Fathers and Brothers

My brother Doug Leishman died on April 25, 2023 after enduring spine cancer for the last six years. Doug asked that each of his brothers speak at his memorial. This is what I shared at the Mormon church in Bellingham on May 16, 2023.

I’m grateful for this opportunity to meet together as Doug’s family and friends. Gatherings of our extended family always have one very obvious impact on me and many other Leishmans, including Doug. After listening to everyone’s stories, I forget how to pronounce my own last name. It will take several days to switch back from Lishman to Leashman.

 

Leishman is an ancient Scottish surname. It’s been pronounced the same way for hundreds of years, since before Shakespeare and the King James Bible. But our branch of the family met the Mormon missionaries in Scotland during the 1850s. They sailed across the ocean and walked across the prairie. When they reached Utah, Brigham Young sent them north to settle Wellsville, in Cache Valley. They became a peculiar people, and developed a peculiar dialect. “Roof” became “ruff.” “Creek” became “crick.” And “Leishman” became “Lishman.” That’s how my brothers and I grew up pronouncing our last name.

 

When I began my professional career, I made a conscious choice to introduce myself as “Roger Leishman.” Just like I don’t say “crick.” But we don’t make a big deal about pronunciation, and respond politely to anyone regardless of how they say our name. Except for “Leischman,” of course.

 

Like Doug, on days like today we are all “Lishmans.”

When Kyla posted the announcement on Facebook letting folks know Doug had died, I was moved by the outpouring of comments. Three or four repeated words stood out:  “Nerd.” “Smart.” And “funny.” I realized that’s what the comments would say for all four Leishman brothers.

 

Folks often remark on how much we resemble each other and both our parents, but they struggle to put their finger on the specific similarity. Folks would say we are even more similar in our personalities. Especially my sisters-in-law, and our children.

There are differences. Yes, we’re all nerds, but Doug is the Dungeons & Dragons nerd. We’re all funny – but Doug is the master of sarcasm.

On the wall at my parent’s house there is a framed series of pictures of the four Leishman Brothers. The same series of photos hangs on the wall in my living room. They were taken a few years ago near Lake Whatcom. It was the only time when the brothers, parents, and grandchildren were all in the same place at the same time. So we hired a photographer. 

 

There are four pictures in this series. In the first picture Roger, Doug, Brian, and Warren are all smiling appropriately for the camera.

 

In the second picture, Doug has a quiet grin. He is sticking his finger into Warren’s ear.

In the third picture, Warren has his finger in my ear, and everyone is grinning.

 

In the fourth picture, the brothers have all burst into laughter. 

 

If you look close, you can see differences between the Leishman Brothers. Warren went bald early. I’ll always be the oldest, and the gay one. And as Brian is quick to point out, he is the tallest brother.

 

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to drive to Kamloops with my parents. Doug looked about the same as the last time I’d visited:  lying in a hospital bed on his stomach in the corner of the living room, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. Before we drove back to Bellingham, I reached in for a goodbye hug. I was struck by how thick and curly Doug’s hair had gotten. And still so dark. 

 

Technically, I am now the least bald Leishman brother, and Warren is the least grey. But I think we should retire the hair titles with Doug as champion.

Gatherings like this are important because we can help each other remember the real Doug.

I often find it a challenge to recall stories from the past without a picture or something to remind me. Faces are especially hard. Last month when my parents called to let me know Doug had died, I lay in bed weeping because I couldn’t remember what Doug looked like before cancer.

 

Doug spent the last few years of his life being seen from a strange angle. Spine cancer prevented him from walking or lying on his back, so we only saw him lying on his stomach. That’s how I noticed his dark curly hair.

 

I knew if I got out of bed and walk into the living room, the pictures on the wall would help me remember laughing together with Doug. But I wanted to conjure the memories on my own. Eventually I was blessed to remember two images of the real Doug.

The first memory was from the spine floor at Vancouver General Hospital. A year and a half ago, Doug was paralyzed by a new tumor in his neck. He was airlifted from Kamloops to Vancouver, where two separate teams of surgeons worked from both front and back, removing the cancer and reconstructing his vertebrae. Doug spent the next hundred days at VGH.

