Starting Over

 

For New Year’s, we had the highest tides I’ve ever seen in Bellingham. For Christmas, we were snowed in by a freak ice storm. For solstice, I was trapped at home with covid. 

 

After a long hard year, Bear and I found ourselves surrounded by gloom and doom. But the end is finally in sight.

 

Hope comes more easily in springtime. Five and a half years ago, in May 2017, I emerged from the fog of PTSD and embarked on a couple of hopeful adventures. 

 

First, I filed a lawsuit against Ogden Murphy Wallace, PLLC. They’re the supposedly “independent” private investigators the State’s lawyers used to justify firing me from my position as general counsel to Western Washington University. Despite the impact of living with PTSD, I thought the Ogden Murphy Wallace lawsuit would let me use my legal skills to clear my professional reputation and protect my family.

 

Second, I started publishing essays on this blog. In Phase I of blogging, covering posts in 2017 and 2018, I took advantage of my newfound freedom from thirty years of writer’s block by exploring a variety of topics and styles. My favorite essays about family were “I Come From Good People” and “Sure of You.” My favorite essay about brains was “Inside Out.” My favourite essay about Showtune Night in Canada was “Six Degrees of Kristin Chenowith.” Thanks to the mysteries of Google’s algorithm, the three most viewed blog posts were “About My Yale Classmate Brett Kavanaugh,” “Thing 1 and Thing 2,” and “Fifty Shades of Green Gables.”

Phase II covered posts in 2019 and 2020. I got more ambitious about extended storytelling and the craft of writing. I published a week of “Rock Bottom Stories,” as well as other connected essays about topics like my dramatically improved mental health, various besetting plagues, and the comforts of dog ownership. For the first time I confronted my experiences as a gay man coming out of the closet at the height of the AIDS epidemic. And I wrote about the traumas and triggers I’d experienced while trying to shine a spotlight on dishonest government lawyers. 

Frankly I got carried away with that last topic. Sleazy lawyer stories were taking over the blog, like an oversized moon whose gravitational pull turns ordinary tides into tsunamis. When I looked at the statistics for 2020 I was aghast. I vowed I wouldn’t start Phase III until I freed myself from the power of the Lawyer dark side. 

Over the last couple of years, most of my writing ended up in other places besides this blog. But I’m proud of the essays I published here as well, including deeper explorations of community, family, memory, and mental illness. By joining The Narrative Project, I learned about the craft of writing, story-telling through trauma, and finding a writer’s life and community. I assigned myself a graduate reading list in psychology and neuroscience. And I observed my thoughts and feelings through hours of mindfulness and loving kindness meditation. 

 

Along the way, I slowly learned to clear my head. I’m still oblivious to lots of important things, starting with everything social, particularly with the gays. But eventually I learned to think clearly by thinking like a writer, not a lawyer – at least, not like the kind of lawyer Attorney General Bob Ferguson would hire.

In November 2017, King County Superior Court Judge John Ruhl dismissed my claim against Ogden Murphy Wallace on a legal technicality.

 

It was important technicality. Washington law immunizes whistleblowers from liability for claims based on their communications to government agencies. One of the questions before the court in my case was whether whistleblower immunity applies to paid communications by government contractors, like Ogden Murphy Wallace’s supposedly “independent” investigation report attacking my character and competence. In August 2021, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that government contractors can’t be sued for injuries that are “directly based” on communications like the Ogden Murphy investigation report. 

 

Our busy trial judge was so focused on the whistleblower statute that he overlooked my other claims against Ogden Murphy Wallace – the ones that weren’t based on any protected whistleblower communication, such as the investigators’ repeated lies about their contractual assignment. Unfortunately, everyone else in the legal process was also distracted by the shiny statutory construction bauble. I spent the next few years trapped in a Kafka-esque struggle to find a state tribunal that was interested in hearing how the State’s lawyers and investigators colluded in government contract procurement fraud, civil rights violations, and ongoing acts of concealment and obstruction. 

 

After losing my state court claim against the OMW Defendants in the trial court, then winning, then losing, then winning, then losing, I lost my original lawsuit for good in June 2022 when the Washington Supreme Court declined further review.

The most interesting event in my state court lawsuit occurred on October 20, 2017. The day before my response was due to Ogden Murphy Wallace’s whistleblower immunity motion, the defendants produced a suspicious document related to their investigation:  the only surviving copy of the 3/16/16 “Investigation Scope Email” from Ogden Murphy investigator Patrick Pearce to the State’s employment attorneys. This smoking gun email revealed I was the victim of a wrongful termination cover-up scheme involving senior lawyers at the AGO, including some of Bob Ferguson’s top lieutenants.

