_______________________________________________________________
 |
 |  MORMON WOMEN, PROZAC® and THERAPY 
 |  http://mormonwomen.lege.net/
 |
 |
 |  MORMON WOMEN, PROZAC® and THERAPY
 |
 |  Copyright © 2003 by Kent Ponder, Ph.D.
 |  e-mail address:  kponder@swcp.com
 |  This report may be freely forwarded, posted, faxed or
 |  otherwise published, so long as it remains untranslated, and
 |  my name, e-mail address and copyright notice are included,
 |  and nothing is removed, added or changed.
 |
 |
 |  THIS REPORT IS ADDRESSED TO:
 |
 |   *  LDS women taking antidepressants, and/or considering or
 |      undergoing psychological therapy, especially LDS women
 |      of color, Lesbian LDS women, and LDS women temple-
 |      married to homosexual men.
 |
 |   *  Those concerned about women as above described.
 |
 |   *  LDS religious counselors, and LDS professional
 |      psychological therapists who treat women as above
 |      described.
 |
 |
 |  Background:
 |
 |  From insights gained during and after my doctoral study of
 |  the psychology of cognitive-dissonance conflict, I have for
 |  many years become increasingly concerned about the profound
 |  mental torment of numerous innocent Mormon women, especially
 |  because the tormented are so often among Mormonism's "best
 |  and brightest" with regard to:
 |
 |  (a) intelligence,
 |
 |  (b) education,
 |
 |  (c) propensity for clear rationality,
 |
 |  (d) sense of factual conscientiousness.
 |
 |  During the last six years I have conducted extensive
 |  research, consisting partly of interviews conducted face to
 |  face and by telephone, fax and e-mail, of nearly three
 |  hundred individuals as described below under "Types of
 |  Individuals Interviewed." I have been motivated to produce
 |  this report by the increasingly massive and heart-wrenching
 |  extent of the problem, which so deeply offends my sense of
 |  justice and compassion.
 |
 |
 |  The Goals of This Report:
 |
 |  (a) To examine and illuminate root causes of many Mormon
 |      women's chronic depression that leads to the use of
 |      antidepressant drugs and psychological therapy.
 |
 |  (b) To report the personal experiences, questions and
 |      observations of many of these women.
 |
 |  (c) To help reduce the need for and use of antidepressant
 |      drugs and therapy.
 |
 |  (d) To express the hope that LDS counselors and therapists,
 |      by increasing awareness of root causes, will improve
 |      their attitudes and counseling methods that now too
 |      often reinforce the causes of damage, thus intensifying
 |      it.
 |
 |  (e) To comment on LDS women's first-hand reports of personal
 |      experiences, beliefs and attitudes, with additional
 |      observations on my numerous communications with LDS
 |      Church counselors and professional therapists.
 |
 |  (f) To allow each reader to assess her/his own level of
 |      understanding, agreement and course of action.
 |
 |  (g) To let readers of this report provide me additional data
 |      by e-mail.
 |
 |
 |        IMPORTANT NOTE: This report's goals do not focus on:
 |
 |        (a) establishing the truth or untruth of Mormonism's
 |            doctrinal and/or historical claims.
 |
 |        (b) evaluating the aggregate, overall efficacy of the
 |            Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
 |
 |
 |  About the Tone and Style of This Report
 |
 |  Several sections of this report are not written with
 |  unemotional scientific detachment. It is difficult to be
 |  emotionally detached from the horrendous mental anguish
 |  experienced by so many entirely innocent Mormon women, as
 |  reflected in their rate of purchase of antidepressants.
 |  Though I've honored the facts by not skewing them, you will
 |  note that some of them are presented and exemplified (often
 |  by the women themselves) dramatically, even forcefully,
 |  because:
 |
 |  (a) the tragic extent of the problem is itself dramatic, and
 |      needs to be presented forcefully,
 |
 |  (b) forceful language may be helpful, or even necessary, to
 |      jar LDS men's consciousness into a state of greater
 |      awareness, hopefully breaking through their/our habitual
 |      LDS-cultural view of LDS women.
 |
 |  Types of Individuals Interviewed:
 |
 |  (1) Nearly three hundred LDS women in four categories:
 |
 |       (a) church-active believers,
 |
 |       (b) church-active nonbelievers,
 |
 |       (c) church-inactive believers, and
 |
 |       (d) church-inactive nonbelievers (none excommunicated,
 |           nor anti-Mormon in activity).
 |
 |  (2) LDS bishopric members acting as religious counselors.
 |
 |  (3) Actively believing LDS professional family counselors
 |      and therapists.
 |
 |
 |  Utah Leads In Antidepressant Drug Use.
 |
 |  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. Approximately
 |  70% of Utahns are Mormons. Jim Jorgenson, director of
 |  pharmacy services for the University of Utah, confirmed that
 |  Utah has the highest percentage of anti-depressant use,
 |  hypothesizing that large families, larger in Utah than in
 |  other states, produce greater stress. (Large Utah families
 |  are primarily Mormon families).
 |
 |  The same LDS Church that works so well for many works very
 |  badly for many others, who become chronically depressed,
 |  especially women. Studies indicate that women suffer twice
 |  as much depression as men. These individuals then cope with
 |  their chronic mental pain and depression by using
 |  anti-depressant drugs and/or treatment by LDS therapists,
 |  who too often treat them ignorantly and counterproductively
 |  -- though typically with such smug assurance that it borders
 |  on unintended arrogance.
 |
 |
 |  Being Clear About Issues
 |
 |  The issue addressed in this report should not be confused
 |  with issues such as the reported low suicide rate of young
 |  Mormon males. Male depression and suicide are one scenario;
 |  female depression and Prozac are a very different scenario.
 |  Suicide is more aggressive; depression is more passive. In
 |  Utah, women's and Mormon women's factually confirmed rate of
 |  depression and Prozac use is the highest in the US, and far
 |  higher than that of men in Utah.
 |
 |
 |  About Good vs. Bad  --  Beneficial vs. Detrimental:
 |
 |  Some of the same beliefs and practices that are more good
 |  than bad for some LDS individuals are more bad than good for
 |  others. Because I am lifelong LDS, I intimately know and
 |  support the many recognized and highly publicized benefits
 |  (individual and social) of Mormonism. And I recognize, too,
 |  its harmful aspects, some of them profoundly damaging to
 |  many innocent women.
 |
 |        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.
 |
 |
 |  As For Me, I Experienced the Benefits. --  Here's My LDS
 |  "Gratitude List":
 |
 |  I'm one of the fortunate ones. For me, Mormonism worked
 |  well. I'm very grateful for:
 |
 |   *  growing up LDS (fourth-generation),
 |
 |   *  participating in LDS sporting events, plays, trips,
 |      dances, group projects,
 |
 |   *  giving sermons from early boyhood on, learning confident
 |      public speaking,
 |
 |   *  avoiding tobacco, alcohol, harmful friendships, illicit
 |      sex,
 |
 |   *  marrying a fourth-generation LDS girl in an LDS temple
 |      (Idaho Falls),
 |
 |   *  serving a full-time mission,
 |
 |   *  raising seven morally clean and healthy LDS children
 |      (five daughters and two sons).
 |
 |   *  being taught and encouraged by numerous LDS women, my
 |      teachers in various church auxiliaries,
 |
 |  Virtually all of the valuable formative influences on me
 |  throughout boyhood and teen years were church-related. LDS
 |  clergy, doctrine and training taught me to love education,
 |  motivating me to achievements I'm sure I never would have
 |  reached without it. Examples:
 |
 |   *  studied at U. of Illinois, BYU (honors B.A.), U. of
 |      Madrid, Middlebury Graduate School (honors M.A.),
 |      Stanford, Yale, Georgetown (highest-honors Ph.D.).
 |
 |   *  taught at Stanford U., Georgetown U., US Naval Academy,
 |      State U. of New York, etc.
 |
 |  I'm certain I wouldn't have developed even a third of that
 |  academic zeal on my own. My wife's and my "Mormotivation"
 |  was so focused for nineteen years that we honestly didn't
 |  even know, until our oldest daughter told us (sparing our
 |  pride 'til then), that for years she'd known that our family
 |  was eligible for free school lunches and food stamps.
 |
 |  The Costs of Focus: I've described the benefits of focus,
 |  but there were heavy costs. As with flashlights, the
 |  brightness of a focused beam is offset by the dimness or
 |  even darkness around it.
 |
 |
 |  My Wife's Less-Positive List:
 |
 |  Please reread the "gratitude-reasons" above, noticing that
 |  they are mostly my reasons, not my wife's. As head-of-family
 |  priesthood bearer, I benefited far more from Mormonism than
 |  she did. While I proudly acquired degrees, respect, Time and
 |  Newsweek write-ups, as well as spousal love and support, my
 |  loyal wife accumulated her own list (unexaggerated):
 |
 |   *  Internalized the Book of Mormon's demeaning description
 |      of her gorgeous brown skin: "dark and loathsome." (She
 |      is Samoan)
 |
 |   *  Felt second-class and chronically drained,
 |
 |   *  Suffered years-long psychosomatic eczema that oozed,
 |      blistered, bled and looked like radiation burns.
 |
 |   *  Bore eight children (that's 72 months pregnant),
 |
 |   *  Raised seven of them to maturity (an eighth died in
 |      infancy),
 |
 |   *  Hand-sewed all the clothes for our daughters, except
 |      thrift-store purchases,
 |
 |   *  Did all cleaning up after nine people (often with no
 |      washer or dryer at home),
 |
 |   *  Prepared almost all meals for nine people,
 |
 |   *  Did work-horse shopping and errands for nine people,
 |
 |   *  Held a few part-time jobs (out of the house) for extra
 |      income,
 |
 |   *  Managed all household finances, did all letter writing,
 |      bill paying, record keeping, income-tax calculating and
 |      filing,
 |
 |   *  Practiced spartan self-denial on my grad-student and
 |      teacher income,
 |
 |  In Short:  She Struggled and Stagnated . . . Enabling Me To
 |  Star and Strut.
 |
 |        What astonishes me now is recalling that, at that
 |        time, I blithely took for granted everything she was
 |        doing. I'm ashamed to admit that I never gave most of
 |        it a second thought.
 |
 |  I was too busy exulting in my LDS male role to even perceive
 |  her work-horse status, which I accepted as normal status
 |  quo, nor did I notice (nor would I have understood) that
 |  some Mormon beliefs are direct root causes of serious harm
 |  to many women.
 |
 |        And if I had noticed, I'd have assumed I was wrong
 |        because, after all, how could God's only true Church
 |        directly harm righteous women? That would have been my
 |        "unarguably correct" LDS logic.