 

I sing in Vancouver Men’s Chorus, which rehearses on Wednesday evenings. Each week I would drive up early and spend time in Doug’s room. He was propped up on his back in a hospital bed. It’s the only time in the last few years when I got to look Doug in the face. It also gave me the opportunity to sit down and spend hours talking with my brother, sometimes with other family and sometimes just the two of us.

 

We discussed our challenges living with cancer and with PTSD. But mostly I remember sitting together face to face with Doug, and talking about what it means to be a father.

Spine cancer targets the parts of the body that signal pain. In addition to dealing with Doug’s underlying symptoms, his healthcare team always focused on making him comfortable. Greedy pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible doctors have created the terrible opioid epidemic that is ravaging our communities. But modern opioids are also miracle drugs that make it possible to endure to the end.

 

While Doug was at Vancouver General, three separate teams were responsible for the opioids in his IV drip, his pillbox, and the little pump installed in his chest. I happened to be visiting the hospital when the pain management teams realized not only were they not communicating clearly with each other, but they were using three incompatible measurements to track dosages. One team would give Doug enough medicine for him to sit up all the way for a meal. After a few minutes they would have to crank the bed back down for him to rest, which would react with the medicine from the other teams. Sometimes Doug would overdose. And then they would start over.

 

While visiting the hospital, I also observed the laborious process of putting Doug in a wheelchair. I listened to presentations about grueling rehabilitation programs at inconveniently located facilities. 

 

After more than three months at VGH, Doug was finally stable enough to leave the spine floor and return home. When I visited Kamloops with my parents a few months later, there was no sign of the elaborate rehabilitation programs we’d heard about at the hospital. Instead, Doug used every ounce of his energy to spend as much time as possible with his family. His world was tiny:  a bed in a corner of a living room. But Doug’s world was as large as eternity because he was at the center of his family.

As I lay in bed last month grieving, I remembered a second image of Doug, from a couple of summers ago. It was the height of the pandemic. Nothing was harder for our family than the Canadian border being closed for the first time since the War of 1812. Doug was stuck in a bed in Kamloops, and my parents and I were stuck in the States. 

 

Like everything else, the Mormon temples closed. But by a miraculous convergence of circumstances, Katie and Christian were able to get married in my parents’ backyard in the strangest Mormon wedding ever. I will always remember the last time I ever saw Doug walking:  he staggered down the aisle, holding on to his daughter, the happiest man and the proudest father in the world.

 

Besides “nerd,” “smart,” and “funny,” the other words Doug’s friends repeatedly used to describe him on Facebook were “family” and “father.” Fatherhood is at the center of all my brother’s lives. That is the great gift our parents and now Doug and Kyla have given to each of the “Lishmans.” 

Church policies and meeting schedules come and go, but the fundamentals are eternal, like the familiar slogan “Families are forever.” I recognize “forever” is way too long for some families. But not for us. 

 

When I was young, the president of the church was David O. McKay. He delivered a similar message, but with more words in it:  “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” (It was the Mad Man era – our ad slogans were longer than my kids’ generation, just like our attention spans.)

 

My brother Doug lived a successful life when it comes to what really matters. I hope we can all remember and be inspired by Doug’s example.

Douglas Todd Leishman

1967-2023

 

Move On

When I was a young litigation associate at my first law firm in Seattle, I came out of the closet and embarked on a lifetime of adventure as an advocate for LGBT dignity and equality. Eventually I quit my day job to spend five years with the ACLU of Illinois as the Director of the LGBT Rights/AIDS & Civil Liberty Project. I continued my advocacy pro bono when I returned to private practice back home in the Pacific Northwest, where I was the ACLU’s co-counsel in Washington’s marriage equality litigation, and argued other important civil rights cases in the Washington and Alaska Supreme Courts. 

 

In 2014, I attended Lavender Law, the annual conference of LGBT attorneys, not as an activist speaker but rather as a legal recruiter at what had become a mammoth job fair. My interview partner was a young gay litigation associate from our firm’s Portland office, Paul Carlos Southwick. Like me, Paul endured ecclesiastical abuse growing up in a fundamentalist church and going to a homophobic religious college.