 

While my original lawsuit against Ogden Murphy wound its way through its doomed appeal, I began tracking down additional incriminating evidence through Public Records Act requests and administrative complaints. Unlike Ogden Murphy, I’m an actual whistleblower. Meanwhile, the State and its co-conspirators continued to execute their strategy of stonewalling, gaslighting, and spoliation.

 

The State refused to respond to my notice of claim and mediation invitation, and threated to sue me instead. So in April 2020, I filed another lawsuit in state court, this one against the Attorney General’s Office, the Governor’s Office, Western Washington University, and their corrupt employees. I was shocked when the State Defendants chose to remove all of my damage claims to federal court. I felt like Br’er Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch. Before I tried to repackage myself as an appellate lawyer and judicial candidate a few years ago, I spent two decades managing complex federal litigation at Bogle & Gates, the ACLU, and Davis Wright Tremaine. I’m much more comfortable litigating in federal rather than in state court.

 

However, it turned out removal was just another short-sighted stall tactic by the State’s lawyers. I didn’t realize cases in the Western District of Washington were paralyzed because our court had the most vacancies of any federal court in the country. After the rest of the baby boomer judges all retired, Judge Richard Jones and Judge Ricardo Martinez held down the fort alone for several years. Our Washington senators and the local legal community succeeding in preventing Donald Trump from making any judicial appointments to fill the vacancies. My lawsuit against the State slowed to a crawl as unfortunate collateral damage. We didn’t even have a trial date or a case schedule.

Once several Biden judges were confirmed, however, the federal court finally returned to a normal litigation schedule. The two-year delay gave me enough time to improve my mental health and to gather a mountain of incriminating evidence. On September 23, 2021, Judge Jones denied the State Defendants’ long-delayed motion to dismiss my claims. Instead, the judge granted my motion to file a detailed amended complaint that includes new damage claims against Ogden Murphy Wallace as well as against the Attorney General’s Office, the Governor’s Office, WWU, and their employees. 

 

It’s as if all the frustrations of my original state court lawsuit never happened. Now we’re on a regular federal court litigation schedule. This month we’re waiting for Judge Jones’ rulings on the State Defendants’ frivolous Third Motion to Dismiss (here’s my response and their reply) and the Ogden Murphy Wallace Defendants’ motion to dismiss some of my new claims (here’s my response and their reply). Depositions in the Federal Lawsuit are scheduled to begin in February, with a jury trial set for January 2024 in Seattle.

I billed more hours of legal work in 2022 than any year since I was a young litigation associate – plus walking at least six miles a day with Bear to keep my head clear. I also had oral arguments in at least ten court hearings in 2022, which sets a personal record. The hearings were all in my Public Records Act case in state court, which is set for a bench trial before Judge Mary Sue Wilson on February 6-7, 2023, in Thurston County Superior Court. 

 

In 1972, Washington voters enacted the most transparent government accountability law in the nation. I’ve submitted dozens of requests to state and local agencies under the Public Records Act. With the sole exception of the Office of the Governor, each agency acknowledged my PRA requests within five days as required by the statute. In October 2020, I emailed the three public record requests to the Office of the Governor as directed by its webpage. The State’s email servers diverted my emails as “junk.” About the same time, the same thing happened with my emails to addressees at several other government agencies – apparently someone put my name and website on some kind of internet “no-fly” list. 

 

Sadly for the Governor’s Office, the Assistant Attorney General assigned to communicate with me on behalf of the State has a bad habit of ignoring my emails, regardless of whether they end up in his inbox or his junk folder. By the time his clients and his supervisors realized their lawyer dropped the ball, they’d already incurred millions of dollars in potential statutory penalties by delaying the Governor’s response to my public records requests for over a year.

 

Once again, the State and its lawyers refused to take responsibility, instead blaming me for their communication errors. So I filed a separate Public Records Act lawsuit against the Governor’s Office. We’re scheduled for a two-day bench trial in Olympia in February. Here’s my lawyer’s Opening Trial Brief.

In August 2021, the world seemed to be approaching the end of the covid pandemic. The Canadian border finally reopened, at least to visitors who uploaded their vaccination status and recent negative test results to an app. Vancouver Men’s Chorus began rehearsing, but only masked and in limited numbers. 

 

We also seemed to be approaching the end of my lawsuits against the State and Ogden Murphy Wallace. In the federal lawsuit, Judge Jones recognized my disability and granted the reasonable accommodation I requested. In my original state lawsuit, the Washington Supreme Court rejected Ogden Murphy Wallace’s claim that lawyers are above the law. 

