The Book of Mormon Girl (17 page)

I start hearing from other Mormons that people have stolen their Yes on 8 signs, left dog feces on their front steps, and thrown bleach on peaceful Yes on 8 demonstrators. Thousands of Mormons line Pacific Coast Highway one night to demonstrate support for the proposition. The television cameras do not come.

Laura at Mormons for Marriage asks me to speak at a No
on 8 event in Redlands, deep within the Inland Empire, Yes on 8 territory. Others on the program include a legal expert, a Christian minister, and a rabbi. “Can anyone else do it?” I ask her. Laura tells me most of her other Southern California contacts are unavailable. She says she could fly down, but she would have to leave her kids. It would be a very fast trip, and very expensive. I agree to help.

The Church has said that it respects the rights of its members with dissenting opinions. Still, as I write my speech, terror sits on my chest. I wrestle with the specter of excommunication that haunts every dissenting Mormon who writes or speaks in public. I wrestle with silence. I carefully arrange my words on the paper, trying to describe the exact shape and weight of the cinder block I feel on my heart. I have not spoken about matters like this to my own family in many, many years.

Encouragement comes from my friend Soledad, who is gay. On Wednesday afternoon, she sees me at the school where our daughters attend kindergarten together. She looks at my face and takes pity. “It’s time to come out of the closet,” she says. She holds my hand.

On Thursday night, I click the mouse to send my speech to my parents, brother, sisters.

On Friday morning, I get an email from my father.

“We want you to know we love you,” the email says. “You have wanted a more just and loving world since you were a little girl.”

Tears drop on my keyboard. My chest heaves.

My husband, my girls, and I leave for Redlands early Saturday morning. When we arrive at the church, as the minister, the rabbi, the legal expert, and I meet to prepare for the event, I can hear old men calling up and yelling about Leviticus into the church’s answering machine.

Among the crowd are many gay Mormons, including one of the paid staff for the No on 8 campaign. I recognize her blond hair, her clear and riveting blue eyes, her narrow features; I hear the remnant of a Mormon Utah accent rounding her speech. We embrace each other deeply. I can feel her ribs through her T-shirt. She tells me she is the niece of a prominent member of the church leadership. She once served an eighteen-month mission for the Church. She spent many years in deep depression, crying on her knees. When she finally came out of the closet, she tells me, she felt a burning in her bosom, an overwhelming feeling of peacefulness and love from her Heavenly Father. Her partner is here at the rally with her. Her family does not speak to her.

•   •   •

I give my speech, voice shaking. I ask the crowd to sign up for an election shift with the Mormon No on 8 organizers. I sing the crowd our old pioneer song:

Put your shoulder to the wheel; push along,

Do your duty with a heart full of song.

We all have work; let no one shirk.

Put your shoulder to the wheel.

After I finish, an old man stands at the back of the crowd, hollering about Leviticus and calling out each of us speakers with an angry pointed finger. “He’s not a real rabbi,” he screams at the rabbi. “You’re not a real Mormon,” he screams at me. One of the gay Mormons in the crowd, a broad-shouldered lesbian, quietly walks over and places her body between the screaming man and the crowd. The minister leads us in singing “This Little Light of Mine.” The old man walks back to his pickup truck in the parking lot.

After the meeting, people confess with tears in their eyes how difficult it has been to bear the unthinking self-righteousness and cruelty of some of their Mormon coworkers and neighbors. They tell me that their No on 8 signs have been stolen from their front lawns, dog feces left on their doorsteps, and acid thrown on No on 8 demonstrators. The crowd at the church in Redlands is small. Television cameras do not come.

•   •   •

On the eve of the election, on Monday night, in Salt Lake City, Mormon mothers of gay children organize a candlelight vigil. “Stop saying mean things about our kids!” brave white-haired Millie Watts tells the television cameras.

Across the West, the Yes on 8 phone banks burn all night long, turning out the vote, while gay people and their allies line the streets and hold candles.

Candles is how we ask for mercy when we know very well what is to come.

It is not good to be angry.
Put your shoulder to the wheel.

•   •   •

When it is all over, Proposition 8 passes by a margin of 52.3 percent to 47.7 percent.