 |
 |
 |  Eight Mormon Women Finally Woke Me Up.
 |
 |  My attention was drawn to these problems by eight dynamic
 |  LDS women:
 |
 |  (a) My multi-talented, "pack-mule" wife, as above.
 |
 |  (b) Our five daughters, one of whom, temple-married to a
 |      wonderful LDS man, became so doctrine-tormented that her
 |      weight plummeted and she stood in her kitchen at night,
 |      screaming and pulling her hair.
 |
 |  (c) My psychology-degreed younger sister who, though
 |      talented enough to teach communication courses to US
 |      federal agencies and to be an award-winning performing
 |      artist, suffered chronic doctrinal worries that caused
 |      her great anxiety and depression during her strongest-
 |      LDS-belief years.
 |
 |  (d) My Utah-pioneer-descended mother, who died prior to my
 |      awakening of awareness. Though married to a kind and
 |      supportive man (my father, who paid for my mission), her
 |      worried wrestling with LDS catch-22 concepts reduced her
 |      from the cheery, mentally and physically robust women I
 |      had known as a boy, to this list:
 |
 |   *  crying nightmares,
 |
 |   *  chronic sick-bed migraines,
 |
 |   *  occasional hallucinations,
 |
 |   *  paranoid accusations and profanity,
 |
 |   *  antidepressant-drug addiction (Valium®, etc. -- she died
 |      prior to Prozac®),
 |
 |   *  several mental-hospital confinements,
 |
 |   *  psychosomatic auto-immune disorders including crippling
 |      rheumatoid arthritis that ended her years as ward
 |      pianist, organist and chorister -- all while
 |      uncomplainingly loving the Church.
 |
 |
 |  New Times -- New Knowledge -- New Opportunities
 |
 |  Until the mid-1900s, some LDS beliefs served women much
 |  better than now. Most women used to be naturally dependent
 |  upon men for safety and livelihood, resulting in
 |  more-natural subservience to male control. Because
 |  subservience to males was more needed and natural, it was
 |  less oppressive and depressing.
 |
 |        But now, because subservience to males is less needed,
 |        it is less wanted, thus more oppressive and depressing
 |        to many females. Notice that I didn't say subservience
 |        to males is unwanted; I said less wanted. Many women
 |        still feel comfortable with it. But not the strongest
 |        and brightest women.
 |
 |  In the US and a few other countries, women now generally
 |  share in rights, freedoms and opportunities on a par with
 |  men. Also, more church-conflicting knowledge from science
 |  and history is now available, even in popular magazines and
 |  on the internet.
 |
 |
 |  Why Are So Many Mormon Women Severely Depressed?
 |
 |  As noted above, Utah is about 70% LDS, and women lead men in
 |  depression (by about double). Why is Utah #1 in the US in
 |  antidepressant-drug use, notably Prozac®?  Why are twice as
 |  many women affected? A standard answer is that LDS women are
 |  overworked, heading large families, struggling to meet
 |  too-high expectations of perfection. There's some truth in
 |  that, but there are other, more fundamental, reasons.
 |
 |  Three realities are much more basic. In the Mormon Church:
 |
 |        1. For females, "One size fits all,"
 |
 |        2. Females obey males from birth to death.
 |
 |        3. Females lack control of their own life choices,
 |
 |  Any Mormon reading this report will recognize that virtually
 |  all LDS girls are taught from childhood to do all 24 of the
 |  following:
 |
 |   *  be respectfully, politely, humbly and gratefully
 |      subservient to Mormon males in personal demeanor,
 |      activities, beliefs, plans and thought.
 |
 |   *  not be, nor aspire to be, nor hope to be, independent
 |      from authoritarian males, nor independent in thought.
 |
 |   *  attend male-directed religious services.
 |
 |   *  participate in male-directed activities. (Even
 |      female-led projects are organized under male
 |      authorities.)
 |
 |   *  attend male-directed weekday seminary classes in
 |      addition to academic school.
 |
 |   *  obey all male-hierarchy-generated directives.
 |
 |   *  submit to male-originated personal-matter (including
 |      sexual) private interviews.
 |
 |   *  obtain a Patriarchal Blessing which usually promises
 |      becoming a mother in Zion if faithful and obedient.
 |
 |   *  do genealogy research on male-headed (patriarchal)
 |      family lineages.
 |
 |   *  marry an LDS man in an LDS temple.
 |
 |   *  accept counsel from her husband, and not as just his
 |      opinion, but as God-inspired revelation.
 |
 |   *  look to her husband as essential to her entry into the
 |      best category of Heaven.
 |
 |   *  have children, more being far better than few.
 |
 |   *  raise all of her children in this exact-same system.
 |
 |   *  attend only the chapel assigned to her residence
 |      address, regardless of preference.
 |
 |   *  accept that if she and family attend any other than this
 |      chapel, she and they cannot enter Mormon temples.
 |
 |   *  know that her husband may, in the next life, marry
 |      numerous additional wives.
 |
 |   *  know that she may not marry any additional husband, here
 |      (if still married to the first one) or hereafter.
 |
 |   *  accept callings to work in church, auxiliary and
 |      welfare-project organizations.
 |
 |   *  make several forms of financial contributions, ten
 |      percent tithing being only one.
 |
 |   *  teach her children to become missionaries to convert
 |      other individuals into this same system.
 |
 |   *  teach this same system to her grandchildren.
 |
 |   *  teach her daughters and granddaughters to obey males at
 |      home and at church.
 |
 |   *  never openly criticize any doctrine, practice, directive
 |      or male authority related to any of the above.
 |
 |  That's the "One Size Fits All Females" list of 24 items.
 |  Each LDS female gains and retains respect, and even
 |  acceptance, only by adhering to the behaviors and attitudes
 |  above, assigned to her by others, most often males, rather
 |  than freely chosen by herself.
 |
 |
 |  Are The Above-Listed Items Beneficial? --  or Harmful?
 |
 |  Ironically, they're both -- just not to the same women.
 |
 |  Different women are impacted very differently.
 |
 |  Many LDS women do benefit, managing to more or less cope
 |  with that list. As the recent book, Mormon America, by
 |  Richard and Joan Ostling, validly reports about Mormonism,
 |  "For the most part, it works."
 |
 |        But this report is written to and about equally good
 |        women for whom it doesn't work. Many of these women
 |        discover that, too often, what they pray for is what
 |        keeps them in depression. For these women, ironically
 |        and tragically, the more prayer, the more depression!
 |
 |  Some women wonder how this can happen. It can happen because
 |  in reality and truth one size doesn't fit all. People are
 |  genetically different in abilities and interests in ways
 |  that the "One Size Fits All" list ignores. As proven by
 |  respected studies, identical twins separated at birth
 |  usually have, as adults, remarkably similar interests,
 |  abilities and personalities despite having always lived in
 |  totally different environments -- demonstrating that their
 |  genetics played a larger role than environment. The LDS
 |  Church is an environment,
 |
 |        My point is that the LDS Church's "One Size Fits All
 |        Women" is an environment that ignores these powerful,
 |        genetically based, individual differences. The Church
 |        is not a genetic-alteration device. For many people,
 |        genetic differences cannot be crammed into One Size
 |        Fits All without great, chronic mental stresses.
 |
 |  Or, stated another way, for some LDS women to strive to be
 |  an excellent Relief-Society-oriented homemaker, mother of
 |  six and church worker is like Oprah Winfrey striving to be a
 |  basketball player, or Katie Couric trying to be happy as a
 |  seamstress.
 |
 |  During my focused-zeal years, I would have mistakenly
 |  attacked the underscored sentences above as being
 |  theologically impossible. [Editor: Those are words such as
 |  "what they pray for is what keeps them in depression", "the
 |  more prayer, the more depression", etc. This ASCII version
 |  doesn't retain underscores.]
 |
 |  For whom doesn't the LDS gospel work? -- Whom doesn't it
 |  fit?
 |
 |
 |  One Outstanding, Righteous Woman Whom It Didn't and Doesn't
 |  Fit
 |
 |  One of my temple-married daughters describes Mormonism in
 |  these exact words:
 |
 |        "It's so counter-intuitive for women, so full of
 |        gender unfairness and contradictions. The Church's
 |        attitude, 'we'll tell you what you're worth' isn't
 |        self-worth. If a woman has any sense of self-worth, it
 |        attacks her on all fronts. And to have any real
 |        difference of opinion means having to go against every
 |        person in your [church] community."
 |
 |
 |  More About, "We'll tell you what you're worth."
 |
 |  Some of "telling you what you're worth" is communicated by
 |  direct implication. Many women, including my daughter, are
 |  able to perceive that it "attacks [them] on all fronts."
 |  Here's one of the fronts mentioned:
 |
 |        "In the LDS universe, theologically described as the
 |        real eternal universe, each man who achieves the
 |        highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom is worth many
 |        times more than each woman, even the women who qualify
 |        at that highest Celestial level, because each man who
 |        achieves Godhood-level may have numerous God-wives,
 |        but each God-wife may have only one husband. This can
 |        only mean that each "heavenly father" is worth many,
 |        many times more than each "heavenly mother."  And,
 |        even if the ratio were strictly one to one, the male
 |        God, not the female God, holds the priesthood
 |        authority and is the only one of the God parents to
 |        whom his earth-mortality children are allowed to pray.
 |        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."
 |
 |        My daughter's "problem" was only that she was
 |        intelligent enough to perceive that clearly.
 |
 |  In a similar vein, other LDS women have learned of the web
 |  site www.reformmormonism.org, which includes the following
 |  in their section titled, "A Message to LDS Women":
 |
 |        "You have known intense religious pressure to conform
 |        your life and your life's objectives to a
 |        predetermined pattern, one that does not necessarily
 |        take into consideration that which you want to pursue
 |        in your life, but one that is predictable and
 |        comfortable for others. You have seen your religious
 |        organization use your financial contributions to
 |        pursue political activities designed to insure that
 |        you are not treated equally under the law."
 |
 |
 |  More About "Worth" . . . The "Personal Worthiness"
 |  Interviews For LDS women, male definition of female worth
 |  begins early. LDS females are taught from childhood that
 |  males who are divinely appointed have authority over central
 |  aspects of these girls' own bodies, thoughts, and behavior.
 |  This occurs in regular, private "personal worthiness"
 |  interviews, conducted, usually with good intentions, by one
 |  or another of her male bishopric during her childhood/teen
 |  years.