 

However, we were actually far from the end – both with the coronavirus pandemic and with my efforts to hold the State and its lawyers accountable. It wasn’t even the beginning of the end. But as Winston Churchill would say, we finally reached the end of the beginning.

In 2021, two longtime members of Vancouver Men’s Chorus commissioned a new work by our resident accompanist and composer Dr. Stephen Smith. They wanted a song that would express the hope and joy the choir felt when we were finally able to sing together again after eighteen months of pandemic isolation and silence. Stephen chose to set to music an 1899 poem by Thomas Hardy. Hardy was one of those gloomy Victorian who looked at the bleak modern world and sighed, yet somehow managed to find hope. 

 

The original title of “The Darkling Thrush” was “The Century’s End.” Stephen arranged the four stanzas as a unison chant, then a two-part duet, then a trio, then with all four sections of the chorus in full harmony. Hardy’s poem begins in desolate twilight, with a storm approaching as “every spirt upon earth seemed fervourless as I.” Suddenly “a voice arose among the bleak twigs.” An ancient song thrush “chose to fling his soul upon the growing gloom.” In Stephen’s arrangement, the thrush’s song is a fiddler’s reel. In the wild, the male thrush uses his distinctive song to attract a mate in the dark.

 

In the folklore of the English countryside, the thrush is known as the bird who sings in the darkest hour. At the conclusion of Hardy’s poem, the narrator recognizes “there trembled through his happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.” 

 

Even when the days get shorter and the nights get darker, we know the light will return. Let us begin the new year in kindness and hope.

March 2023 litigation update:

My lawsuit asserting claims against the Office of the Governor under the Public Records Act was set for trial on Monday, February 2, 2023. However, on the Friday before trial we learned we'd lost our slot to a three-week jury trial involving bull-goring injuries and cattle prod experts. Instead, we held our two-day bench trial on May 1-2, 2023. Closing arguments are scheduled for May 25, 2023.

Another Do-Over Year

2022년 복 많이 받으세요

“2022nyun bok manhi padeseyo”

The literal translation of the Korean equivalent to “Happy New Year” is “May you receive many blessings in 2022.”

 

Hopefully a few new blessings.

2021 turned out to be another year spent indoors waiting for viruses, lawyers, and judges to finish their work. I didn’t see enough movies to generate a list of favorite films. The only play I saw indoors was a high school production of Macbeth (Eleanor was one of the witches). My only other non-Zoom experience was seeing David Sedaris at the Mount Baker Theatre in September.

 

Fortunately, one of the benefits of emerging from the fog of mental illness is that I’m reading again. In addition to magazines and other online reading, last year I finished sixty books. Here are my favourites: 

Roger's Favourite Books of 2021

1.     Barbara Blatchley, What are the Chances? Why We Believe in Luck

 

2.     Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

 

3.     Lauren Hough, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing

 

4.     Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing

 

5.     Temple Grandin, Animals Make Us Human

 

6.     Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show:  A Political History of ACT UP New York 1987-93

 

7.     Stephen King, On Writing

 

8.     Oliver Sacks, On the Move

 

9.     Douwe Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past

 

10.  B.J. Fogg, Tiny Habits

 

11.  Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music

 

12.  Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

 

13.  Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

 

14.  Brian Greene, Until the End of Time

 

15.  Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain

 

16.  Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk:  How Randomness Rules our Lives

 

17.  Eric Garcia, We’re Not Broken:  Changing the Autism Conversation

 

18.  Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

 

19.  David Sedaris, A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020)

 

20.  Simon Garfield, Dog’s Best Friend

 

21.  Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

 

22.  Michael J. Fox, No Time Like the Future

 

23.  Julia Glass, A House Among the Trees

 

24.  Kevin Kwan, Crazy Rich Asians

 

25.  Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

 

26.  Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, & Cass Sunstein, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

 

27.  Alan Cumming, Baggage

 

28.  Ethan Kross, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It 

 

29.  Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

 

30.  Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design

I’m fascinated by memoirs, both as a reader and a writer. My 2021 reading list included memoirs by writers, mathematicians, neurologists, addicts, and actors, as well as dispatches from across the Autism Spectrum. Plus Vladimir Nabokov. Many English Majors identify Speak, Memory as the best-written memoir ever. It’s true – the rest of us should probably just give up writing. But we can’t help ourselves.

 

Upcoming blog essays respond to the two memoirs that spoke most directly to me in 2021. Lacy Crawford is a journalist. In Notes on a Silencing, Crawford describes her trauma as a sexual assault victim at a prestigious boarding school, and her triggers and re-traumas three decades later as she observed how the legal system worked to protect her abusers and their enablers.