It is the most expensive ballot initiative fight over a social issue in California history: eighty-two million dollars. Mormon individual donors account for at least 50 percent of the money raised in support of Proposition 8.

An oral rehydration packet for a child with diarrhea costs about 10 cents. Diarrhea is the second leading cause of death among children worldwide. Diarrhea kills five thousand children each day, almost two million children each year. Eighty-two million dollars buys almost one billion oral rehydration packets, enough to provide life-saving treatment for every child on the globe with diarrhea for a decade to come.

•   •   •

A few days after the election, outraged gays and lesbians and their allies rally by the tens of thousands at Mormon temples in San Diego and Los Angeles.

I do not attend the rallies. I read news coverage, and I laugh at some of the picket signs: “You have two wives, I want one!” Other signs are more ugly, angry, hurt: “Liars burn in hell.” Would have been nice, I think, if you all would have
been out in August and September, canvassing eight hours a month.

It is not good to be angry.
Put your shoulder to the wheel.

The protesters do not understand that picketing at Mormon temples inflames a centuries-old persecution complex: deep memories of mobs amassing in Missouri, of temples abandoned and destroyed in Ohio and Illinois. More reason for Mormons to circle the wagons and to feel like an embattled righteous minority.

Women stand in a little cluster at my sister’s ward house in Utah. “I never thought I would live to see the last days,” one says, hanging her head, tearful. “I never knew it would look like this.”

A few weeks after the election, Grant Jensen publishes a glossy coffee-table book:
How Americans View Mormonism
. The book is full of little colored bar charts and pie graphs, like the ones I used to print out at his office when I was fifteen. His findings? Forty-nine percent of Americans have unfavorable impressions of Mormons; 37 percent have favorable ones.

My dad relays even more specific elements of Brother Jensen’s findings to me: in our Orange County, he relates, surveys show more people would rather vote for a Muslim than a Mormon. His chest is tight with surprise, a knot in his throat. He recedes a bit against the world he inhabits.

I look up Grant Jensen’s son Mark. I haven’t seen him since we were both children in the same Orange County
congregation. We reconnect by email.
How are you?
I ask.
Okay
, he says. He is living with his boyfriend in San Bernardino. He recounts the day he stumbled upon stacks of Proposition 8 campaign materials in his father’s office and realized the magnitude of what was to come. He and his parents haven’t spoken since.

•   •   •

Three months after the election, I bring myself and my daughters back to church. I generally opt out of the adult meetings, preferring instead to sit in the back of my daughters’ primary classes, where the talk is about God and Jesus and prayer and pioneers and not about the adult business of protecting marriage.

Eventually, though, I do venture back into Relief Society. The teacher, a dark-haired woman in her fifties, has outlined on the chalkboard the lesson plan straight from the Salt Lake City–issued manual. But her talk keeps veering sharply away from the lesson plan, to the strain of Proposition 8, flak taken by Mormon high school students during the Yes on 8 campaign, the anti-Mormon sentiment of the television show
Big Love
, Tom Hanks’s recent talk show declaration that Mormons are “un-American,” and a searching postelection feature on the Church in the pages of
Time
magazine.

The campaign has taken a toll on every one of us.

I try to distract myself by checking my text messages, then I start keeping score. Fifteen minutes into the lesson:
stories relating to Proposition 8 or anti-Mormon sentiment resulting from Proposition 8, 5; stories relating to Jesus, 0.

The air is heavy with defensiveness, and
man
, how I miss Jesus. I consider getting up and leaving the room just to spare myself the frustration. I think about sitting in my car and having a cry. But I don’t. I hold my tongue, but I also hold my seat. This is a church inhabited by people willing to give up their own children for being gay. This is also the church of Millie Watts and the church of my grandmothers. This is a church of tenderness and arrogance, of sparkling differences and human failings. There is no unmixing the two.

•   •   •

There is no way around Proposition 8: being a Mormon in California will mean dealing with its legacy of hard feelings, in our families, in our churches, in our neighborhoods, for years and years to come. Yes, like it or not, by putting ourselves front and center in the battle against gay civil rights, we Mormons have married ourselves to gay folks for a long, long time.

