general conference October 2003, ‘To the Women of the Church’
Do you wish to marry a girl whose education has been far superior to your own? Gordon B Hinckley
‘I was ultimately told to suppress it.’ Mama Dragons: A Great Big Story aka Inside the Network of Mormon Moms Fighting for Their LGBTQ Children, victim, short 13.07, 2018
‘I was in support of his transition, but for about the first year and a half I didn’t know a single other Mormon mom with a transgender kid. I don’t want other moms as alone as I felt.’ ibid. mom
Utah residents currently use more antidepressant drugs, notably Prozac (fluoxetine hydrochloride, introduced in 1987), than the residents of any other US state. This problem is clearly, closely and definitely linked to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
... The women harmed often experience further damage by being misunderstood, shunned, misrepresented and even disparaged by well-meaning LDS whose happy experiences and feelings leave them unable to comprehend how the same church that benefited them could damage innocent people undeserving of harm, especially since that church is defined as being beneficial for all ... after all, how could God’s only true Church directly harm righteous women?
... what they pray for is what keeps them in depression. For these women, ironically and tragically, the more prayer, the more depression!
My point is that the LDS Church’s ‘One Size Fits All Women’ is an environment that ignores these powerful, genetically based, individual differences ...
So Mormon women can never, NEVER achieve equality with men, no matter how outstanding or righteous the women are. That’s just the way it’s set up.
… Is the cause of the problem more properly attributable to the women or to the belief system which has been taught to these women and that they have believed? Doctor Kent Ponder, board post ‘Mormon Women, Prozac’
In Utah, 14% of adults and adolescents reported experiencing severe psychological distress, and 10% said they’d had a major depressive episode in the past year. Bad mental health days come three times a month for those living in Utah. Melissa Dahl, msnbc.com
My observation is that inside Utah, Mormons have a huge persecution complex. In a popular youth activity, the LDS kids here re-enact handcart treks every summer. It is important to remind the children that their ancestors lost life and limb due to the horrible persecutions suffered at the hands of the Missourians.
After all, this persecution is the very heritage of the people of Utah. And the young people here are taught to make it their cultural identity. The persecution complex is what binds the chosen people of this great state together as members of an holy and peculiar culture. The persecution complex just may be what has made the Mormons of Utah who they are today. Molly No More, board post 30th May 2009, ‘Mormon Persecution Complex in Utah’
Ex-Mormons are often accused of ‘playing the victim’ and wallowing in ‘victim logy’, and it’s always struck me as weird that many church members simply cannot imagine that anyone might have been hurt or damaged by their association with Mormonism. People do get hurt, and often the hurt goes quite deep. Acknowledging that pain is not an indictment of Mormonism but simply acceptance of other people’s experience.
I’ve written before about how Mormonism compounded my innate issues of self-worth, guilt, and shame (I don’t think I need to explain in detail how Mormonism contributed to my feeling that I didn’t measure up and never would). In the LDS church there is a major focus on worthiness, meaning that one must meet a certain level of obedience before being eligible for certain ordinances, blessings, and church assignments. We could not have the influence and companionship of the Holy Spirit, we were told, unless we were worthy. Although I regularly and honestly passed my worthiness interviews, I always had nagging guilt and wondered if I really was worthy. I would beat myself up for little things, sure that I was deficient in some way. In talking with current and former members, I realize that I engaged in far less sinful behavior than most, but I was sure that God was disappointed in me for not measuring up.
Although I don’t think I’ve expressed this before, I have often felt like the damage done to my soul was permanent, that Mormonism had helped break me in ways that could never be repaired. So, yes, those feelings contributed to deep resentment toward the church; it’s natural to have bad feelings toward people and institutions that have hurt you. substrate, board post 30th October 2009, ‘Worthy at Last’
The new research focuses on a familiar type, perfectionists, who panic or blow a fuse when things don’t turn out just so. The findings not only confirm that such purists are often at risk for mental distress – as Freud, Alfred Adler and countless exasperated parents have long predicted – but also suggest that perfectionism is a valuable lens through which to understand a variety of seemingly unrelated mental difficulties, from depression to compulsive behavior to addiction.
Some researchers divide perfectionists into three types, based on answers to standardized questionnaires: Self-oriented strivers who struggle to live up to their high standards and appear to be at risk of self-critical depression; outwardly focused zealots who expect perfection from others, often ruining relationships; and those desperate to live up to an ideal they’re convinced others expect of them, a risk factor for suicidal thinking and eating disorders. Benedict Carey, board post 4th December 2007, ‘Unhappy? Self-Critical? Maybe You’re Just A Perfectionist’ citing The New York Times
1) The recent Morg donation of $100,000 for ‘Abuse’ is the first recorded for abuse and domestic violence, and was made in the same week as the Morg faced criticism on this Board [viz esias 12 June 2012: The Mormon Scandal of Domestic Violence].
2) The Morg has no overall policy and procedure, particularly in the Bishop's handbook, for cases of abuse and domestic violence ... [and] continues its abominable practise of lack of support for single mothers and encouraging them to abandon their babies ... The Morg refuses to launch an independent inquiry into the back catalogue of abuse cases … The statistics of Utah (and elsewhere) suggest significantly that the Morg makes abuse and domestic vioTence worse … offends any reasonable sense of a duty of care … the Morg makes youth suicides worse … [and] refuses to carry out a proper program of training and education for bishops ... esias, board post 18th May 2015, ‘Oh, Rage Against the Dying of the Morg Compassionate Light’
1. I went to Mongolia ... There are gangs of street kids that roam around the city. There were no real charities there to help them out and the Mongolians were always shooing them away like flies. We were natural targets for them because not only were we Americans, we were also pretty much the only people in the entire country that wore suits! We must all be filthy rich, right? They used to follow us around sometimes and beg. Our oh-so-Christ-like Mission President told us over and over that we were not to so much as talk to the street kids because they were distracting us from our real mission: to save souls. If we felt guilty about it then we were to donate any left-over money to the branch fast offering fund so that it could be administered ‘in the Lord’s way’. That was supposed to make us feel better.
Mongolia is a high desert, and so it is cold in the winter. I’m not talking about Utah cold either. I grew up in Alaska and I’ll be damned if I wasn't freezing all winter long! During the winter these kids would live under the streets because that was where the hot water pipes were. All of the buildings were steam-heated from central boilers spread throughout town and so there were hot pipes in the sewers. One spring there was a flashflood and hundreds of these kids drowned. Did anyone care? Did Christ’s true servants even so much as say a prayer for them?
It was common for these kids to sleep in the entrances of the apartment buildings. If they kept their mouths shut nobody would kick them out. Because they would beg from us our entrances seemed to have more of these kids in them than others. So here I am, a servant of Jesus Christ, with a pocket full of money and a kitchen full of food and starving homeless kids on the other side of my door. I caught hell for letting one in just one time!
Like so many missionaries I spent my 2 years feeling guilty ...
So here are these kids sleeping, starving, and even shitting in my entryway and sure enough, one morning we find one of them dead. Mormonism is responsible for fucking each of us up in our own special ways, and for me this was it. I was really messed-up over this dead kid that we had just ignored on our way into our apartment the night before. I went to the MP and bawled my eyes out to him. He gave me a blessing and it kinda made things better – that’s how brainwashed I was. I let a kid starve/freeze to death but it was ok because he was fast-tracked to the Celestial Kingdom.
What could a few tens of thousands of dollars from the church have done? There are places like this all over the world. I don’t believe in god or christ but if they had a ‘true’ church on this world, everyone would know it because of its fruits ... It makes me sick. (Akexmo, board post ‘Anger, Anger’)