 

Lauren Hough is a middle-aged lesbian writer/cable installer whose parents raised her in a weird sex cult named “The Children of God.” Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing tells how Hough escaped her religious roots by finding a new community in the military – only to find herself betrayed by authoritarian abusers in the era of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” It turns out Pharisees and lawyers are everywhere.

As usual, many of the other books on my 2021 reading list are about how thinking does and doesn't work.

 

Other than our extraordinary brains, humans are unremarkable as a species. Many animals are faster and stronger, with superior powers of vision and hearing, or superpowers like flight and invisibility. Instead, after our primate ancestors diverged from their chimpanzee cousins, evolution spent the next sixteen million years focused on building bigger and fancier human brains. This turned out to be a great longterm investment – eventually. 

 

In the meantime, we spent most of the Pliocene and Pleistocene eons as feeble hairless bipeds cowering in trees and caves. Even after the arrival of modern Homo sapiens half a million years ago, we lived for hundreds of thousands of years scattered in small bands of hunter-gatherers, well down the food chain from more impressive predators. Even within genus Homo, H. sapiens isn't very special. To the contrary, just 100,000 years ago we were one of at least six extant human species. Even after we tamed fire and invented a few stone tools, the investment in big brains was hardly paying dividends. As Yuval Noah Harari points out, 

 

We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full two million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures.

 

Then, just a few thousand years ago, something clicked in the human brain. Suddenly we experienced an accelerating series of revolutions:  agriculture, writing, civilization, empires, industry, automobiles, and iPhones. In a cosmic blink of the eye, humans achieved supremacy over every other species on the planet. 

Since this Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been enough time for natural selection to accomplish further genetic evolution. Instead, our enhanced human brains are responsible for the havoc wrought by the immense cultural evolution that continues at an ever-accelerating pace. At our current rate of “progress,” we’ll only need a few centuries or even mere decades before we join Tyrannosaurus Rex and the dodo in extinction, no doubt dragging the rest of the biosphere with us. Unless we finally learn how to think clearly.

For decades, evolutionary biologists and child psychologists have been trying to figure out when the human mind originated. Both point to the same breakthrough in the development of the human species and in the development of each human individual child:  “Theory of Mind.” 

 

The phrase “Theory of Mind” comes from an influential 1978 paper by David Premack and Guy Woodruff, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” Only modern Homo sapiens has demonstrated the capacity to understand our experience and to act based on the proposition that other individuals possess a mental state that may differ from our own. When humans finally evolved enough to feel empathy, our brains grow three sizes. Not just our hearts.

 

Some neuroscientists and philosophers focus on another important aspect of Theory of Mind:  because each individual’s mental state is independent of the real world, humans can feel, believe, and foresee things that are not true and may never be. According to Harari, “large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.”

One of the few TV shows I binge-watched in 2021 was The Wheel of Time, a sorta-feminist variation on Game of Thrones set in a fantasy world that resets itself every few thousand years. Human experience In the real world is profoundly cyclical, whether you focus on days, months, seasons, years, or the school calendar. 

 

Last year I read several excellent books about how our brains process probabilities, choices, disappointment, and uncertainty. My upcoming blog essay “How Lucky Can You Get?” dives into these topics, including some of the insights from my favourite book of the year, What are the Chances? Why We Believe in Luck, by neuroscientist Barbara Blatchley.

 

Blatchley identifies our reliance on “counterfactuals” as another important aspect of Theory of Mind:  

 

Counterfactuals are alternatives to reality that we generate, particularly after negative events. An upward counterfactual is an imagined alternative to reality that is better than what actually happened. A downward counterfactual is an alternative that is worse than reality. Researchers have found that upward counterfactuals might help us prepare to encounter this negative situation again in the future and perhaps to do better the next time.

 

What are the Chances? resonated with the best book I read in 2019, Carol Dweck’s Mindset. Dweck is the psychologist who coined the terms “fixed” and “growth” mindsets:

 
In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it. 

 

Similarly, Blatchley observes “When lucky people are unlucky – when something unwanted or awful happens – they learn from their mistakes, incorporating that experience into their expectations about the future. They are able to use their transformed expectations to change their bad luck into good for the next time.” Life becomes an upward spiral.

Somehow we all made it through 2020 and 2021, endured Donald Trump and Zoom school, and survived forest fires and floods. Now it’s another new year. The holiday snow is melting and the days already feel longer. As we slouch toward Groundhog’s Day, remember the lesson of the classic 80s movie:  Bill Murray learned how to learn from experience.