 |
 |  Even worse, despite generally good intentions, sometimes
 |  male prurience accompanies the process. Our daughters once
 |  asked me if they had to submit to these private, very
 |  intimate interviews conducted by an LDS man they described
 |  as "dirty-minded and creepy." I replied, "Not if you don't
 |  want to; it's entirely up to you." They didn't want to and
 |  they didn't. I then just let our bishop's negative reaction
 |  roll off my back without comment. But not all LDS fathers
 |  are as self-assured in defense of their daughters' right to
 |  choose privacy from personal sexual questions. Not even I,
 |  as their father, ever subjected them to that intrusion. Nor
 |  did their mother.
 |
 |
 |  Walking The Walk
 |
 |  If a church's "belief shoes" (by analogy) are all narrow,
 |  even though they vary in length, which women will think this
 |  works? Those with narrow feet, of course; they will benefit.
 |  Those with wide feet will be in pain and wondering why. When
 |  bishoprics and therapists have strong religious conviction
 |  that narrow shoes are God's only true shoes, they offer corn
 |  and bunion pads to pained women with wide feet. Women who've
 |  been taught to believe that narrow feet are the true feet
 |  will accept this belief and the officially dispensed corn
 |  pads, whether their own feet are narrow or wide. Their
 |  thinking doesn't let them even conceive of solving their
 |  problem by changing their shoes.
 |
 |
 |  Marching The March
 |
 |  How far can a female LDS soldier march in too-narrow combat
 |  boots? The LDS hymn defining us all as, "We Are All Enlisted
 |  'Til The Conflict is "O'er" symbolizes the problem. Recall
 |  its phrase, "Soldiers in the army." How many US women would
 |  find a "fit" in the US Army or any army? The fact that some
 |  women do doesn't help the many who don't. Only one of my
 |  five daughters marches daily and comfortably in the
 |  LDS-assigned, narrow footwear.
 |
 |  The unhappy LDS women sense that something is fundamentally
 |  wrong with thinking that all LDS females are divinely
 |  conscripted into regimentation as "soldiers in the army."
 |
 |        The idea of freely chosen enlistment versus coerced
 |        conscription was given to me by the woman who said,
 |
 |              "My parents converted before I was born. I was
 |               born in the Church. I didn't enlist, I was
 |               drafted,"
 |
 |  These women mistakenly feel that something is wrong with
 |  them, because even though they're in the true church that
 |  teaches them that they "are that they might have joy,"
 |  they're not experiencing joy.
 |
 |
 |  I've Exchanged Hundreds of E-mails With LDS Professional
 |  Therapists.
 |
 |  Through my communications with many LDS bishopric counselors
 |  and professional LDS therapists (including hundreds of
 |  e-mails during the last few years), they've sent me repeated
 |  confirmation that their thinking usually doesn't let them
 |  even suspect that the shoes (by analogy) are the problem.
 |  They're profoundly certain that the feet are the problem
 |  because the narrow shoes, which they see as divinely
 |  designed and endowed, must fit all women's feet -- at least
 |  must fit all righteous women's feet.
 |
 |        But I don't condemn the therapists for thinking that
 |        way, because I used to see things just as they do.
 |        During my first fifteen years of marriage, I would
 |        have "known," by male Mormon logic, that pained and
 |        depressed women should (analogously speaking) undergo
 |        foot operations, not change their shoes.
 |
 |        It is angering to notice that the women for whom
 |        Mormonism does not work are often the highest-caliber
 |        in intelligence, education, rational ability and
 |        conscientiousness. Thus, this report.
 |
 |        (It is also disturbing to notice that the time periods
 |        corresponding to women's greatest reported belief in
 |        Mormonism is in positive correlation with the time
 |        periods corresponding to their greatest damage from
 |        depression.)
 |
 |
 |  Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch:
 |
 |        Here's another analogy, this time from an LDS
 |        rancher-woman in Mesa, Arizona: If we LDS were horses
 |        or ducks, she told me, we'd see that we've been
 |        lifelong-taught that God sends women to earth to be
 |        plow-horse broodmares or egg layers, not allowed to be
 |        race or show horses, or peaceful pond paddlers, at
 |        least not without profound guilt and forfeiture of top
 |        celestial rank.
 |
 |        The women who experience the severest strain in the
 |        harness feel, as this sister from Mesa said, that the
 |        hymn, "'Put Your Shoulder To The Wheel' should be
 |        titled, 'Push Your Shoulder To the Yoke,' or even
 |        'Haw!' or 'Mush!'" -- as she reminded me of the
 |        sled-dog saying, "If you're not the lead dog, the view
 |        never changes," adding, "For me, the view hasn't
 |        changed in thirty years."
 |
 |
 |  "View Never changes"  means  Blocked Personal Growth
 |
 |  Dozens of women (including four of my daughters) have
 |  reported that this same-view monotony, this endless focus on
 |  homemaking crafts and yearly recycling of essentially same
 |  lesson manuals in which sometimes the noticeable change is
 |  just the color of a cover, a sameness in which even the
 |  adult-gospel-doctrine manual has on occasion been the same
 |  as the one for sixteen-year-olds except for a few added
 |  questions at the ends of chapters, leaves many women feeling
 |  stymied and blocked in important avenues of personal growth.
 |  This droning sameness was a key factor that led my daughter
 |  to scream and tear her hair. And women say they've noted
 |  that, increasingly, LDS men chosen for ward and stake
 |  leadership positions are the types who, though personable
 |  and administratively adept, are sometimes too dull or narrow
 |  in awareness to be cognizant of this monotony, even after
 |  it's been brought repeatedly to their attention.
 |
 |
 |  Males Rule Females
 |
 |  Nearly all LDS girls internalize from near-infancy the
 |  teaching that priesthood-authority males have a literal
 |  God-appointed right to enter their most fundamental
 |  thoughts, desires and choices. Many women (including my
 |  wife, whose father was a Patriarch for many years) have told
 |  me that they have felt spiritually "owned" by their father
 |  and bishop until transferred to their husband and new
 |  bishop, and thus are not able to experience an adolescence
 |  into full adulthood. Women who are affected by this syndrome
 |  often remain stunted as emotionally child-like (which some
 |  men find charming), even retaining a child's voice tone.
 |
 |  From childhood, the LDS female is thoroughly trained to be,
 |  in behavior and thought, submissive to a long and imposing
 |  list of males with authority linking directly to God
 |  Himself. This list, proceeding from the least authority
 |  upward, includes but is not limited to these several dozens:
 |
 |   *  her husband,
 |
 |   *  her three bishopric males,
 |
 |   *  her two home-teacher males,
 |
 |   *  her three stake presidency males,
 |
 |   *  Quorum of the Seventy males,
 |
 |   *  Presiding Bishopric males,
 |
 |   *  Church Patriarch (a male),
 |
 |   *  Assistants to the Twelve Apostles,
 |
 |   *  Quorum of Twelve (male) Apostles,
 |
 |   *  First Presidency (who are three additional male
 |      Apostles).
 |
 |  She learns that she absolutely cannot enter the highest
 |  heavenly kingdom without a temple-married husband. She is
 |  totally dependent upon her husband because:
 |
 |   *  Her husband will lead her by hand "through the veil" to
 |      celestial existence,
 |
 |   *  Her role in heaven will be to continue forever bearing
 |      offspring for him as one of his wives.
 |
 |   *  She knows there is no approved escape from this
 |      God-decreed, interminable destiny for females, because
 |      it is the system that existed for gods in pre-existent
 |      worlds prior to this earth, and will exist without end
 |      in the future for her, her husband-god and vast numbers
 |      of other gods.
 |
 |  Note that I haven't labeled the above as detrimental or
 |  beneficial per se, or even as false or true. I'm just
 |  stating that the above is what the LDS female has been
 |  taught to believe. The perception of detriment or benefit
 |  depends on the kind of woman doing the perceiving and
 |  experiencing.
 |
 |        The above beliefs, whether true or false, constitute a
 |        massive weight of inevitability that underlies and
 |        affects, at least subconsciously, the LDS woman's
 |        every belief, thought and action,increasing in this
 |        weight according to the extent that she believes them
 |        to be literally true. In other words, the truer the
 |        heavier.
 |
 |              Some women, therefore, out of the normal need
 |              for emotional survival, begin to look to the
 |              hope that this monolithic mass may not be
 |              literally true, as a window of hope to maintain
 |              or regain emotional and physical health.
 |
 |              They sense it as: "If it is true, I'm truly
 |              doomed."
 |
 |
 |  Security Versus Freedom.
 |
 |  As Will and Ariel Durant point out in their book, The
 |  Lessons of History, security and freedom are like two
 |  buckets in a well: when one comes up, the other goes down.
 |  Some people are more attracted to security, others to
 |  freedom and opportunity for self-directed growth.
 |
 |  Some women find security and comfort in male direction and
 |  decision and eternal male rule, just as some find security
 |  in convents, or even in prisons (a few so much so that after
 |  release they commit new crimes in order to return to prison:
 |  their comfort zone).
 |
 |  The LDS women this report is about don't find comfort in the
 |  concept of eternal male decision and rule; they find chronic
 |  pain whether they believe it is true or not, and the truer,
 |  the more pain.
 |
 |
 |  My Personal Awakening about Mormon Women
 |
 |  I recall the exact moment when I first grasped the weight
 |  and the eternal, inevitable implication of what LDS females
 |  are taught. I was conducting our weekly family home evening
 |  in upstate New York, looking at our beautiful daughters (one
 |  of whom later became Miss California in the Miss USA
 |  Pageant, by the way), when the silent thought suddenly
 |  struck me, "Thank the Lord I'm not female."
 |
 |  That's when I first began to mentally put myself in my
 |  wife's and daughters' LDS shoes, thinking of their eternally
 |  unalterable second-class status as females. That night I
 |  awoke and spent hours sitting on the edge of the bed,
 |  holding my head in my hands.
 |
 |
 |  Let's Hear Directly From Women
 |
 |  Dozens of women I've interviewed have phrased their negative
 |  experiences in heart-wrenching, haunting ways. I next quote
 |  a homemaker and businesswoman, temple-married with children,
 |  church-active with a strong conviction of LDS truth, who
 |  permitted me to record this, which I've decided to
 |  transcribe for you including all of her hesitation sounds:
 |
 |        "Well yes I --uh -- I do [long breath] take Prozac,
 |        Brother Ponder, I've -- umm -- taken it for quite some
 |        - uh -- mmm -- a very long time now, and yes, I do
 |        strongly believe that the gospel is true; -- uh -- I
 |        know it's true and -- uh -- I'm one who gets that
 |        'burning in the bosom' and even a redness on my neck
 |        and -- umm -- I don't like to bear my testimony from
 |        the stand for that reason -- it's so visible -- . . .