 

I’ve attended Lavender Law numerous times over the years, but 2014 in New York is the only keynote session I vividly remember. We had recently won stunning marriage equality victories in the courts and before voters in multiple states, including Washington, and successfully challenged the odious federal “Defense of Marriage of Act.” The plenary panel’s topic was “What Next?,” and their answer was clear:  Queer Youth. LGBT kids are coming out younger than ever, at an average age of thirteen. As one speaker put it, “We’ve made it possible for them to come out, but we haven’t made it safe.” Each speaker challenged us to return to our communities and work both individually and systemically on behalf of the disproportionately at-risk queer youth in schools, homeless shelters, foster care, and the juvenile justice and mental health systems.

 

In 2020, Paul Southwick left private practice to become a full-time LGBT advocate. Paul founded REAP – the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, a program sponsored by the nonprofit Soulforce. REAP is currently litigating a nationwide class action that challenges federal rules permitting institutions of higher learning to accept federal funds without complying with the laws prohibiting discrimination that must be followed by every other accredited educational institution. Three of REAP’s plaintiff class representatives are from Brigham Young University, my alma mater.

Several years ago I wrote about the challenge of explaining BYU to normal people. Brigham Young University is the Mormon church’s flagship educational institution, and the largest private university in the United States. The Y attracts talented faculty and students with top credentials from around the world. BYU offers excellent programs in many areas, including a respected law school. It looks just like a real university, except with creepily immaculate landscaping. (I once saw a groundskeeper climb a tree to vacuum leaves before they could fall.) But the university’s actual mission is to facilitate youthful heterosexual marriages within the faith. BYU helps God join together each generation of recently returned Mormon missionaries with their blushing virgin brides. 

 

BYU was in the news last week because its former president Jeffrey Holland, now the fourth-ranking official in the Mormon church, delivered a homophobic and self-pitying speech to the University’s assembled faculty and staff. As the Salt Lake Tribune reported, “On the same day that Brigham Young University announced the creation of an ‘Office of Belonging’ to combat ‘prejudice of any kind, including that based on race and sexual orientation,’ Latter-day Saint apostle Jeffrey R. Holland sharply criticized faculty members and students who challenge the faith’s teachings on same-sex marriage. He also questioned why a BYU valedictorian would choose his 2019 commencement address to come out as gay.” [In hindsight I wish I had enough insight and courage to come out during my own BYU valedictory address in 1986.]

 

Elder Holland told BYU’s faculty and staff they should be taking up their “muskets” to defend the Church, especially “the doctrine of the family and marriage as the union of a man and a woman” as applied to the purely secular institution of legal marriage. According to Elder Holland, BYU professors who instead speak out on behalf of their LGBT students are attacking the Mormon church from within with “friendly fire — and from time to time the church, its leaders and some of our colleagues within the university community have taken such fire on this campus. And sometimes it isn’t friendly — wounding students and the parents of students who are confused about what so much recent flag-waving and parade-holding on this issue means.” 

Elder Holland urged BYU’s faculty and staff to “stay in harmony with the Lord’s anointed,” rather than questioning the Mormon hierarchy’s pronouncements about human sexuality. He quoted an earlier speech at BYU by the senior Apostle, Dallin Oaks, who said “I would like to hear a little more musket fire from this temple of learning,” especially “defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman.”

Violence and violent language directed at gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals are nothing new for BYU and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

 

Other than the Brethren in Salt Lake City, there are no paid clergy among the Mormons. Instead, every worthy male member is eligible to hold the priesthood and to participate in voluntary church leadership. I was ordained a deacon in 1976 when I turned twelve years old. Twice a year the men all gather for a Priesthood General Conference, beamed by satellite from the Tabernacle. I attended for the first time in October 1976, just a few weeks after my family moved from Vancouver to a small town in Utah. It was a memorable session.

 

Apostle Boyd K. Packer delivered a notorious address about the Law of Chastity. The name of the sermon was “To Young Men Only,” although it’s generally referred to as the “little factory” speech because of Elder Packer’s extended metaphor about the risks of masturbation revving up hormone production. Like every other church spokesman then and now, Elder Packer recklessly dismissed the reality of sexual orientation as “a falsehood that some are born with an attraction to their own kind.” One horrifying passage stood out:

 

It was intended that we use this power only with our partner in marriage. I repeat, very plainly, physical mischief with another man is forbidden. It is forbidden by the Lord. There are some men who entice young men to join them in these immoral acts. If you are ever approached to participate in anything like that, it is time to vigorously resist.

While I was in a mission on one occasion, a missionary said he had something to confess. I was very worried because he just could not get himself to tell me what he had done.