 

According to Barbara Blatchley in What are the Chances?, 

 

Luck is the way you face the randomness in the world. If we are open to it, accepting, not anxious or afraid, willing to learn from mistakes and to change a losing game, we can benefit from randomness. We can gain a modicum of control over this aspect of life, even if we can't control the universe on a large scale. Randomness will happen no matter what we do—chaos theory rules in our universe. Knowing how to roll with the punches; now that's lucky.

May we all plant plenty of flowers and find many blessings in 2022.

Blink

Before I acquired so many children and dogs, I used to collect antique maps and prints. Above the stereo cabinet in our living room is a poster with the slogan “Strengthen Liberty.” It commemorates my time in Chicago as a gay rights lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. 

The poster was actually printed for the Boy Scouts of America’s fortieth anniversary in 1950, the year that also marked the ACLU’s thirtieth anniversary. BSA and the ACLU share a comically similar taste in patriotic graphic design.

 

I keep this picture of the Statue of Liberty, an American flag, a Boy Scout, a Cub Scout, and an Explorer to remind me that some things change, and some things don’t. Because some people won’t change.

John Hammell and Keith Richardson in Windy City Times

When I arrived in Chicago in 1995, I inherited an appeal defending the ACLU’s victory in an employment discrimination case against the local Boy Scout council. John Hammell, the founder of the ACLU of Illinois LGBT Right Project, had filed suit on behalf of Keith Richardson under the City of Chicago’s antidiscrimination ordinance. John and Keith were both Eagle Scouts. (I think I made it to Second Class Scout.) After the Chicago Area Council rejected Keith’s employment application because he was an “avowed homosexual,” the Chicago Human Rights Commission determined the Boy Scouts violated Chicago’s ordinance prohibiting employment discrimination based on sexual orientation.

 

Sexual orientation has nothing to do with Scouting. Nevertheless, decades ago the Boy Scouts adopted an internal anti-gay policy excluding LGBT youth and adult leaders. BSA acted at the behest of some of its major organizational partners, including the Mormon church. For many decades, the Mormons sponsored more Boy Scout troops, Cub packs, and Explorer posts than any other organization. Scouting was the church’s official youth program for boys when I was growing up.

 

The First Amendment guarantees the right of “expressive association,” which means a private organization like the Boy Scouts can exclude members whose statements or presence would prevent the organization communicating its chosen message. Until advocates like the ACLU and Lambda Legal came along, most people didn’t know about BSA’s exclusionary policy. After critics began speaking out and LGBT rights lawyers began challenging the Boy Scouts’ anti-gay policy, BSA started identifying homophobia as one of its core values – preaching that it’s impossible for a gay individual to live up to the Scout Oath’s promise to be “morally straight.” In June 2000, the United States Supreme Court ruled by a 5-4 vote in Dale v. Boy Scouts of America that the First Amendment protected BSA’s exclusionary policy from the application of local anti-discrimination laws. 

 

In hindsight, the Boy Scouts of America won the battle but lost the war. A year after the Dale decision, Lambda Legal’s Executive Director Kevin Cathcart said “I’m disappointed that we lost the court ruling, but never have we lost so successfully. It must be driving the Boy Scouts crazy - to keep thinking this is going to die down, and yet it doesn’t stop.” Gregg Shields, the Boy Scouts’ longtime spokesman, told another reporter that despite winning in the Supreme Court, it felt like BSA lost.

The Advocate (March 17, 1998)

When I was working on the Richardson v. Chicago Area Council appeal, I could see the writing on the wall. The Boy Scouts were absolutely committed to their anti-gay policy. Eventually the mounting evidence of BSA’s homophobic statements and conduct would demonstrate to any court that the phrase “morally straight” should be taken literally as one of the organization’s core expressive values. At some point the excruciatingly principled folks at the ACLU would have to start defending BSA, just like we would with the First Amendment rights of Ku Klux Klan marchers or Nazis parading through Skokie.

 

It was time to redirect pressure toward the partners and sponsors of Scouting whose own values embraced LGBT inclusion. Because the Richardson case had generated a full trial record, I inherited a mountain of documents showing how Scouting works. The Girl Scouts are like Starbucks – GSA owns and operates each individual Girl Scout troop. In contrast, the Boys Scouts are organized like McDonald’s – BSA and its regional councils franchise or “charter” local organizations to operate each youth group in accordance with BSA’s policies. The charter approach greatly expands BSA’s reach.

 

The Richardson case file included a printout identifying the organization holding the charter for each of the 400+ Boy Scout troops, Cub Scout packs, and Explorer posts chartered by the Chicago Area Council. Many of the chartered organizations were schools and other governmental entities, as well as various private groups and churches. For example, a substantial share of Explorer posts in Chicago and nationwide were operated by government agencies.