 |        What worries me is that the more I know the gospel is
 |        true the more I feel I'm losing my mind. I bear my
 |        testimony to feel better but later I feel worse --
 |        like losing my mind. I think I could -- uh -- be
 |        happier if I didn't -- uh -- did not believe the
 |        Church was -- is true. I think if I didn't believe the
 |        gospel I could be -- uh -- would be off of this
 |        treadmill that is making me feel almost crazy and
 |        sometimes I frighten my poor husband, the poor thing,
 |        he's so sweet about it. Umm -- I wish I knew what to
 |        do -- umm -- I still  have hope even though prayer --
 |        umm -- my praying and fasting hasn't helped, and that
 |        makes me feel worse, you know what I mean? . . . For
 |        now I think there are worse things for me than Prozac
 |        -- umm -- even cheeseburgers [laugh]  . . . I believe
 |        it's helping me -- umm -- Prozac helps me save my
 |        sanity for the sake of our children."
 |
 |
 |  Again:  Which LDS women are benefited?  Which are harmed?
 |
 |  We've talked shoes, horses, ducks, convents, prisons . . .
 |  Bear with me one more time and consider surfing. My Samoan
 |  wife and daughters are skilled ocean swimmers; three are
 |  good surfers (California, Hawaii). By analogy, if a church
 |  were to teach that God's divine scriptures forbid women to
 |  surf or swim in the ocean, which women would embrace such a
 |  doctrine and which would not? Poor swimmers would like the
 |  prohibition; they'd find security, protection and comfort in
 |  it.
 |
 |        It would protect them from letting others know that
 |        they're weak swimmers, so they can stay safely out of
 |        the water while enjoying the illusion of feeling
 |        righteously superior. The fact that people ordinarily
 |        aren't aware of the psychology of this syndrome
 |        further protects their feelings of confidence and
 |        illusion of spiritual superiority.
 |
 |  But strong swimmers with surfing talent would not like it.
 |  They would see nonbeliever women surfing and swimming with
 |  their friends and daughters, and would lower their heads and
 |  return to their laundry, feeling deprived and maybe . . .
 |  depressed.
 |
 |  The happy LDS woman is often the one who likes restriction
 |  of choices. She gains security from having to make fewer
 |  decisions since so many are made for her. But the strong
 |  swimmers who are not allowed to swim and surf in the ocean
 |  feel depressed by being made to stay in the shallow pools.
 |
 |  The Right to Control Her Main Choices According To Her
 |  Abilities -- Not To Feel Owned, Coerced, Stymied.
 |
 |  Even many animals become depressed under conditions of lack
 |  of control.
 |
 |   *  Our youngest son even has two large iguana lizards that
 |      react that way.
 |
 |   *  Experiments have shown that when rats cannot control
 |      whether they are shocked or not, they fall into
 |      depression and lose the motivation even to flee from or
 |      resist the shocks.
 |
 |   *  The shocks themselves don't depress them if they have
 |      some control; it's the lack of control that depresses
 |      them, and then the shocks deplete and defeat them.
 |
 |   *  Zoo keepers know that animals in small, boring cages
 |      also often become depressed, listless, neurotic and ill.
 |
 |  Some LDS women feel that they are in small, stifling or
 |  suffocating mental cages, with no real control and no way
 |  out -- ever.
 |
 |        An inactive LDS woman described her active
 |        late-middle-aged LDS friends' facial expressions in
 |        church: "They're just sitting around waiting to die."
 |
 |  Non-LDS women (including other Christian believers) are free
 |  to choose. They choose without first being required to get
 |  permission from men.
 |
 |
 |  Retarded Emotional and Intellectual Development.
 |
 |  Many of the women report that they have suffered from being
 |  treated as children after becoming adults.
 |
 |        One woman told me: "Having to play 'Mother, may I?' is
 |        bad enough. We have to play 'Father, may I?' -- and it
 |        never ends."
 |
 |        Another: "Men in the Church can't help treating us
 |        this way. It's like a Priesthood-produced blind spot.
 |        They don't even know they're doing it. How can they
 |        know? We've all been taught it's right."
 |
 |        [Remember this comment about "blind spot" as you read,
 |        further on, the LDS White male obstetrician's comment
 |        about Black women.]
 |
 |
 |  Subconscious vs. Conscious:  Intuitive vs. Analytical.
 |
 |  The Intuitive Ones: Many LDS women (like many men, for that
 |  matter) don't study and analyze doctrines, teachings and
 |  practices academically or scientifically. The unhappy
 |  campers in this group just subconsciously intuit, or
 |  socially perceive, that some things are just plain
 |  drastically amiss and don't make sense, or sometimes they
 |  mistakenly feel that they themselves are the problem. The
 |  women in my family, unusually bright and extraordinarily
 |  perceptive but not preferentially scholarly, tended to be of
 |  this category, developing eczema or rheumatoid arthritis or
 |  screaming in the kitchen at night, etc.
 |
 |  The Analytical Ones: Other LDS women may have a more
 |  scientific inclination or historical/academic-research bent.
 |  The unhappy campers in this consciously analytical group
 |  tend to seek out information in order to compare and
 |  contrast ideas. Some of them dig into archives, search the
 |  internet, examine old documents, sometimes developing
 |  cognitive-dissonance headaches and brain-fog worries trying
 |  to make sense of it all.
 |
 |
 |  Examples of Women's Intuitive Observations:
 |
 |   *  Some women are observant enough to notice that LDS
 |      converts seem to be, by and large, emotional-security
 |      seekers rather than factual-truth seekers. A few
 |      college-educated women have said they notice that the
 |      truth-seeker profile doesn't fit the LDS-convert
 |      profile.
 |
 |   *  Some women say they notice that, increasingly,
 |      firm-testimony LDS are (in the words they've used)
 |      "kooky," "nerdy," "nutty," "weird," "wacky." My third
 |      daughter used the term "hypnotized."
 |
 |   *  Some women say that too often those who teach gospel
 |      subjects, especially genealogy, are among the "nutty"
 |      people mentioned above. They wonder how such ostensibly
 |      important activities in the one true church are so often
 |      headed up by such nutty people.
 |
 |        One woman expressed it this way: "It's like the
 |        televangelist problem; would God pick such nuts to be
 |        his spokesmen?"
 |
 |   *  Some women have noticed that LDS men who defend
 |      scriptural "people" issues and handle their ward
 |      congregation's people problems are just not "people
 |      people."  By this the women (who tend to be more alert
 |      to social relations than men) mean that engineers and
 |      mathematicians, etc. who hold forth on sociology,
 |      history or philosophical/theological subjects, etc.,
 |      demonstrate too little affinity or ability for it.
 |
 |        As one woman said it: "In about twenty years, we've
 |        never had a bishop or stake president who understands
 |        people. The bishop we have now is a computer
 |        technician who doesn't understand about women or real
 |        people in real life. He's like a caricature of a
 |        bishop. . . . Oh no, my husband and I never ask him
 |        anything."
 |
 |
 |  Bridging Intuitive and Analytical:
 |
 |  So those are some of the worries reported from the intuitive
 |  side. Here's one that bridges intuitive and
 |  scientific/historical. Women don't have to be personally up
 |  to speed on the science involved to ask these intelligently
 |  perceptive questions:
 |
 |   *  Some intuitively perceptive women recall that they have
 |      been lifelong-taught that the loving Jesus Christ of the
 |      New Testament and Book of Mormon is the same being as
 |      the fiery Jehovah of the Old Testament, and thus is the
 |      same being who, when little boys were teasing a prophet
 |      about hair loss, this God's solution was to send bears
 |      out of the woods to kill the boys. The women wonder why
 |      the highest divine intelligence would do such an
 |      unconscionably vicious thing. They wonder if it doesn't
 |      make a lot more sense to believe that an ancient writer
 |      just claimed that a god did a thing that seems so crazy,
 |      rather than believe that their LDS God really did
 |      something that by today's moral standards seems to them
 |      so psychotic.
 |
 |        One woman worded it this way: "That's a man's invented
 |        idea about God. No woman believes in her heart that
 |        God would use bears to kill boys. Even Satan isn't
 |        reported to have done anything that vile."
 |
 |   *  Some women, though they haven't academically dug into
 |      the data, intuitively wonder why virtually all respected
 |      scientists and historians in the entire world, other
 |      than a few LDS ones, believe that the Book of Abraham
 |      (B of A) is fiction having nothing to do with any
 |      Egyptian papyri? And why do all these scientists believe
 |      that the three Facsimiles as published in the B of A do
 |      not relate in any credible way to the B of A text, Hugh
 |      Nibley's explanations notwithstanding?
 |
 |   *  And why, these intuitive women wonder, do the majority
 |      of educated specialists who examine the Book of Mormon
 |      (B of M) conclude that it's not true? Why do virtually
 |      all respected archeologists, anthropologists,
 |      historians, linguists and other scientists, except a few
 |      LDS ones, conclude that the B of M is fiction?
 |
 |
 |  Analytical:  Searching Into Scholarly and Scientific
 |  Matters:
 |
 |   *  The more academically inclined LDS women, whether in
 |      college, on the internet, or even reading common
 |      magazines such as Discover, National Geographic or
 |      Popular Science, are nowadays likely to encounter
 |      eye-opening facts unavailable until relatively recent
 |      years, such as articles showing that humans lived on
 |      earth over 100,000 years before any time sanely
 |      connectable to Adam and Eve (even from Old Testament
 |      genealogies), having left human artifacts such as
 |      clothing, jewelry, tools, pottery, etc. Adam and Eve in
 |      the Garden of Eden, these women think as their brains
 |      compute this data, couldn't have been the first humans,
 |      though the LDS Church still teaches that this occurred
 |      literally.
 |
 |   *  Some LDS women, reflecting upon the Garden of Eden,
 |      wonder how it could have been near Independence,
 |      Missouri, as Joseph Smith taught, considering that
 |      Genesis (as also confirmed in P of GP, Moses) says the
 |      Garden of Eden was near Assyria, Ethiopia and the
 |      Euphrates river (the Genesis and Moses descriptions best
 |      fitting what is now near Baghdad in Iraq). How, they
 |      wonder, does that make any sense at all, despite FARMS's
 |      convoluted commentaries?