After patient encouragement he finally blurted out, “I hit my companion.”

“Oh, is that all,” I said in great relief.

“But I floored him,” he said.

After learning a little more, my response was “Well, thanks. Somebody had to do it, and it wouldn’t be well for a General Authority to solve the problem that way.”

I am not recommending that course to you, but I am not omitting it. You must protect yourself.

 

Elder Packer’s message was so important the church distributed it in pamphlet form for the next forty years – only to boys, of course. These words terrorized generations of young Mormon men, especially the queer ones. 

The church finally stopped printing the “To Young Men Only” pamphlet in 2016. The transcript of Elder Packer’s original sermon was silently scrubbed from the church’s official General Conference archive in July 2020, but his harmful message can still be found online. More importantly, it lives on in the words and deeds of today’s Mormon leaders.

 

1981 Kimball Scholar finalists at BYU. Can you believe only John, Bill, and I turned out to be gay?

I first met Jeffrey Holland in January 1981, when he was in his first year as BYU president. I was visiting campus as a finalist for BYU’s prestigious Spencer W. Kimball Scholarship. Mormon youth from around the world apply for the university’s top honor, named for the current president of the church. BYU flew the finalists to Utah for an intense long weekend of competitive bonding before they selected twelve winners and two alternates. (The girl finalists had their turn the following week – God forbid the sexes should intermingle before marriage.) Being chosen as a Spencer W. Kimball Scholar remains one of the great honors of my life.

President Kimball served as the Mormon Prophet from 1973 until his death in November 1985. He bore a strong resemblance to his contemporary Yoda – short and ancient, with a croaking voice that could move mountains. He was one of the most godly individuals I’ve ever encountered.  

 

In the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, Elder Price’s big number is “I Believe.” The song is a catalogue of accurate yet outlandish-sounding tenets of the Mormon faith – such as “I believe … that in 1978, God changed his mind about black people.” 

 

That’s President Kimball’s legacy. 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. After this purportedly essential doctrine became increasingly untenable in the 1960s and 70s, President Kimball was the one who finally had the vision to open the temple doors to everyone, regardless of race.

Spencer W. Kimball (1895 - 1985)

One of the great tragedies of my life is that my personal hero was also one of my first abusers. President Kimball single-handedly did more damage to me and countless other LGBT Mormons than anyone or anything before the church's shameful role in the Prop 8 campaign. As Bryce Cook wrote in his comprehensive history of the divide between the Mormons and the gays:

 

Spencer W. Kimball’s popular book, The Miracle of Forgiveness, first published in 1969, devoted an entire chapter to homosexuality, entitled “Crime Against Nature.” As one LDS historian explained, “[This chapter] is the earliest and most comprehensive treatment on homosexuality by an apostle, and the foundation from which Mormon thought, policy and political action on homosexuality grew for the past 45 years.” 

 

Kimball described homosexuality and homosexuals using terms such as, “ugly,” “repugnant,” “ever-deepening degeneracy,” “evil,” “pervert,” deviant,” and “weaklings.” He taught that it was a spiritual disease that could be “cured,” and to those who felt otherwise, he responded: “How can you say the door cannot be opened until your knuckles are bloody, till your head is bruised, till your muscles are sore? It can be done.” 

 

This “curable-disease” mindset – based on obsolete psychological thought from the 1950s and 1960s – was embraced by Kimball and other church leaders because it aligned with their spiritual views of homosexuality. They believed that homosexuality was a psychological or spiritual malady that could be cured through intense repentance, self-mastery and even marriage to the opposite sex. This belief informed the church’s ecclesiastical approach and training of leaders, as well as Mormon mental-health therapists, for years to come – and it was probably the most psychologically and spiritually damaging of all the church’s teachings on homosexuality. 

 

I read The Miracle of Forgiveness multiple times when I was a teenager. I carried the book around for years, before finally throwing it out when the kids and I moved into our current house. Nevertheless, I don’t remember a word of what President Kimball said about gay people, in his book or anywhere else.

 

I had to have known. But I couldn’t associate the man I loved and admired with this ignorant and hateful message. So I repressed or disassociated my memories of the Prophet as homophobe. No doubt that made the experience all the more traumatic.