I consummate my own personal relationship to the marriage equality movement in March when I attend Camp Courage, a weekend-long event where they train activists to tell our own stories about why equality matters and to use our stories as we phone bank and canvass, to change the political landscape of California, one conversation at a time. This is the same door-to-door, face-to-face grassroots strategy
used by the Obama presidential campaign.
Put your shoulder to the wheel!

At Camp Courage San Diego, I see a few familiar faces from the No on 8 campaign—Buddy and Tom from the phone bank, and Richard, a tall slender gay man in his late sixties wearing round Michel Foucault–style glasses and an
Angels in America
T-shirt. Richard has been married to his husband Tom for thirty-one years.

I tell him that I am Mormon.

“Brigham Young University did things to our people,” Richard tells me, his face long and pale, but without blame. “Electroshock therapy. If they found out you were gay, they’d threaten to tell your family, kick you out of school and the church unless you did the electroshock aversion therapy.”

Yes, I nod. I know.

To begin the training, Camp Courage attendees gather in small groups where, under the guidance of Obama campaign veterans, we scribble the elements of our personal stories on preprinted handouts.

My page fills quickly. The other folks in the group notice. “Look at the star student over there,” a pretty brown-haired woman kindly teases me.

After we write, we tell our stories to one another. Everyone in the circle has a story worth telling: stories of being disowned by families and beaten up by classmates, stories of running away and starting over, stories of consciously choosing a life of dignity and fulfillment. But I am the only Mormon
girl. To them, my story is a revelation. When the Camp Courage organizers call on each group to choose one member to tell her story to the entire camp, my group pushes me forward.

Lisa, the woman leading Camp Courage, puts her arm around my shoulders and brings me up to the stage. “Now, this is Joanna,” she tells the crowd, with a giant smile. “And we are gonna show her the love.” Two hundred gay rights activists come to their feet.

“My name is Joanna,” I say. “And I am a straight Mormon feminist.”

(The crowd cheers.)

“I grew up in the orange groves of Republican Orange County. I was raised to believe in a loving, kind, and powerful God—”

(A voice comes from the front row—“Yes!” Someone is testifying along.)

“In 1993, one of the leaders of my church declared feminists, intellectuals, and gays and lesbians enemies.

“I felt as if someone had thrown my heart to the concrete and dropped a cinder block on it.

“In 1997, my church started giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to antigay marriage initiatives.

“I felt as if someone had thrown my heart to the concrete and dropped a cinder block on it.

“For years afterward, I cried almost every time I set foot in a Mormon church.”

(A wave of tenderness.)

“But I went back to church so that my daughters could know the same loving, kind, and powerful God I was raised to believe in.

“Just a few months later, my Church mobilized a huge campaign for Proposition 8.

“And again I felt as if someone had thrown my heart to the concrete and dropped a cinder block on it.

“I did what I could. It wasn’t enough. But I am a Mormon. And I am not giving up.”

No one boos. No one makes me feel ashamed. Everyone shows Mormon girl the love.

Courage
.

I tell my story. The cinder block lifts, and my heart comes up off the ground.

gathering the tribes

W
hat if one woman told the truth about her life?” mused the poet Muriel Rukeyser. “The world would split apart.”

Sometimes the world does split apart, but writing can help put it back together.

I first started writing about faith when I was seven years old, and I published a poem about the baby Jesus in a Mormon children’s magazine. For a long season in the middle of my life, I quit trying to organize experience into words. It was too hard and too painful. But not long after my second daughter was born, words came back to me again. I realized that my language was furnishing the world Ella and Rosa lived in. Ella turned two and started to attend a Jewish preschool, her modest vocabulary expanding to include words like
Shabbat
,
seder
, and
mitzvah
. It was up to me to give her
a few Mormon words as well—
ward
,
sacrament
,
pioneer
. More important, it was up to me and David to develop a verbal architecture that would shelter the interfaith shape of her small life. Every night after the girls’ bedtime, at a wobbly, makeshift desk pressed up against the edge of the front room in our nine-hundred-square-foot rental in San Diego, I came back to writing. I wrote at first about what was closest to me: my own interfaith family. My Jewish husband, our two Mormon-Jewish daughters, our little gathered tribe and the small world we were making together. My fingers made questions, prayers, and confessions.