 |
 |   *  Now puzzled about Eden and Eve, some LDS women see
 |      articles about women's mitochondrial DNA (which is not
 |      in men) traced by credible scientists back 150,000 years
 |      as confirmed even by BYU anthropology professor Brant
 |      Gardner, who writes:
 |
 |        "The so-called 'genetic Eve' was the ancestral
 |        mitochondrial genetic line for all modern living
 |        humans. Obviously it was carried ultimately by one
 |        real woman over 150,000 years ago. . . . The
 |        mitochondrial Eve was therefore one woman among
 |        thousands living over 150,000 years ago."
 |
 |  And, that being the case, these LDS women say they know
 |  there is no valid way to reconcile an "Eve" of that long
 |  ago, especially as just "one woman among thousands," with a
 |  literal interpretation of the Genesis (and Moses) story of
 |  Adam and Eve.
 |
 |   *  Some women, before or after thinking the above thoughts,
 |      see the now-common bumper sticker, "Eve was framed." One
 |      LDS woman in Santa Monica, CA joked with me:
 |
 |        "Men see us as second-rate in most things, but at
 |        least they honored us with a 'first' for sin in the
 |        Garden."
 |
 |   *  A few women have mentioned the many different versions
 |      of Joseph's First Vision story, claiming different
 |      numbers of divine beings. They remind me that the
 |      version now officially used is the latest, which didn't
 |      appear until about 18 years after the claimed
 |      occurrence. One woman (an attorney) added, "I know how
 |      that shakey kind of alleged fact looks in court."
 |
 |   *  Another active LDS woman mentioned the LDS teaching that
 |      Noah's flood was a total immersion of the earth,
 |      symbolic of earth's baptism -- wondering how koalas from
 |      Australia, sloths from South America and arctic penguins
 |      could have reached the ark.
 |
 |   *  Her husband has long read about similar doctrinal
 |      puzzles in FARMS's defensive apologetics, and she asked
 |      him: Why do LDS scholars say Cumorah was in Meso-America
 |      when she and her husband know that Joseph Fielding Smith
 |      and other apostles have opposed these theories,
 |      reaffirming that LDS authorities have always taught that
 |      Cumorah was in Palmyra, New York? She wonders why
 |      various BYU scholars still oppose Joseph Fielding
 |      Smith's position. She and her husband tell me they have
 |      no sensible answer to that.
 |
 |   *  Some women who, on the internet, discover Jerald and
 |      Sandra Tanner's publishing house, Utah Lighthouse
 |      Ministry, additionally discover that even Joseph Smith's
 |      History of the Church, though it has been reworked to
 |      read in first person as though written by him, was in
 |      fact 60%-written by others after his death, with many
 |      changes in the other 40%, though the History itself
 |      gives no indication of these facts. These women learn
 |      that FARMS researchers don't dispute this (and of course
 |      they can't, since both the earlier and later versions
 |      are right there in print), attempting merely to explain
 |      how this could be OK, which these women feel makes no
 |      sense.
 |
 |   *  Some women do basic internet searches and discover that
 |      there have been massive and substantive changes in the
 |      Doctrine and Covenants, documented by side-by-side
 |      photos as in Jerald and Sandra Tanner's book, The Case
 |      Against Mormonism, and in Sharon. I. Banister's book,
 |      For Any Latter-day Saint: One Investigator's Unanswered
 |      Questions. The women note that explanations by FARMS
 |      don't actually change these facts, which are amply
 |      proven after all by photographic evidence. FARMS
 |      explanations mainly attempt to say they're no problem.
 |      But most of the women say they're much more impressed by
 |      Banister's material than by FARMS' attempted
 |      explanations. A talented LDS woman, a Fed. Gov't.
 |      employee in Wash. DC with a sly sense of humor, told me
 |      that she thought FARMS (Foundation for Ancient Research
 |      and Mormon Studies) should be DORMS (Diversion and
 |      Obfuscation in Rationalizing Mormon Scriptures).
 |
 |   *  Many LDS women wonder why Joseph Smith and Brigham Young
 |      strongly admonished and loudly warned people, in the
 |      official name of God, to flee from other countries to
 |      Zion in the US, claiming authoritatively that these
 |      wicked nations would shortly be destroyed when the Lord
 |      returned. The women wonder why Joseph, Brigham, et al.
 |      would have said that in light of the undeniable fact
 |      that these nations have not been destroyed despite the
 |      prophecy and Joseph and Brigham's insistence. These
 |      women wonder why the Church now teaches exactly the
 |      opposite, telling people to stay in those countries, and
 |      they wonder why the Church is building lots of temples
 |      in those supposedly wicked nations, even though the Lord
 |      has not returned. Why this complete reversal in
 |      teaching? In Gordon B. Hinckley's book, Stand For
 |      Something, given to me by one of my daughters, he
 |      describes these nations not as wicked but wonderful. So
 |      the women notice, too, that reversal of teaching.
 |
 |
 |  MORMON WOMEN OF COLOR
 |
 |  What if a Mormon is Native American (I am part Cherokee) or
 |  Polynesian (as is the woman I married)? He or she may then
 |  wonder why the Introduction to the Book of Mormon states
 |  that American Indians (and therefore Polynesians, per
 |  Matthew Cowley's and other LDS Apostles' teachings about the
 |  B of M's Hagoth the ship builder's traveling to and
 |  populating Polynesia) are descendants of the Lamanites, and
 |  thus are inherently less than Whites. LDS Native American,
 |  Polynesian (and African American) women have been officially
 |  taught for over 100 years that they were born into those
 |  lineages and marked with a dark skin because they and their
 |  ancestors were markedly defective in the premortal world. In
 |  LDS scriptures, official teachings and tradition clearly
 |  dark is less, light is more -- dark is worse, light is
 |  better -- dark is to be forgiven and overcome, white is to
 |  be aspired to and someday achieved. Numerous LDS apostles
 |  and prophets taught that when dark straightens up and
 |  behaves, "dark and loathsome" skin will become "white and
 |  delightsome" skin.
 |
 |
 |  LDS Women of Color, and DNA
 |
 |  Some women remember the many official LDS statements, for
 |  over one hundred years, that American Indians are
 |  descendants of Lamanites (as officially stated in the
 |  Introduction to the Book of Mormon), and they wonder why all
 |  non-LDS anthropologists, and even some vocal LDS
 |  anthropologists, such as Thomas Murphy, believe that DNA
 |  evidence is clearly inconsistent with the B of M and
 |  historic LDS teachings that dark skins originated as visible
 |  marks of God's curses.
 |
 |   *  Thinking LDS women of color have reported to me that
 |      they've learned enough real facts to know that dark skin
 |      is not a mark of divine displeasure. It is just sun-
 |      protective melanin, solely and simply a result of their
 |      ancestors having a history nearer to the sunny equator.
 |
 |   *  These women know that dark hair and dark eyes are best
 |      similarly explained. Blond hair, blue eyes and white
 |      skin obviously correlate with areas farther from the
 |      equator.
 |
 |   *  Some of these dark LDS women have internalized so much
 |      self-deprecation, so much cognitive-dissonance stress,
 |      that it has given them, on top of being female, another
 |      theological reason to reach for a Prozac, or a phone or
 |      computer to contact an LDS therapist..
 |
 |   *  Analytical LDS sisters of African heritage (I've worked
 |      professionally with many African Blacks) have told me
 |      that even though they are technically accepted in the
 |      LDS Church and that Black males may now hold the
 |      priesthood, they are all still defined and seen as
 |      morally inferior in lineage.
 |
 |        One Black sister joked: "Oh, I'm OK, Brother Ponder.
 |        It's just my ancestors all the way back on both sides
 |        that were all moral reprobates."
 |
 |        And you'll love this one: Years ago my wife and I were
 |        in a restaurant with close LDS friends, an M.D. and
 |        his wife. He worked in obstetrics and gynecology at
 |        the Wash. DC General Hospital, where most of his
 |        patients were Black (and obviously all women). He
 |        looked at me and my wife and said exactly this: "Kent,
 |        these [Black] women love their kids just like we do."
 |        I replied, "Yes, and our kids' non-White mom loves
 |        them too." Think about it: As an obstetrician all
 |        of his patients were female, but he was surprised to
 |        learn that Blacks love their children as do Whites.
 |        And he'd been raised in the Wash. DC area. His comment
 |        illustrates how LDS beliefs can skew a White's
 |        perception.
 |
 |  Very little research is needed to find many LDS authorities'
 |  references to inferior Black ancestral history back into the
 |  eons of pre-earth existence. Though Blacks have relatively
 |  recently been allowed access to LDS priesthood, many LDS
 |  Blacks perceive it as that we Whities are now reaching down
 |  to pull their previously inferior Black souls up here to sit
 |  at table with us morally superior Honkies.
 |
 |        As they worry about these issues, many LDS women, of
 |        whatever color, say they worry about what to teach
 |        their daughters, and as emotional stress affects
 |        digestion and endocrinological balance, these women
 |        sometimes experience adverse auto-immune reactions.
 |
 |
 |  MORMON WOMEN and HOMOSEXUALITY.
 |
 |  LDS Lesbians: For a Mormon woman, to feel a strong
 |  self-image identity as homosexual is much worse than to be
 |  dark-skinned. Though the latter are labeled "dark and
 |  loathsome," LDS women who are genuinely in love with a woman
 |  instead of a man are, beyond loathsome, labeled as gravely
 |  sinful, and may achieve top celestial status only by
 |  repenting of and desisting from any intimate relation with
 |  another female, no matter how genuinely and exclusively
 |  devoted, and instead, marrying a man in an LDS temple, thus
 |  being "cured," or at least, akin to the alcoholic,
 |  diligently abstinent. The LDS Church has always defined
 |  homosexuality, male or female, as grievous moral sin to be
 |  repented of, a defect or illness to be cured, behavior to be
 |  forever abandoned and eschewed. But many LDS women are
 |  learning that this no longer accords with the most respected
 |  scientific findings.
 |
 |  A female LDS gynecologist (not lesbian) reported:
 |
 |        "The pre-scientific religious misconceptions of
 |        lesbianism die hard as any internet search of "causes
 |        of lesbianism" immediately demonstrates. Yes, there
 |        are instances of learned lesbianism, but the fact is
 |        that many if not most instances are genetically
 |        driven. Currently, the professional consensus on
 |        homosexuality, male and female, is that it is not a
 |        malady to be cured, and that attempted "cures" such as
 |        aversion therapy, female-hormone injections for women,
 |        placing individuals in behavior-modification camps for
 |        rehabilitation, and so on, are in reality forms of
 |        physical and emotional abuse stemming entirely from
 |        ignorance and misguided ideology, most often
 |        religious."
 |
 |  Another MD (psychiatrist) told me:
 |
 |        "There is no doubt that religious opposition to
 |        homosexuality rests on erroneous assumptions."