Unlike the Mormons’ ban on ordaining blacks, finally lifted in 1978, the Mormon church’s anti-LGBT bias is no relic of the past. I’m living proof. Mormon church leaders not only caused my original trauma three decades ago, but they also helped trigger the strange new PTSD symptoms that disabled me and ended my legal career five years ago.

 

In November 2015, just as I was struggling to understand my body’s excruciating reaction to a toxic work environment, news reports emerged of the Mormon church’s vindictive response to the Supreme Court’s marriage equality rulings. Mormons don’t believe in infant baptism. Instead, they place the “age of accountability” at eight years old. Getting baptized is a big deal for any Mormon child. Nevertheless, the church issued a policy denying baptism to all children of married gay couples. Just the legally married ones – not gay single dads or couples living in sin, as we used to call cohabitation.

 

In a Washington Post op-ed commentary about the new Mormon policy, my longtime civil rights colleague and former Utah neighbor Kate Kendell, Executive Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, called it “repugnant and deeply stigmatizing.” Like Kate, I thought I had made my peace with the Mormons long ago. Nevertheless, family and friends remarked at my over-the-top reaction when news broke about the church’s new baptism policy. Even after deleting all the original ranting, my own PTSD-fueled Facebook response at the time was pretty damning:

 

The Gospel of Matthew describes an occasion when Jesus’ disciples, like paparazzi-weary security guards, attempted to block a group of little children from coming to hear the Master. Jesus rebuked his own disciples, saying with uncharacteristic harshness that “whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matt. 18:6.

 

In their public statement defending the leaked policy of denying baptism to the children of married gay couples, the Mormon Church said “We regard same-sex marriage as a particularly grievous or particularly significant, serious kind of sin.” Because of this stance, they refuse to allow children with approving but married gay parents to follow Christ into the waters of baptism – out of a “desire to protect children in their innocence.” 

 

The ludicrousness of the assertion that a couple’s public affirmation of commitment to each other is a more grievous sin than murder, rape, or child abuse speaks for itself. In the face of Christ’s actual statements about children, it is breathtaking.

 

I was thirty years old before my parents and I finally had our coming out chat. I drove up from Seattle to confess I was gay, I’d quit my law firm job, and I was moving to Chicago with my boyfriend to be an LGBT rights lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. (We agreed on a cover story to tell my fathers’ Republican friends:  I’d been disbarred and gone away to prison.)

My daughter Rosalind represents the new generation. She came out in middle school, in a text. Actually two texts:

#1:  “Papa, I just wanted to let you know I’ve been going to the Queer Student Alliance after school.”

#2:  “Don’t make a big deal about it.”

For her sixteenth birthday this summer, Rosalind requested a pair of Converse custom Pride hightops. Last week she confidently wore her big gay shoes on the first day back at in-person high school.

I will never forget the Lavender Law speakers’ challenge to do whatever we can to make the world safe for every child. In hindsight, perhaps the most important action I’ve taken personally has been to keep my own children as far away as possible from the unrepentantly sexist, racist, and homophobic Brethren in Salt Lake.  

"What's a Mama Dragon?"

When Paul Southwick and his colleagues organized the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, they chose an acronym for the organization – REAP – that intentionally invokes a familiar New Testament metaphor. The hopeful motto on REAP’s homepage comes from sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Galations: “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” As the Apostle Paul warns in the previous verse “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.”

 

REAP’s imagery also resonates with another Biblical metaphor, from the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus told the multitude

 

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

 

Matthew 7:15-17, 20 (King James Version).

When I first heard about Jeff Holland’s recent speech at BYU, I didn’t want to rush to judgment. Fortunately, both the church and the Salt Lake Tribune made the complete transcript available. It turns out Elder Holland’s actual words are even worse than their description in the press.

 

First, his violent imagery in asking the faculty to take up “muskets” against proponents of LGBTQ inclusion was not a misplaced or misunderstood metaphor. My BYU classmate and fellow Student Review alumnus Michael Austin, now the academic vice president of a Methodist university in Indiana, was quoted in the original Salt Lake Tribune article about Elder Holland’s speech. As Mike subsequently wrote, 

 

The nature of our metaphors is important because words are important. Language has enormous power to wound and to heal. Using a martial metaphor to describe discussion and disagreement introduces an unnecessary level of violence into the discourse. It makes it harder, not easier, for us to understand each other and work together in love to solve conflicts.