 

So I filed a lawsuit against the Chicago School District, instead of against the Boy Scouts. I argued that the government cannot exclude youth or adults from taxpayer-funded programs just because someone signed a homophobic charter agreement with a discriminatory private organization. Our plaintiffs were a Methodist minister and Kevin Poloncarz, a gay law student. After a few months of litigation, the school district agreed to voluntarily end its sponsorship of the Boy Scouts’ discriminatory programs. 

 

The next week BSA announced it was opening its Explorer posts nationwide to every youth, regardless of sexual orientation or religious belief. That earnest teenaged Explorer saluting in my vintage poster?  As of 1998, it was ok for him to be gay.

Every religion has its little quirks. Transubstantiation. Lutheran hotdish. Yarmulkes. Usually these peculiar beliefs do not interfere with adherents’ ability to participate in ordinary society. Since the LDS Church’s founding in 1830, Mormon doctrine has dramatically diverged from the American mainstream only three times. 

In the nineteenth century the divisive issue was polygamy. Joseph Smith, who claimed to see God and later produced the Book of Mormon, was the first Mormon Prophet. Brother Joseph was a charismatic, visionary, strange man. Before an Illinois mob shot and killed him, Joseph told his closest confidants God had revealed that the highest degree of heaven required a man to marry multiple wives. (It’s not clear whether Joseph ever told his wife Emma this, even after Joseph secretly married the nanny and several other attractive young women.) 

Joseph Smith led the church for its action-packed first fourteen years. His death in 1844 amid continuing attacks by their neighbors left the Mormons in disarray. Characteristically ambiguous, Joseph sent mixed messages about who would succeed him, and the saints split into various factions. The largest group followed Brigham Young, the senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. 

 

Brother Brigham was God’s dude on Earth for the next thirty-three years. He was a very different kind of leader compared to Joseph Smith, yet exactly the shepherd his demoralized flock needed. Young took Joseph Smith’s wild visions and translated them for a practical world. He held his grieving people together, then led them across the prairies and mountains all the way out of the country. After the United States stole Utah and the rest of the West from Mexico three years later, Brother Brigham pragmatically became territorial governor. History recognizes Brigham Young as an American Moses. 

As with many other aspects of Joseph Smith’s creative theology, Brother Brigham organized and systemized polygamy. Brigham himself married fifty-five wives. Despite my Mormon pioneer heritage, I only have one polygamous ancestor. Leishmans are bad at multi-tasking, and as marginal family farmers they couldn’t meet the strict financial requirements for polygamy anyway. 

By the time Brigham Young died in 1877, the United States was targeting polygamy for extermination. Within a few years Church leaders were in hiding or in prison. The federal government seized the Salt Lake Temple and other church property. Families like the Romneys crossed the border to found Mormon colonies in Mexico and Canada.  

In 1890, Brigham’s successor Wilford Woodruff announced “The Lord showed me by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if we did not stop this practice.” He issued a Manifesto that abandoned and denounced the previously eternal principle of plural marriage. Nowadays you’ll only see polygamists on HBO in Big Love, or in Northern Arizona compounds where folks in quaint outfits still believe everything Joseph Smith and Brigham Young said.   

Seventy-five years after the Utah branch of Mormons abandoned polygamy, the church found itself in conflict with evolving American values regarding race.

During the nineteenth century, the Mormons picked up a lot of racist myths and folk theology. As a result, no one with a “drop” of African blood could be ordained to the priesthood, or participate in the Church’s most sacred rites. Like so many other Americans since 1619, one generation of Mormon leaders after another were flawed human beings who embraced and perpetuated structural racism. 

The church’s anti-Black doctrine became increasingly untenable in the 1960s and 70s. Missionaries found it heartbreaking to turn away enthusiastic converts in multiracial nations like Brazil. College athletes refused to play against teams from BYU. Ordinary Mormons found the dissonance between their Christian values and the Brethren’s out-of-touch dogma unbearable.

 

One of the advantages of a rigidly hierarchical organizational structure is that a single person has the power to end centuries of evil. In 1978, when I was a Boy Scout, the Mormon Prophet was Spencer W. Kimball. After “spending many hours in the Upper Room of the Temple supplicating the Lord for divine guidance,” President Kimball “received a revelation extending priesthood and temple blessings to all worthy male members of the Church.”

Like his predecessor President Woodruff, Spencer W. Kimball chose people over dogma. Because of his humility and vision, Mormons and their church finally began the long process of emerging from a century and a half of entrenched systemic racism.