 |
 |  A female LDS clinical psychologist reported:
 |
 |        "Homosexuality in both sexes might roughly be compared
 |        to handedness. Being left-handed is not a defect to
 |        repair."
 |
 |  Another women (non-LDS clinical psychologist) wrote:
 |
 |        "Attempting to cure lesbianism or male homosexuality
 |        is tantamount to attempting to cure red hair. It is
 |        silly, harmful and guilt-producing. . . . Doctrinally
 |        based psychotherapy should be outlawed, but I don't
 |        think that is going to happen any time soon."
 |
 |  One of the best-read and most generally impressive LDS
 |  lesbians with whom I have communicated summarized it in
 |  these words:
 |
 |        "I have a wonderful father and mother, wonderful and
 |        heterosexual brothers and sisters, and during my
 |        entire life I have always been successful and
 |        emotionally sound in every way. But I have never been
 |        romantically attracted to any man. I have no aversion
 |        to them or disinterest in them, but I have always been
 |        romantically attracted only to females even as a young
 |        girl, even though everyone with whom I associated
 |        during my formative years, so far as I know, was
 |        heterosexual. Because during my entire life I have
 |        always been so clear about who I have always been and
 |        how mentally and physically healthy I am and have
 |        always been, I am not interested in the opinions of
 |        ignorant individuals who know nothing about how I have
 |        felt all of my life and who know nothing about lesbian
 |        relationships. I am so clear about this that I have no
 |        patience with any religious persons addressing a
 |        subject that they in truth know nothing about."
 |
 |
 |  LDS Women Married To Homosexual Men: After I released the
 |  earlier version of this report, I received e-mails from
 |  women reporting their experiences married to gay men. While
 |  there is relatively little separate data for this category
 |  related to use of antidepressants, it is a chronically
 |  stressful problem for the women who have found themselves in
 |  it, in addition to the other problems outlined in this
 |  report. Mormon gay men are not exempt from the requirement
 |  of temple marriage to qualify for first-class celestial
 |  status. This requirement obviously coerces them to deny
 |  their homosexuality and marry LDS women, leaving the
 |  pressures to erupt farther down the road, many times after
 |  there are children involved.  Again, their feet do not fit
 |  the one-width-fits-all, standard-issue shoes. Typically they
 |  spend many years feeling guilty about their feet instead of
 |  suspecting the shoes.
 |
 |  Here's the inescapable logic of it:
 |
 |              First Premise: Highest Celestial Kingdom
 |              admission is limited to heterosexual couples
 |              married in LDS temples.
 |
 |              Second Premise: George is homosexual.
 |
 |              Conclusion: Therefore George must renounce
 |              homosexuality and enter into heterosexual
 |              LDS-temple marriage to gain the highest
 |              Celestial Kingdom.
 |
 |  Since George must marry an LDS woman, he must either
 |  genuinely become heterosexual or must hide his homosexual
 |  orientation from his wife in order not to lose her and thus
 |  fail to qualify for heavenly admission. Clearly, this sets
 |  the stage for depressing disillusionment of the affected LDS
 |  women. (No, I do not yet have data relative to LDS women of
 |  color temple-married to homosexual men, but does it not
 |  stand to reason that this would be an extraordinarily
 |  depressing set of circumstances for an LDS woman?)
 |
 |
 |  Summarizing the "Depression Categories"
 |
 |  The depressed LDS female, whether white, "delightsome" and
 |  heterosexual. dark and "loathsome," sinfully lesbian, or
 |  married to a homosexual man, looks around and sees her
 |  still-happy Relief Society sisters, and worries that she's
 |  not faithful enough or righteous enough, or white enough, or
 |  correct enough in sexual orientation, or is too
 |  intellectually curious -- because so many of her LDS sisters
 |  have obviously found so much more joy than she has. She
 |  consults with her bishop or his counselors, but they too
 |  often seem perplexed by her problem and unable to adequately
 |  empathize with what she's talking about. The prayer and
 |  fasting, etc., that they recommend to her, she has already
 |  tried for months to no avail.
 |
 |  She concludes that she can't do it on her own, and that the
 |  men in her bishopric can't help her. So she decides to take
 |  . . . the next step.
 |
 |
 |  THE NEXT STEP:  PROFESSIONAL COUNSELING
 |
 |  When she contacts a therapy service, if the therapist tells
 |  her the equivalent of the exact words that one LDS therapist
 |  (though I've never been a therapy client) wrote to me a few
 |  days ago, "Jesus Christ loves YOU, Kent," though the words
 |  may ostensibly appear to be reassuring, these same
 |  well-meant words, in the opinion of some damaged women, can
 |  be harmful because, as they have reminded me, the words
 |  reinforce the very belief-paradigm that brought her to the
 |  therapist -- the male hierarchy heavily weighing on her
 |  shoulders:
 |   -- her male God speaking to her male authority prophet
 |   -- speaking to her male authority stake president
 |   -- speaking to her male authority bishop
 |   -- speaking to her male authority husband,
 |  all supporting the same message for her, which is:
 |
 |   *  Jesus Christ loves YOU, by cementing you to this LDS
 |      salvation system.
 |
 |   *  Christ and all of your male-authority benefactors have
 |      blessed you by making the main decisions for you, as
 |      follows:
 |
 |   *  Follow the prophet's choices for you:
 |
 |   *  attend weekly Sacrament Meetings as you are commanded;
 |
 |   *  have your daughters attend male-conducted worthiness
 |      interviews;
 |
 |   *  marry a male authority in the temple;
 |
 |   *  have babies and more babies;
 |
 |   *  obey the Brethren because "when they speak the thinking
 |      has been done;"
 |
 |   *  hold to the iron rod;
 |
 |   *  don't ask questions that aren't essential to your
 |      salvation;
 |
 |   *  endure to the end and you will be saved in the Celestial
 |      Kingdom where you will continue bearing millions of
 |      offspring for your husband-God forever."
 |
 |  So the therapy she's under, though Jesus-love-linked, is
 |  implicitly LDS male-monolith-authority ideology, even though
 |  offered to her with professional psychological TLC. Even
 |  though the therapists may be unaware of the direct
 |  implications and ramifications of their
 |  male-monolith-ideology orientation, she is being further
 |  cemented into her worries, while paying for her therapist to
 |  reinforce the very system that prevents her from controlling
 |  her own life, which is one of her root problems.
 |
 |  And what's worse, whether or not she's fully conscious of
 |  this web of direct implications, she dares not even
 |  complain.
 |
 |
 |  Complaining wouldn't be proper. It's almost unthinkable.
 |
 |  How could she in fairness complain?
 |
 |   *  Jesus Christ loves her enough to die for her.
 |
 |   *  Joseph Smith, as prophet, restored the "Gospel of Joy"
 |      for her.
 |
 |   *  Elohim personally hears her prayers.
 |
 |   *  All of these other men are bending over backward for her
 |      every day.
 |
 |  And the only small things these male humans and male Gods
 |  require in return is for her to keep serving in the divine
 |  system as:
 |
 |   *  a brood-mare baby birther (or feeling guilt if she's
 |      not),
 |
 |   *  a human sled-dog (or feeling guilt if she's not),
 |
 |   *  an obedient, non-criticizing, uncomplaining servant to
 |      males for eons without end or any hope of end --
 |      forever.
 |
 |
 |  Conscious Eternal Hope -- vs. -- Subconscious (or Even
 |  Conscious) Eternal Despair
 |
 |  In this context of eternal male, God-mandated domination,
 |  knowing that the LDS therapy she has sought is another means
 |  of reconciling her to this same eternal fate, Prozac® and
 |  Zoloft® enter her mind as the new hope, her new saviors, the
 |  pillow and mattress of the new eternal rest she was promised
 |  as a reward for enduring.
 |
 |  She knows that indeed the LDS Church, for women, is "one
 |  size fits all." It doesn't feel like it fits her, but the
 |  therapists are helping her modify her feelings so the fit
 |  will feel better to her. The LDS therapists define mental
 |  health for an LDS woman as her fitting herself to the LDS
 |  system.
 |
 |  She still believes that women need men to return to God and
 |  to become co-gods themselves, and therefore it would be
 |  clearly wrong for an LDS woman with strong and
 |  doctrine-informed testimony not to cherish this beautiful
 |  gospel and pass it on.
 |
 |        How could a woman, after all, not cherish what the
 |        Lord Himself died to give her -- and what Moroni came
 |        back to give her?
 |
 |  She has been taught and believes that any other life-path is
 |  less godly and less worthy of a righteous LDS woman, and
 |  actually would be traitorous for her at this point. So she
 |  prays strongly that her naturally wide feet will become
 |  miraculously narrower in the way that "dark and loathsome"
 |  people, as she has been taught, will become "white and
 |  delightsome."
 |
 |  Well, sure, she knows that all the major decisions of her
 |  life are being made for her and handed to her ready-wrapped,
 |  but that's how the gospel plan is designed by Heavenly
 |  Father and Jesus Christ to work for righteous women, and is
 |  she not righteous in her heart? How could anyone complain
 |  when the Lord himself designed it and is commanding it?
 |
 |  Remember that, for many LDS women in Utah, this is really
 |  all they know. They have nothing to compare it with.
 |
 |
 |  Oh, and About Her Mother in Heaven --
 |
 |  From an LDS woman's point of view, how can this good sister
 |  complain, since she has been taught (by direct and
 |  inescapable implication) this additional eternal truth?
 |
 |        Her own Mother in Heaven went through this same
 |        earthly trial with male authority when She was a
 |        mortal on an earth eons ago, just like this sister is
 |        undergoing now. So how could our good sister presume
 |        to criticize her Father God and her Mother God and
 |        their Only Begotten Son, her Savior God? Could our LDS
 |        sister even think of acting against God's plan? To do
 |        so would be what Satan did.
 |
 |  As I said above, when the implications and impact of these
 |  teachings began to dent my awareness years ago in upstate
 |  New York, I sat on the bed for hours with my head in my
 |  hands.
 |
 |
 |  My Questions To LDS Professional Therapists:
 |
 |  So I ask you male LDS professional therapists: Can you
 |  understand how, for high-caliber LDS women, Prozac® is much
 |  more attractive than that clear awareness? Have you THOUGHT
 |  about that before?
 |
 |        Do you LDS males reading this begin to understand the
 |        weight on our LDS women who are intelligent and
 |        clear-minded enough to grasp the direct implications
 |        of these LDS doctrines? And remember, I'm not defining
 |        whether they're true or not. I'm just stating that
 |        those are our teachings, and you know they are. And
 |        I'm relaying to you, in this report, how these
 |        teachings impact many women -- the women bright enough
 |        to understand that these are the direct implications
 |        of LDS doctrines.