 

Elder Holland’s call to arms was at the center of the entire speech. Chillingly, he justified his choice of words with an explicit appeal to the authority of even more senior Mormon apostles who had previously used the same violent language. (“My brethren have made the case for the metaphor of musket fire, which I have endorsed yet again today.”) And he demanded “loyalty to prophetic leadership and devotion to revealed doctrine.”

 

Second, like so many abusers, Elder Holland insists on wrapping himself in the mantle of victimhood. He complained about the Brethren’s “scar tissue” from being criticized about their position on “the whole same-sex topic.” Elder Holland acknowledged with crocodile tears that “Too often the world has been unkind, in many instances crushingly cruel, to these our brothers and sisters.” Yet not once has Elder Holland or his gerontocratic brethren ever publicly acknowledged responsibility for the crushing cruelty they have inflicted on LGBT Mormons and their families, or for the impact of the church’s relentless political and legal campaigns against purely secular rights for LGBT citizens.

 

Finally, you will search the text of Elder Holland’s speech in vain for words like “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “transgender,” or “LGBTQ.” Instead, he refers to “those who live with this same-sex challenge.” His odious homophobic dog-whistle is painfully familiar to survivors of discredited reparative therapy and traumatizing “pray-the-gay-away” preaching. Nevertheless, just like Spencer W. Kimball, Boyd Packer, and pathologically legalistic senior apostle Dallin Oaks, Elder Holland is so blinded by bad science and worse dogma that he is incapable of acknowledging the existence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender children of God – recognizing only weak sinners who struggle with what the Mormons insist on calling “same-sex attraction.”

 

Jeffrey Holland should know better, both as an English Major and as an apostle charged with proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I urge Elder Holland to ponder his own words at the conclusion of his disastrous recent speech to the BYU faculty:

 

“Light conquers darkness. Truth triumphs against error. Goodness is victorious over evil in the end.”

Like the out-of-touch Brethren who lead the Mormon church, I’m fond an ancient Middle Eastern proverb:  “The dog barks, but the caravan moves on.” (It rhymes in both Turkish and Armenian.)

After I left the Mormon church thirty years ago, Elder Holland sent me a sincere and thoughtful private letter in which he described me as perhaps the “biggest disappointment” of all his students and friends at BYU. 

 

When I first read Elder Holland’s letter three decades ago, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. That’s the same way I used to feel every time I heard the Mormons’ message that gay, lesbian, and transgender youth are hopelessly broken and unworthy of love. Despite the progress I’ve made, the church’s ugly attack on gay families five years ago once again triggered debilitating PTSD symptoms.

 

Fortunately, it gets better. This month as I read Elder Holland’s speech and observed the justifiably outraged response, I felt only pity – for the queer youth subjected to the Brethren’s hateful, violent, and dishonest message; for the countless lives lost to suicide, loneliness, and self-destruction; for the parents forced to choose between their children and their faith; for the deluded couples pressured into doomed heterosexual marriages, and for the children of their broken homes; for the abuse victims who believed the false promise they could pray the gay away; and for the BYU students and faculty who thought they were investing in an academic degree, and instead find themselves on the road to pariah status as the Mormon version of Bob Jones University. 

 

I even pity the blind old men in Salt Lake who cannot see any way to untangle the knot they’ve tied themselves in. Nevertheless, today I can say that Jeffrey Holland is definitely the biggest disappointment of all my professors at BYU, Yale, and the University of Washington.

An Importunate Single Dad

from Parables by Nikola Sarić, http://www.nikolasaric.de/ 

Growing up among the Mormons planted the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder time bombs that my abusive employers triggered decades later. But I also count many blessings from my Mormon youth. For example, I was steeped in the old-fashioned King James Version of the Bible, the greatest Early Modern English text written by someone not named Shakespeare.

Each of Jesus’ New Testament parables has its own traditional name, such as “The Prodigal Son” and “The Wheat and Tares.” The story that opens Chapter 18 of the Gospel of Luke is sometimes called “The Unjust Judge”:

And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;

Saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man:

And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary.

And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man;

Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.

Usually this story is referred to as the “Parable of The Importunate Widow,” or in recent years, “The Persistent Widow.” I don’t know which Greek or Aramaic words King James’ scholarly committee was trying to translate when they recounted Jesus’ story about the widow who continually troubled the unjust judge. But here are some of the English synonyms that Microsoft Word suggests for “importune”:   pester, harass, plague, annoy, persist, beleaguer, pursue, demand, bother. 

