I’ve shared my exit story with a number of people, but I decided that it would be nice to have it on my blog so there’s a single accessible place where I can share it. I personally enjoy reading these, so it only seems fair to have this available for those who are interested. I’ll apologize in advance that this will get rather long.

I’ve already written in detail about a number of experiences that prepared me for my exit. When I was very young I learned that just because something doesn’t affect you, doesn’t mean it affects no one. Though there were other experiences that shook my faith (my patriarchal blessing being very wrong, several lessons that brought up uncomfortable questions, and several deep questions the church had no answer for among others; all of these seem worthy of their own blog post at some point), none shook me so profoundly as learning that Stuart Matis committed suicide because of the incompatibility of his homosexuality and his membership in the Mormon church. Nothing, that is, until I attended BYU.

Looking back to my BYU experience I have mixed feelings. It’s always interesting to look back at that in retrospect. I went in with a testimony, albeit a relatively weak one, hoping to come out with the holes restored. The church is true, afterall. Or so I thought. To be clear, I thoroughly enjoyed my first semester there. I made friends that last to this day, almost all of whom remained true friends even after learning of my apostasy. I met many students who are true believers in the church and in whom I have a great deal of respect, and instructors that never cease to impress me with their knowledge and skills in the subjects they teach. Despite the relentless attempts at indoctrination, the classes that were harmed by this are in the minority (at least the ones I took) and not enough to have seriously impacted the quality of my education. At my graduation I was admittedly quite happy to meet with and personally express gratitude to many of my instructors, none of whom have any idea that I haven’t set foot in a chapel since, and never plan to. That way it will remain if I can help it.

Even my first semester there, however, my bullshit detectors were in overdrive. Every where I turned I saw evidence of confirmation bias, attributing natural occurances or decisions of others to the divine, and even expressing deep gratitude for the school itself. This last one threw me through a loop. There were plenty of other schools out there, many of which have institute classes, what’s so special about this one? Then came my second semester there. Here I took an Old Testament class that set in motion the events that would lead to my apostasy. In case you choose not to read the linked article, the short version is the instructor stood up and said some things that I knew were impossible (the flood being a global event and Adam and Eve were real thus contradicting the entire foundations of Biology Sciences) and he backed up his claims with Joseph Smith quotes. What happened next was the first of several events that would change the course of my life forever: he bore his testimony of the truthfulness of these claims, all the while my fellow classmates were remarking about how much they felt the spirit; thus confirming that testimonies are by their nature unreliable.

The walk back to my apartment from that class was arguably the longest 10 or so minutes of my life. I still remember vividly the myriad of thoughts — most of them unpleasant — that were going through my mind. If Joseph Smith said something so blatantly false while claiming to have prophetic insight, what else could he be wrong about? Could he possibly be a liar? Over the next few days my school work admittedly suffered as my focus was on how the church could possibly be false. I was still under the church’s spell at the time, so the idea of it being false was very difficult to fathom. After a few days of this I decided to take Moroni’s Challenge as I had been taught in Seminary. Of course, they claim that if you pray sincerely you would receive a confirmation that it is true, but to my mind faith without actions is dead; so I would follow up my fervent prayers by reading the Book of Mormon with honest inquiry. Further, I wouldn’t allow any “anti” material influence me, I would give this the absolute best shot possible.

But how on earth could I know with just the book itself in front of me whether it’s true? I knew there was no evidence for the events in the Book of Mormon, but absence of evidence only meant they haven’t found it yet. (I know now that this is a fallacy but I hadn’t fully reached the logical mindset yet) There was no way to verify the supernatural claims, and I had just experienced a fairly spectacular witness that the spirit alone wasn’t reliable. So the only thing left that I could think of was anachronisms. I prepared a notebook and began reading, dutifully writing down anything that I could think of that might reveal an anachronism should there be any so they could be verified or dismissed as the case may be using the internet. Finding this book perfectly consistent with what we can verify in history would be something, even if the Lamanite people themselves were nowhere to be found.

If you are an exmormon yourself you can probably guess what happened next. The anachronisms came pouring in faster than I could verify them. It started with the use of steel before my research showed that it was invented, and went downhill from there as I realized that metallurgy in the Book of Mormon is way beyond what was ever available in the Americas; and we would see a vast difference in the civilizations here otherwise. Then I got to the chariots and horses, Cimiters, the use of the words Bible and Synagogue—which I tried to justify by assuming that Joseph Smith used his own semantics for something else, which fell apart when I realized that this was supposedly divinely inspired.

Yet I kept reading. I don’t know why, somehow I must have hoped that I would find something later that would make it all better. And then it came. The Tower of Babel,  mentioned as a historical site. Right here in the “most correct book on earth.” One of the stories in the bible that could not possibly be true given the towering evidence against it. There it was, staring right back at me. I continued reading into the next chapter, perhaps hoping to find some hint that the reference to the tower was allegorical, but by this time it was too late. This of course set off a chain of emotional triggers which soon left me a complete emotional wreck, as I was utterly unprepared for what I had found.