 |
 |
 |  The Sisters? -- or The System?  Time To Think Logically and
 |  Sensibly.
 |
 |  We must require ourselves to confront, clearly and
 |  logically, this question : Is the problem the sisters or is
 |  the problem the system?
 |
 |        Stated more precisely: 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?
 |
 |
 |  Let's begin with what is known. It is known that Utah leads
 |  the nation in antidepressant-drug use, and that
 |  approximately twice as many women as men suffer from
 |  depression. It is known that this is a closely Mormon-linked
 |  problem. Logically, scientifically, even using common sense,
 |  it is clear that it is not credible to think that an
 |  acceptable explanation is that Utah and the LDS Church have
 |  simply attracted so large a percentage of genetically
 |  depression-prone females who spawn so large a percentage of
 |  depression-prone daughters. No one, to my knowledge, has
 |  even suggested such a preposterous idea. There is no
 |  scientifically sane way to suggest that these are simply
 |  females who, compared to the national female population,
 |  carry a "depression gene." Nor, I facetiously note, has a
 |  "not-righteous-enough" gene been postulated.
 |
 |  In short, the cause does not reside in the females. And, by
 |  simple process of elimination, the cause therefore resides
 |  in the belief system that has been taught to these females.
 |  Thus, women have not brought this calamity upon themselves;
 |  the problem these women have is clearly not of their making.
 |  It is also clear that this problem is sharply inconsistent
 |  with and even contradictory to the promises these women have
 |  been given by people whom they have trusted.
 |
 |
 |  Is There No Way Out of This Gilded Mental Cage?
 |
 |  Some LDS women have reported to me that one nudge in a
 |  sanity-saving direction for them has been that they have
 |  begun to intuit that all this maleness is inherently suspect
 |  because, they say:
 |
 |        There is something just plain-old, flat-out
 |        incongruous, if not ludicrous, about the idea that the
 |        God of the universe is, in practice, unable to come up
 |        with a better plan than that of using harems of
 |        subordinate females through whom to be reproductive
 |        enough to have become the Father in Heaven for,
 |        currently, six billion souls on our planet.
 |
 |  To these intuitive women, something is very wrong with such
 |  a picture. So the women become willing to consider other,
 |  sanity-saving, pictures:
 |
 |   *  Some thinking LDS women come across important books such
 |      as Reality Therapy, by William Glasser, MD, and his
 |      later Control Theory, and through such books they gain a
 |      better understanding of many LDS women's psychosomatic
 |      problems including auto-immune disorders such as
 |      rheumatoid arthritis, eczema and depression, that
 |      develop when these women do not have control of their
 |      individual lives.
 |
 |   *  Some analytically and academically intelligent, stressed
 |      LDS sisters I've interviewed wonder if they should start
 |      taking seriously the majority of respected
 |      anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, etc., who
 |      present the scientific case that women (and men), as
 |      believing members in a religious community such as the
 |      LDS, are living in a microcosmic societal illusion that
 |      can seem very real.
 |
 |  These women wonder if what this vast and respected majority
 |  of the scientific world says is true: that the LDS view and
 |  testimony, no matter how true it may seem to us as LDS and
 |  how much the bosom may burn when one thinks of it, repeats
 |  it and feels it, is simply one of hundreds of societal
 |  mind-sets that sociologists and anthropologists, world-wide,
 |  commonly refer to as "cultural trance" -- a cognitive state
 |  that makes it very difficult for believers of any religion,
 |  not just the Mormon one, to examine their own beliefs
 |  objectively and rationally, looking into their real origins,
 |  and looking into the means by which the strong belief-state
 |  is created.
 |
 |  These LDS women wonder if it could really be possible that
 |  we are subject to the same psychological principles that, as
 |  we can observe around the world, create tremendous strength
 |  of religious conviction in others, such as people willing
 |  even to strap bombs around their waists and blow themselves
 |  up.
 |
 |
 |  About "Understanding." -- The Larger Perspective
 |
 |   *  Some LDS women, of all shades of color, have read Eric
 |      Hoffer, who wrote that "In order for a doctrine to be
 |      effective, it must not be understood." They understand
 |      how that clearly applies to other religions, defined
 |      by us as teaching false doctrines, but then they
 |      wonder if their lifelong LDS understanding should
 |      possibly be rethought as "understanding" in quotes --
 |      an "understanding" that constrains Mormon women's
 |      thinking and feeling to repetitive circling in
 |      tightening coils of stress and depression.
 |
 |   *  Can this be, these women then wonder, what Werner
 |      Erhardt of the popular "est" movement meant when he said
 |      that "Understanding is the booby prize?" Could this
 |      really be, they wonder, our problem and the root source
 |      of our depression-causing worry? It is really possible
 |      that what we think we "understand" is wrong, and that we
 |      could actually be in a belief system similar in some
 |      ways to the belief system that causes people such as
 |      otherwise good Palestinian parents to be religiously
 |      proud of their suicide-bomber sons -- and daughters in
 |      some cases?
 |
 |   *  Other women have watched Joseph Campbell's popular PBS
 |      presentations on mythology, noting that he wrote,
 |      "Religion is misunderstood mythology." How can such a
 |      world expert on religion and mythology think that way,
 |      they wonder -- What did he mean by that?
 |
 |   *  A few women have confirmed to me that they've heard
 |      Winston Churchill's comment, that "All sensible men are
 |      of the same religion" and have wondered why such a great
 |      man would have said that, especially since when he was
 |      asked which religion that was, he cryptically replied,
 |      "Sensible men never say." They wonder what it is that
 |      sensible men (and women) are not saying.
 |
 |   *  Some LDS women tell me they read FARMS materials, though
 |      my research indicates that it is much more often read by
 |      LDS men. But women, often more perceptively intuitive
 |      than men, tell me far more often than men do that they
 |      find it suspect and convoluted. Many women have
 |      expressed doubt that any God would expect anyone to have
 |      to understand the Nibleys and Tvedtneses et al. of the
 |      apologetic world. Can this really be, they wonder, what
 |      God expects of already overloaded women?
 |
 |   *  Mainly they wonder why LDS General Authorities don't
 |      simply speak to us directly and clearly the way Joseph
 |      Smith used to do. (Though other women remind me that
 |      many things Joseph Smith directly and clearly said have
 |      now become deleted embarrassments.)
 |
 |   *  Many women tell me they intuitively sense that Mormon
 |      apologists have drifted into the same realm of diversion
 |      and heavily footnoted obfuscation that older mainline
 |      Christian denominations have been wading hip-deep and
 |      candlelight-illuminated in for centuries.
 |
 |
 |  Spanish Catholic Street Smarts?
 |
 |  A few women are acquainted with a very famous, old Spanish
 |  saying: "A quien dices el secreto, das tu libertad." ("To
 |  whom you tell the secret, you give your liberty.") Wondering
 |  what secret this could be, one woman, knowing I speak
 |  Spanish, asked me. I answered that a Spanish academic I knew
 |  at the University of Madrid explained that if a person
 |  figures out that the Catholic Church isn't literally true
 |  and that even the pope is just a man in a fancy robe with a
 |  claim to a gift of infallibility that has fallen on its face
 |  on various historical occasions, having figured that fact
 |  out is "el secreto," which frees its discoverer from feeling
 |  guilt-driven to adhere to all the rules, rituals and
 |  financial obligations of Roman Catholicism, and feeling
 |  guilt-ridden if he/she hasn't been able to do it. And if the
 |  discoverer then explains that "secreto" to others, he/she
 |  makes the mistake of giving them his/her liberty to obey or
 |  not obey, to pay or not to pay, which the people to whom the
 |  secret is given don't deserve, because they have not figured
 |  it out on their own through their own study and effort, and
 |  which can backfire on the discoverer who discloses it,
 |  because such disclosures weaken the social structure of the
 |  religion and negatively affect the discoverer's new
 |  "libertad." So the meaning is that the discoverer should be
 |  prudent enough to keep quiet about it the secret, doing
 |  his/her part in keeping the "secreto" secret.
 |
 |  Some LDS women wonder if they're mainly unknowing cogs in a
 |  wheel of a similar huge Utah-based institutional
 |  doctrinal/historical machine with a similar "secreto." They
 |  wonder, is it possible that there's a similar "secreto" here
 |  too?
 |
 |   *  And why, they wonder, do the General Authorities remain
 |      silent on the above issues and so many more, while
 |      letting FARMS apologists spar and speculate, even
 |      advising LDS apologists to avoid going head to head with
 |      Jerald and Sandra Tanner of Utah Lighthouse Ministry?
 |
 |   *  Why did Gordon B. Hinckley answer journalists who asked
 |      about the Mormon doctrine that God was once a man, by
 |      responding to one journalist, "I wouldn't say that." and
 |      to another, "I don't know much about that; it was just a
 |      couplet; I don't know that we teach that." How can
 |      President Hinckley repeatedly respond that way, they
 |      wonder, when they know that the Church does still
 |      believe and teach that.
 |
 |   *  Some of these LDS women tell me they wonder if they are
 |      any better attached to reality than if they believed in
 |      such deities as Vishnu, Krishna, Sun Myung Moon as the
 |      Korean Christ reincarnate, and so on. These women wonder
 |      if they're more reliably perceptive and intelligent than
 |      the computer-programmer males of the Heaven's Gate group
 |      who had themselves castrated and killed themselves after
 |      being seen looking serenely happy, interviewed on most
 |      of the major TV networks, trying to reach a higher
 |      dimension as their promised spaceship sped to earth
 |      behind the Hale Bopp comet.
 |
 |
 |  So, They Wonder, Which is the "true path?"
 |
 |  Some tell me that they think this may not be a proper
 |  question. It may need to be rethought. I've asked them, "Do
 |  you mean that no one asks, 'Which is the true language?' --
 |  or -- 'Which is the true car?'" They confirm that that's
 |  exactly what they mean. Virtually every individual knows
 |  that it is irrelevant to wonder whether his or her native
 |  language is "true." Neither do they look for the true car or
 |  think they have found it; they look for a brand and model
 |  that suits their needs. Increasing numbers of LDS women say
 |  they realize that Mormonism fits some women a whole lot
 |  better than others. Some say that they shouldn't feel
 |  inadequate about that, since they're the ones astute enough
 |  to have "figured it out," naming, as helpful in this
 |  figuring-out process, the recent books, The Jesus Mysteries,
 |  by Freke and Gandy, and, Who Wrote the New Testament?, by
 |  Burton Mack, that explain how the New Testament was put
 |  together in ways far different from how it appears.