You get the picture.

There are three phases of litigating your way through mental illness.

Phase 1: Traumas

Shortly after I began work with the Washington Attorney General’s Office as Chief Legal Advisor to Western Washington University, I began experiencing strange symptoms that affected my behavior. In November 2015, my new Bellingham doctor determined my debilitating symptoms were caused by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Although my PTSD symptoms were rooted in traumas that occurred three decades before, they were triggered by unhealthy dynamics in my new workplace. 

Meanwhile, I also encountered implicit and explicit homophobia from my employers, as well as from key client contacts like former WWU President Bruce Shepard. When I submitted a sexual orientation discrimination complaint about my immediate supervisor’s misconduct, the Attorney General’s Office hired Patrick Pearce of the Seattle law firm Ogden Murphy Wallace PLLC into investigation my allegations of workplace bias. Instead, the State’s top employment lawyers assigned Mr. Pearce to investigate secret complaints from my supervisors about my behavior. Then they used his one-sided investigation report as a pretext for firing me.

Originally my story was about how the State bungled its response to disclosures about my disability and sexual orientation. These are the kinds of messy legal problems people face in real life every day. Usually there’s no clear written record or obvious explanation for what happened. Witnesses provide insistent versions of the same event. Defendants can always find a paid expert to justify their conduct. (“In my expert opinion, you can’t call what Ogden Murphy Wallace did ‘malpractice,’ because at least Mr. Pearce didn’t accuse you of faking your disability. That was Assistant Attorney General Kerena Higgins.”) 

As a lawyer, I’m often asked if someone can sue their landlord, or boss, or Comcast. The literal answer is yes – anyone with a credit card number can file a lawsuit. But that’s only the beginning. Before a judge or jury can resolve the parties’ messy disputes, you have to endure months or years of expensive and painful litigation. For most people, the costs and risks aren’t worth the fight. That’s how Donald Trump became a “successful” businessman – by lawyering up, then bullying and intimidating his partners, suppliers, and customers.

By the time the State placed me on an abusive “home assignment” in March 2016, my PTSD symptoms made me incapable of representing myself, and barely capable of being a client. With the help of a good lawyer, eight months later I reached a modest settlement agreement with the State that my attorney and I thought would put me on track to reviving my health and career.

Things actually were much worse than my lawyer and I realized.

When I first encountered Ogden Murphy Wallace’s taxpayer-funded investigation report into my sexual orientation discrimination complaint, I thought it all was a terrible mistake. I naively thought that if the right people actually examined the evidence everyone would recognize there’d been a misunderstanding, and my family could promptly return to normal life. I was wrong. 

As I wrote in one of my “Rock Bottom” stories last year, just before my mediation with my former employer I became suicidally depressed for the first time in thirty years. Our family lost our health insurance because the State’s lawyers miscalculated the COBRA deadline. Meanwhile, my former colleagues at the Attorney General’s Office had already begun a campaign to cover-up their co-workers’ malpractice and ethical lapses. Blaming the victim, they besmirched my reputation and interfered with my efforts to find new employment – in violation of our settlement agreement, the Washington Law Against Discrimination, and the Rules of Professional Conduct.

The Unjust Judge

Phase 2: Triggers

In January 2017, I reached out to Ogden Murphy Wallace’s managing partner in an attempt to clear my name. Rather than respond to my letter, instead he hired one of Washington’s most notorious insurance defense law firms, Lee Smart. (The firm’s nickname within the profession is “Less Smart.”) After failing to get anyone’s attention, in May 2017 I filed a lawsuit seeking damages from the lawyer-investigator who lied to me, Patrick Pearce, and from his firm. At this point I was representing myself. I couldn’t afford to pay a lawyer, and any ordinary plaintiff’s contingent fee lawyer would have looked at my case and seen a big huge hopeless mess.

I began my lawsuit with one stroke of good luck, and one disastrous stroke of reality.

My good fortune actually was the result of my industriousness. Or mild OCD. Because Washington is a community property state, when you sue someone you’re supposed to name both spouses as defendants. Lazy lawyers just put “and Jane Doe Smith” in the captions, but I try to identify the correct name. However, the State’s attorney-investigator Patrick Pearce appeared to be an internet cipher. In hindsight, it looks like someone paid an online reputation management company to clean up the embarrassing public record – a service Ogden Murphy Wallace happens to offer to its clients. 