Other supposed Christians were even slower than the Mormons on race. Conservative evangelical Bob Jones founded his eponymous university in 1927. His grandson Bob Jones III was president of the university in 1971 when it admitted its first Black students. Nevertheless, the Joneses and the university were convinced God had forbidden miscegenation, and therefore retained their rules against interracial dating and marriage.

In 1976, the Internal Revenue Service revoked Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status on the grounds that it practiced racial discrimination. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled against the university in an 8-1 decision. (Justice Rehnquist dissented. Typical.)

Last week in “Move On,” I wrote about the work of REAP – the Religious Exemption Accountability Project – which was founded last year by my former law firm colleague Paul Southwick. REAP seeks to apply the logic of IRS v. Bob Jones University to private colleges that accept government funding, yet insist on discriminating against LGBT students. Religious organizations should be free to practice their discriminatory beliefs – but not if they want to accept the benefits of being part of a civilized community.  

Bob Jones III abandoned the university’s interracial dating ban in 2000, after a campus visit by presidential candidate George W. Bush provoked intense media scrutiny. In 2008, Bob Jones University finally apologized for having allowed “institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful.”

With the Mormon church, the good news is that interracial couples have been permitted to marry in the temple since 1978. The bad news is that the church still hasn’t apologized for its racist past – just like the Brethren have yet to offer a word of apology for their decades of abusively homophobic words and deeds. 

Rachel Maddow on the Bob Jones University apology

In the decades after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dale, the Boy Scouts faced increased internal and external opposition to its anti-gay policy. Membership and donations plummeted. As CBS News reported, 

In 2013, after heated internal debate, the BSA decided to allow openly gay youth as scouts, but not gay adults as leaders. Several denominations that collectively sponsor close to half of all Scout units – including the Roman Catholic church, the Mormon church and the Southern Baptist Convention – have been apprehensive about ending the ban on gay adults.

Just two years later, the Boy Scouts of America announced a compromise that “ended its blanket ban on gay adult leaders, while allowing church-sponsored Scout units to maintain the exclusion for religious reasons.”

But the Mormons were already on their way out the door.

In 1913, the Mormon church became the Boy Scouts’ very first sponsor in the United States. For the next century every Mormon congregation chartered at least one Boy Scout troop, and every Mormon boy was automatically enrolled in Scouting. Even me. The immediate past president of the church, Thomas S. Monson, was a member of BSA’s National Executive Board, and a recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, BSA’s highest honor.

President Monson died on January 2, 2018. His successor, Russell M. Nelson, is a 97-year old former heart surgeon. President Nelson has focused his tenure on getting everyone to stop using the word “Mormon.“ (The formal name of the church is “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”) Even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has been rebranded.

One of the most interesting items I found in the Richardson v. Chicago Area Council files twenty-five years ago was a transcript from the deposition of Jack H. Gosalind, then the Mormon church’s Young Men’s President. Elder Gosalind testified that the church’s two top ecclesiastical bodies – the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles – had each adopted written policies stating that if BSA ever backed away from its anti-gay policy, the church would end its relationship with Scouting. 

Four months after President Monson’s death, the Mormon church announced that it was following through with the Brethren’s threat, and terminated its 105-year relationship with the Boy Scouts.

Last week in “Move On” I responded to a recent speech by Mormon apostle Jeffrey Holland, who used to be the president of Brigham Young University and my English professor. Afterwards several friends asked me how long I thought it would take before the church backed away from its anti-gay message and dogma. 

My prediction:  decades. In the meantime, thousands of LGBT Mormons and their families will continue to suffer, and a generation of would-be saints will drift away from the Brethren’s perplexing and unchristian fundamentalism.

The panel that made me weep the first time I saw the AIDS Memorial Quilt 

Here are three reasons for my pessimism. 

First, as Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” The Brethren have history of taking their marbles home to Salt Lake to sulk. At the conclusion of his recent anti-gay speech to BYU’s assembled faculty and staff, Elder Holland issued a threat that echoed Elder Gosalind’s deposition testimony in the Boy Scout case:

We could mimic every other university in the world until we got a bloody nose in the effort and the world would still say, “BYU who?” No, we must have the will to stand alone, if necessary, being a university second to none in its role primarily as an undergraduate teaching institution that is unequivocally true to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in the process. If at a future time that mission means forgoing some professional affiliations and certifications, then so be it. There may come a day when the price we are asked to pay for such association is simply too high, too inconsistent with who we are. No one wants it to come to that, but, if it does, we will pursue our own destiny….

I pity BYU students and graduates as they try to explain why they went to an unaccredited Bible school. Fortunately, like Elder Holland I have a degree from Yale to compensate for my B.A. from Bob Jones University of the West.