 |
 |  One problem, as I reported at the beginning, is that very
 |  often the brightest women who most strongly believe the
 |  Church is true are the ones made most depressed by it.
 |  That's a very serious and fascinating problem. For our "best
 |  and brightest" women, the truer they believe it is, the more
 |  depressed they feel. Why?
 |
 |        Because these best-and-brightest women have studied
 |       the LDS gospel enough to understand its implications
 |       for them as women, as I've clarified above.
 |
 |  They tell me they're coming to understand the consequences
 |  of being mentally trapped in never-ending male control of
 |  and rule of their very souls . . .with men drafting them
 |  into a system of male servitude and never-ending baby
 |  production, in a never-ending universe of worlds and male
 |  gods and blood-sacrificed male saviors on gazillions of
 |  worlds. They're coming to understand the consequences of
 |  living like children, not allowed to make their own
 |  life-choice decisions.
 |
 |   *  Some of the mentally strongest "survivor types" among
 |      these women have told me they are learning not to worry
 |      or even care about whether the LDS Church's doctrine is
 |      literally true. One woman worded it to me this way in an
 |      e-mail:
 |
 |        "We have already been taught that other churches'
 |        doctrines are not true, so if we discover that our LDS
 |        version of alleged revealed truth is also in that big
 |        pile, ours adds just one more to the pile. I know I
 |        will never be able to sort out all the arguments on
 |        both sides. The main thing I am sure of is that some
 |        of our teachings are very unhealthy for me, and nobody
 |        anymore can get away with trying to make me think they
 |        are [healthy for me]. I can't believe that God would
 |        design it that way, so I feel good about ignoring it."
 |
 |   *  Some intelligent and educated LDS women have adopted a
 |      pragmatic strategy of looking around and noticing which
 |      group of people are the kind they enjoy being with and
 |      want their children to be with, and then, while
 |      remaining on the LDS rolls, they increase their family's
 |      association with the other group as an additional
 |      "village," as per Hillary Clinton's book, It Takes A
 |      Village.
 |
 |        These women tell me that they have succeeded in
 |        becoming self-confident and secure in their feeling
 |        that no man, no matter how loudly he claims divine
 |        authority, has the right to define their reality if
 |        these men's claimed reality is mentally and physically
 |        damaging to these LDS women.
 |
 |   *  One active LDS mom said it in these words:
 |
 |        "The scriptures claim God made Adam first? -- and then
 |        as an after-thought, made Eve as a helper? That can't
 |        be right; who are they kidding? You know a man had to
 |        dream that one up. Women reproduce, not men. The
 |        female is much more central. Males weren't needed for
 |        reproduction until well along in evolution. And God
 |        being male? God the Father more primary than the
 |        mother? Please!, that doesn't wash either. Who can
 |        really believe that anymore if they sit down and think
 |        about it?"
 |
 |        I asked her how she could still be active in the
 |        Church with the above ideas, and she joked: "What else
 |        would we do Sunday mornings? We're not golfers."
 |
 |  LDS women tell me that their new perception and style of
 |  family management restores their control over their feeling
 |  of emotional integrity in their own perceptions, and
 |  improves their confidence and self image and their health
 |  and their relationship with their husband and children.
 |
 |   *  Of the hundreds of opinions I've received, one of the
 |      most interesting is from a very prominent journalist and
 |      famous lifelong Mormon (male) in Salt Lake City, who
 |      e-mailed me this statement:
 |
 |        "It's been a while since I cared whether or not the
 |        Book of Mormon or even the Bible constituted the word
 |        of God. Maybe so, maybe not. It's enough for me that
 |        I'm Mormon, that these are my people, and that I could
 |        have done a hell of a lot worse. All theology comes
 |        down to people who don't know behaving as if they did,
 |        which pretty well sums up the meaning of life for
 |        everyone regardless of I.Q. I don't bother with
 |        religious debate, even within myself. It's too much
 |        like arguing over who has the best imaginary friend."
 |
 |   *  Many LDS women are very aware of unarguable photographic
 |      documentation proving that LDS authorities have
 |      massively changed and deleted from or added to the
 |      Doctrine & Covenants and the History of the Church to
 |      make them more currently believable.
 |
 |  Some tough-minded LDS women don't quibble about how or why
 |  massive editing was done because they say they're confident
 |  that its goal was to inspire people, especially younger
 |  people, to live cleaner and more productive lives.
 |
 |        Do we, these women ask, know of any other
 |        organizations demonstrably better at inspiring large
 |        numbers of young people to lead clean, productive
 |        lives?
 |
 |   *  LDS authorities recently eliminated from the temple
 |      ceremonies death penalties that until quite recently
 |      required us to vow being disemboweled and have our
 |      throats slashed if we disobeyed or denied certain LDS
 |      vows, but, some LDS women have asked me, should LDS
 |      leaders have left that antiquatedly anachronistic
 |      violence in?
 |
 |   *  And though many good LDS women are convinced that there
 |      is not any credible evidence in the Americas for any
 |      existence of any of the alleged millions of people of
 |      the Book of Mormon, is it realistic to expect LDS
 |      leaders to shut down BYU, board up temples and chapels
 |      and tell everyone, "Go find a life path of your choice?"
 |
 |   *  Various women have reminded me that a good feature of
 |      the LDS Church is its ability to pilot-test social
 |      projects and then apply the best through local LDS
 |      congregations around the world. The women regard that as
 |      an admirable concept for average social improvement,
 |      though it doesn't fit some of them well.
 |
 |   *  Or consider President David O. McKay, who was fond of
 |      saying, "No other success can compensate for failure in
 |      the home." Are there any other church, government agency
 |      or humanist groups doing a better job of applying that
 |      important concept to improving homes? Not that they know
 |      of, they say.
 |
 |  But remember that it doesn't work for a very large
 |  percentage of excellent people, especially women. The women
 |  referenced and quoted here have already stated that. .
 |
 |        Again, it works only for the people for whom it works.
 |        It helps some women while others report that it
 |        tortures their souls and drives them insane because it
 |        provides them too little opportunity to direct their
 |        own lives.
 |
 |
 |  Prozac®-Free LDS Women Skeptics
 |
 |  Some ex-Prozackers, ex-Zoloft®ers, etc. tell me that their
 |  mental stability improved when, instead of succumbing,
 |  dropping out or fighting, they began using the LDS Church as
 |  they would a cafeteria: consuming what didn't gag them, and
 |  ignoring what did.
 |
 |  These women stay with Mormondom for whatever good they can
 |  find, which they pick and choose -- things like decency,
 |  honor,  clean living and wholesome friends. Then they teach
 |  it to their children as my wife and I did: as a helpful and
 |  beneficial guide rather than as sole truth.
 |
 |  In any event, you LDS women deserve the best in your right
 |  to direct your own choices in ways that make sense to you
 |  and feel right and don't make you sick, whether or not they
 |  make sense to men.
 |
 |        You increasingly see yourselves as the mothers of
 |        future generations of women looking men in the eyes as
 |        their equals, not as their servants seeking approval
 |        or permission.
 |
 |  And if you're reading this report as an LDS woman who thinks
 |  the Church is A-OK just as it is, and you're happy with it
 |  as it is, stay with it in peace.
 |
 |        But please also recognize that other women, just as
 |        righteous and sincere, have experienced it differently
 |        and been hurt by it, often through no fault of their
 |        own, though you may find that hard to understand.
 |
 |
 |  True? . . . Untrue?
 |
 |  As I stated at the outset, the goals of this report do not
 |  include establishing the truth or untruth of Mormonism's
 |  doctrinal and/or historical claims. Consistent with that
 |  statement, I leave it to each LDS woman, LDS religious
 |  counselor, and LDS professional therapist to evaluate and
 |  decide for him/herself how the LDS belief system could, in
 |  sound logic and good common sense, and at one and the same
 |  time, accomplish both of the following:
 |
 |  (a) be the direct cause of so much chronic and profound
 |  mental anguish for so many clearly innocent women,
 |
 |  (b) be literally true as bestowed by a loving Heavenly
 |  Father.
 |
 |  This is the kind of question whose answer one person cannot
 |  resolve for another, regardless of amount of compassion for
 |  that person's welfare. It is the effort to answer that
 |  question for herself, based upon her inherent right to seek
 |  out information and decide what makes sense to her, that
 |  allows each woman to gain needed, yea, biologically
 |  necessary, control of her own mental and physical health.
 |
 |
 |  Please Take Heed, LDS Counselors and Therapists --
 |
 |  You therapists who confidently presume to counsel LDS
 |  females, be informed that many of the hundreds of active and
 |  inactive, pained and depressed LDS women I've interviewed
 |  have expressed important thoughts that some of them have
 |  specifically asked me to convey to you on their behalf:
 |
 |        These women recommend and hope that you, as
 |        therapists, will:
 |
 |        1. be open to the possibility that what you have
 |        absorbed as divine doctrine may be another mythology
 |        presented as literalist doctrine in order to be more
 |        convincing and motivating to developing minds, and to
 |        the women needed as uncomplaining workers in the
 |        system.
 |
 |        2. try harder to be humble enough to understand and
 |        appreciate the women who honor you with their client
 |        relationship, and who flatter your overconfident
 |        ignorance with their intuitive questions and honest
 |        concerns that too often fail to enter into your real
 |        human awareness.
 |
 |        3. become increasingly able to apply the above and be
 |        inspired, by the experiences of these deeply injured
 |        women, to help mold a kinder, gentler, less
 |        microcosmically miopic and monolithically male
 |        Mormonism.
 |
 |  I leave you with the reminder that I'm grateful I grew up
 |  LDS, and I still value its obviously admirable points. But I
 |  wasn't one of the ones damaged by it, maybe just because I
 |  was born male -- that pesky Y-chromosome thing.
 |
 |  Feel free to write if you think I have erred in or missed
 |  something important, am off-track in some way, or if you
 |  have additional information.
 |
 |  My sincerest best wishes and gratitude to you all. Life is
 |  complex and we sort it out as we go along.
 |
 |  Kent Ponder
 |  E-mail address:  kponder@swcp.com
 |
 |  Copyright © 2003 by Kent Ponder, Ph.D.
 |
 |  This report may be freely forwarded, posted, faxed or
 |  otherwise published, so long as it remains untranslated, and
 |  my name, e-mail address and copyright notice are included,
 |  and nothing is removed, added or changed.
 |______________________________________________________________