I never tracked down Pearce’s marital status. Instead I connected the dots between various separate news articles and made a juicy discovery. A couple of years earlier, the Chief Hearing Officer at Washington’s Office of Insurance Commissioner filed a whistleblower complaint about her supervisor’s improper interference with pending cases. The OIC hired Patrick Pearce to conduct the investigation – not into Judge Petersen’s complaint, but into trumped-up accusations against the judge herself. Eventually the State paid $450,000 to settle her wrongful termination claims. This discovery immediately changed my case narrative:  allegations that formerly might have been be dismissed as a messy “he said/he said” dispute instead became part of Defendants’ well-documented pattern of deceptive business practices.  

The unfortunate stroke of reality? By spring 2017, I’d begun to understand the nature of my disability, and I’d learned to cope with some of my daily symptoms. Nevertheless, like many individuals who suffer from PTSD, I struggled to respond to stressful social interactions. Just like the Incredible Hulk. On the surface, I appeared to be a wholesome middle-aged Mormon dad. You couldn’t see the deranged obsessions, or the explosive rage waiting to be detonated by bureaucratic lies and lawyerly prevarications. This phase in my mental health was captured in a series of blog essays about my reactions to frustrating customer service experiences with Comcast. 

Defendants replaced their lawyers from Lee Smart with a new hack insurance defense boutique. Meanwhile, the Attorney General assigned a dishonest and corner-cutting Assistant Attorney General to appear on behalf of the State. Both sets of lawyers tag-teamed me with gaslighting lies and obstructive tactics. I responded by losing my calm and my focus. Unsurprisingly, a busy trial court judge grasped at the slimmest of reeds to get rid of us.

The Incredible Hulk phase of my litigation/mental health experience ended in disaster. Not only did the trial judge dismiss all of my claims under an inapplicable technicality, but he also ordered me to pay Defendants’ legal expenses. At the State’s request, the court also entered a broad order permanently sealing virtually all of Ogden Murphy’s investigation files, rather than considering any of my individual objections to the State’s overbroad and frivolous privilege designations.

However, once again I had the good fortune of discovering written evidence of my opponents’ dishonesty. In October 2017, shortly before they succeeded in getting my case dismissed, Defendants’ attorneys finally produced a copy of an irrefutable “smoking gun” email exchange between the State’s lawyers and their investigator. 

There’s something wrong with the rule of law if it takes two years for the Court of Appeals to correct an obvious procedural mistake by a trial judge. Nevertheless, I put those two years to good use. After submitting numerous requests to the State under the Public Records Act, eventually I located the rest of the incriminating evidence that the Attorney General’s Office and Defendants had concealed. My efforts triggered a new outpouring of obfuscations and lies from two separate sets of sleazy lawyers. 

As usual, the cover-up was even worse than the crime.

Phase 3:  Recoveries

During the last two years I also made significant progress in my mental health. Some improvement was gradual. Eventually I stopped responding to every frustration like the Incredible Hulk. Other breakthroughs came after I passed important milestones, such as my recent string of victories in the Court of Appeals and the Washington Supreme Court, becoming a fulltime single dad, and inheriting a dog.

In “Well-Picked Battles,” I recently offered a few tips for anyone coping with litigation: (1) Find the best possible venue; (2) Focus on what’s important; (3) Seek the most favorable legal standard; and (4) Aim for as few distractions as possible. These days I don’t need to rely on disputed allegations, or “he said/she said” incidents. Instead, every argument I’ve chosen to make in my public filings is based solely on undisputed evidence:  the smoking gun emails and other contemporaneous documents begrudgingly produced by the State and Defendants themselves. 

After four years of hard work, I’ve finally figured out healthy and effective ways for a pro se plaintiff living with mental illness to speak truth to power.

The truth will out. Eventually someone in authority will recognize what the State and Ogden Murphy Wallace did to my family is wrong.

Hopefully they won’t merely condemn these lawyers’ misconduct from sheer exhaustion, like the Unjust Judge in the parable. Instead, someone will finally recognize the truth because it’s the right thing to do.

The Importunate Widow