Second, the Mormon church is a rigid gerontocracy. Ever since Brigham Young seized the martyred Joseph Smith’s mantle, the church presidency has automatically gone to the senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The current church president fills each apostolic vacancy with a thoroughly vetted disciple. Nowadays no one with the prophetic spark that inspired Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Spencer W. Kimball can sneak into the Quorum.

President Nelson just turned 97. His presumed successor, legalistic bigot Dallin Oaks, is 88. Next in line is Russell Ballard, age 92, followed by Jeffrey Holland. Although Elder Holland is a relative youth at age 80, his recent speech at BYU demonstrated his homophobic bona fides. As with the Trump-skewed Supreme Court, religious political extremists will retain control over Mormon doctrine for the foreseeable future.

Third, Mormon hostility to LGBT dignity and equality is inescapably tied to the church’s doctrine about gender roles, including their extraordinary and inspiring belief that we have both a Father and a Mother in Heaven.

The First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles issued a “Proclamation on the Family” in 1995, at the height of hysteria over the mere possibility of marriage equality. Many states rushed to pass “Defense of Marriage Acts.” You will not be surprised to learn Utah’s mostly Mormon legislators won the race to pass the first DOMA in the country.

 

The Proclamation insists on a very narrow vision of what a family looks like:

 

Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.… By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children…. God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.

 

Apparently our Mother in Heaven is the kind of wife who sits in silence while staring up adoringly at her husband. Like the church’s all-male gerontocracy itself, the language of the Proclamation on the Family comes directly from the era of Ozzie and Harriet. Nevertheless, I barely notice the Proclamation’s pervasive sexism. Instead, I’m inevitably drawn to these words:

 

“Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.”

 

As I wrote in “Our Family,” the Mormon authors and readers of the “Proclamation on the Family” didn't realize “gender” is not the same thing as “sex.” These are not Women’s Studies majors. Instead, they probably thought “gender” is just a euphemism for “sex” that doesn’t sound so, well, sexy.

In the New Testament, Jesus says “in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage.” Matt. 22:30. Where other Christians have stuck with this bright-line rule for 2000 years, I’ve always appreciated the Mormons’ openness to creative theology. Nevertheless, as applied to the reality of LGBT experience, Mormon doctrine is on a collision course with itself.

I’m a humble English Major, not a theologian. I’m not here to fine-tune Mormon eschatology, just to point out the lessons of history. The current Mormon doctrine privileging eternal male-female couples only goes back as far as President Woodruff’s 1890 Manifesto. Before that, Mormons believed God only loved polygamists. Before that, Mormons who wanted to get into Heaven were “sealed” in the temple to a righteous man. Surely God can also find room at the heavenly family reunion for His and Her lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children.

For many of us, the most offensive and abusive aspect of the Mormons’ anti-gay campaign has been their insistence that LGBT people do not even exist – we’re just weak sinners who struggle to overcome what both Mormons and their allies in the discredited field of “reparative therapy” insist on calling “same-sex attraction.” For example, this quote comes from an influential 1996 sermon by Dallin Oaks, currently President of the Quorum of the Twelve and heir to the Prophet’s mantle: 

 

We should note that the words homosexual, lesbian, and gay are adjectives to describe particular thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. We should refrain from using these words as nouns to identify particular conditions or specific persons. Our religious doctrine dictates this usage. 

 

A quarter century later, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Elder Holland’s recent anti-gay speech to the BYU faculty is his inability to say words like “gay,” “lesbian,” and “transgender.” Instead, he referred to “those who live with this same-sex challenge.” Elder Holland’s homophobic dog-whistle is painfully familiar to survivors of the Mormons’ traumatizing “pray-the-gay-away” preaching. 

Galileo before the Inquisition

One tragic irony of the Mormon’s multi-decade campaign against LGBT dignity and equality:  the Brethren were halfway to the truth all along. Here’s the next sentence from Dallin Oak’s 1996 sermon:

It is wrong to use these words to denote a condition, because this implies that a person is consigned by birth to a circumstance in which he or she has no choice. 

You can find similar statements from Spencer W. Kimball, Boyd K. Packer, and every other Mormon priesthood leader who has offered his non-expert opinion about the scientific basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2021, the rest of us recognize these traits are essential and immutable aspects of individual identity.

As Galileo pointed out four centuries ago, sometimes the way to see the truth is to stop thinking you’re the center of the universe. It took 359 years before the Vatican hierarchy finally admitted Galileo was right and they were wrong. Hopefully it won’t take that long for someone in Salt Lake to embrace God’s love and recognize the truth about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. 

On the left: Copernicus and Galileo's heliocentric model of the solar system
On the right: what it takes to live a lie