1/x I haven't published anything yet about growing up in a Mormon fundamentalism but editing @C_Stroop's latest article about evangelicals' obsession w/sex got me thinking.
Although their doctrines often have vast differences, authoritarian religions often function the same.
That's definitely true in regards to the unhealthy views of sex that are so common in high-demand faiths. Members do not have autonomy over their own bodies, their very selves.
Chrissy's essay speaks to this very well in the evangelical Protestant subculture but I've heard people from extremist Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic families say the same.
Those aren't my stories, but I can tell of my Mormon experience and how it parallels to Chrissy's account.
Extremist Mormons and evangelicals have a lot in common even though they hate each other. Both traditions see their own ways as the God's only ones, and both seek to control the bodies of their followers by filling them w/fear about themselves.
There is something uniquely terrible about faith traditions that seek to dictate personal thoughts and sexual practices while allowing businesses & churches to do anything.
In both traditions, it is women, children, and sexual minorities who bear the brunt of this abuse.
Both fundamentalist evangelicals and Mormons poison the minds of their children with constant brainwashing to hate themselves if they ever happen to touch their genitalia.
Both cultures have spent millions of dollars on trying to destroy same-sex identities and families.
Brigham Young University even conducted "research" in which it used electricity to torture men who were aroused by same-sex pornography.
This Mengele-style research is still not widely known to have happened. But it did and many men were scarred by it abcnews.go.com/health/mormon-…
Chrissy talks at length about the manipulative sexuality teachings in evangelicalism so please refer to that.
In the Mormon world, every teenager is expected at least once a year to submit to questioning from church leaders about their sex lives. It is truly despicable.
Unlike Catholic confessions where the priest does not necessarily know who the confessor is, in Mormonism, teen girls and boys are taken into a closed room and quizzed by a single male leader.
In the case of boys, if they confess to anything, they face immediate ostracism.
In Mormonism, teen boys are the administrators of communion. But not boys who confess to masturbation. They are banned from doing so. Whenever someone sees a boy not participating in the ceremony, they know why it is.
I have seen lives ruined by the shame this engenders.
For decades, the LDS church has distributed a book called "The Miracle of Forgiveness" which teaches that masturbation turns you gay. Boys were encouraged to read a loathsome pamphlet called "To Young Men Only" which sanctions violence against gays archive.org/details/ToYoun…
Girls, meanwhile, are taught weekly through chanting repetition of a "Young Women Theme" to obsess over (straight) marriage.
It's a modern outgrowth of the abusive practices early LDS women endured in polygamy. Some were even forced to engage in polyamory.
Though not commonly known, polygyny (commonly mistakenly referred to as "polygamy") is actually still practiced in the LDS church.
Widowers are actually allowed to marry another woman and be considered "sealed" in heaven.
I could go on forever, but I'll save that for my forthcoming memoir on my Mormon past.
My heart goes out to everyone who has been damaged by toxic religious teachings.
I hope you'll join us at @DiscoverFlux. We're growing daily with great creators like @C_Stroop and maybe you!
There is so much physical and mental sexual abuse in Mormonism that you could write multiple books about it. But this is an important and relevant corollary to what I wrote above.
Adults are often subjected to "worthiness" interviews. One woman's story:
Beyond the obvious Disney carve-out, the law is a great example of how the flim-flam peddled as conservative technology policy is nonsensical and would harm them also.
Legally, all of these laws can be used against right-wing social sites. And they will be.
Suppose that by dint of a miracle that Trump does actually get to the 100 million uniques threshold in the FL law. That means that leftist trolls can sue Trump if he bans them.
People would be lining up to file such suits. And they would be hilarious.
Kirk began his career on a lie, claiming to know that he had been rejected by West Point based on affirmative action. He started TPUSA by telling rich, elderly Republicans that he would stop the millennials from becoming socialists. (That didn't exactly work, did it?)
But Kirk did have one important difference in his message from past GOP youth outreach. He correctly understood that Americans, especially young ones, want secular arguments for ideas, not religious ones.
This idea + Kirk's open embrace of trolling, propelled him on campus.
Texas has so many additional taxes that its burden is actually higher than California's for middle-class people.
California's taxes on rich people are significantly higher than Texas. That's actually why GOP commentators whine about CA taxes bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
1/x: Polls keep showing that Republicans believe objectively false ideas, but have conservatives really lost their grasp on reality or have they decided to just lie about it to pollsters?
American conservatism is based on a modern Christian fundamentalism which believes the Bible is literally and completely true.
This is something everyone, including them, knows to be nonsense. But this realization has psychically damaged conservatives flux.community/matthew-sheffi…
As a result, the far-right is in "epistemic collapse," they know that their arguments are unprovable but they still want to believe.
Michael Flynn's Covid election conspiracy below is a great illustration. He refers to "my truth," not the truth
Unfortunately, this keeps happening. Why? Because media executives and editors for NY and DC outlets hold very antiquated views of politics, wrongly supposing that ideas flow from elected officials down to the grassroots. But this is untrue and has been for some time.
I can't tell you how many times people have remarked to me in recent months that they're astonished how quickly the Christian supremacist political insurgency that's unavoidably obvious now was able to assemble.
My response is that this story has been out there for years.
Just as an FYI, the "Conservative Review" site mentioned in the original tweet is a vehemently anti-government publication that hates almost all Republicans for not being crazy enough.
But the site has a very curious history. It was started by a Democratic donor.
The man in question, Cary Katz, operated a massive student loan business that made him a billionaire. He worked to make student loans so that they couldn't be discharged in bankruptcy.
But his business evaporated thanks to an obscure provision in the Affordable Care Act.