And every year, the same question threatened to consume me with shame.Įach time I lied, I plunged into a very Mormon kind of hell.
My great-great-grandparents were among Utah's earliest Mormon pioneers. Like Mitt Romney, I have ancestors who fled to Mexico to practice polygamy after Utah outlawed it. Other ancestors were martyred during the Mormons' 1,300-mile westward trek to 'Zion' in search of religious freedom. armed forces in the 1857 Utah War to protect this freedom. From the time we're in kindergarten, Mormon boys know that when we turn 19, we'll serve a mission for the church somewhere in the big world. When adults asked my playmates and me where we wanted to serve, most of us said, 'China!' Even then we knew that after we returned from our mission, we would look for a wife. Few of us would turn 23 unmarried.īut at the age of 12, one autumn afternoon in 1997, along with my cohort of 12- and 13-year-old neighbor boys, I received my first copy of “ For the Strength of Youth.” We sat in a circle of metal folding chairs in our Sunday school classroom and each of us read aloud a section from the pamphlet. The Lord specifically forbids certain behaviors, including all sexual relations before marriage, petting, sex perversion (such as homosexuality, rape, and incest), masturbation, or preoccupation with sex in thought, speech, or action. Homosexual and lesbian activities are sinful and an abomination to the Lord.