And even as I made that realization, in student housing at BYU of all places, I still tried to do mental gymnastics, finding some way to twist this to make the church true. But no matter how hard I tried, no matter how strong my bias was in favor of the church, I couldn’t do it. If the ancient authors of this book thought the tower was real, God would have set them straight. And if God were to allow untrue myths in his divinely inspired holy book—which is supposedly free of errors—that would make him a liar, and according to what I had been taught he would cease to be God.

By now my prayers became much more to the point: O God, and the prophets hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee. And if all I may receive for a sign is to be smitten, struck down or made deaf; I would accept this, for it would be better to have this and know than to dwindle in unbelief. (having just read the Book of Mormon, this was a slightly altered version of Alma 22:18 and being fresh in my mind it made a natural choice to try and salvage my testimony) As I had been taught, this had to work, right?

After a few ultimately painful weeks of attending classes in the indoctrination heavy environment that is BYU, I decided to take another shot at that book. I actually sat down and read it again. But this time I was reading a completely different book, one that I had never read before. I wasn’t reading scripture or accounts of real people, but clumsy fiction filled with manipulative snares and fear tactics to command belief. As I read, the entire reality of the church that I grew up in unfolded in a dazzling display even as my entire world view rapidly snapped together into a new form that, though atheistic, was surprisingly familiar. It seemed as though I had this atheistic world view all along that was simply cocooned behind the walls erected through my childhood indoctrination. And at last, this book made sense. Through Laman and Lemuel I understood why apostates seemed to be fools. Through Korihor I understood why questioning the church as I had been was such a frightening prospect. Through Nephi killing Laban I understood how I was able to justify bad things that Joseph Smith and even God did. Everything fit. There was no more need to verify my findings. This was evidence so powerful I could not refute it, that not only was the Book of Mormon not what it claimed it was, but neither was the church.

Ultimately, I found one reconciliation that worked for me. That the church is not true, but run with entirely good intentions and by people who believe what they teach, and is therefore ultimately a force for good. Not true, but good, and something that is as good as the Mormon church is something I can get behind. Armed with this, and with grades far below where they needed to be, I returned to my studies and participated the same as I always had. Deep down, something was still wrong though. Interestingly, I found myself defending the church more at this point in my life than I ever had as a believer. It was dishonest, but it wasn’t until years later that I realized why I did this: I really didn’t want anyone else to go through what had, what up until then was arguably the most painful and traumatic experience of my life. This lasted for most of my BYU education, and for the most part, it wasn’t that difficult. I still had friends there, I still found plenty to do, and even had a girlfriend for a while.

Not bad. Until fall 2008, at least. Proposition 8 changed everything. I knew the church wasn’t true, but once again, I was having my world view shattered. This isn’t just bullying, these are people who claim to speak for God, and there members of the LGBT community that believe they actually do— a belief that for many can lead to depression and end in suicide. I sat back and beheld the church that I held dear destroy the lives of others. Then at FHE, in my classes and in church I was surrounded by people who constantly verbalized their disdain for homosexuals; often making degrading jokes about them and declaring that they should all be shipped off to third world countries or otherwise disposed of. I dared say nothing. I knew this was wrong.

But the worst was yet to come, the second moment at BYU that would change my life forever, the impact of which perhaps eclipsed the first: The bishop stood in sacrament meeting and read the names of a dozen students in the ward. One by one, each student stood has his or her name was read. The bishop then proceeded to announce that these members were called to be “call operators.” In other words, they were to spend certain hours of the week at a nearby call center and bother people in California to tell them how to vote. Never before had I seen a more spectacular display of unfettered evil as I had witnessed there. The church using resources like this to influence an election, vilifying the LGBT community, and ultimately leading youths to suicide who think that God hates them. That’s the pattern with gay youth, they fail to make themselves straight and conclude that God either hates or doesn’t care about them. Think about the psychological consequences of that. It’s no wonder that many of these kids end their own lives. This is what was going through my head in that meeting, I may as well have been witnessing a murder. That’s what the church was doing.

I was secretly distraught when Prop 8 passed. This was the first time I had felt any guilt since mentally disconnecting myself from the church; guilt for not speaking up. For not doing anything. Although I can’t imagine anyone blaming me for my inaction, just having gone through that experience is something I’ll never forget, and played a major role in shaping up who I am today; for in my mind the measure of how good a person is was by how willing they were to stand up for something that doesn’t affect them. This would have been the perfect time for me: I wasn’t gay, so standing up for gay rights would have been the ultimate measure of being a “good” person. I was forced to fail my own test.

I have a very difficult time seeing anyone in emotional pain. But my awakening didn’t truly end there. My eyes were now opened. As I began researching thoroughly into the human mind, the psychology of belief and cult thought reform I began to see how the people around me were really affected by Mormonism. I saw men smothered in guilt at their inability to stop masturbation. I saw women subtly degraded into virtual drones, giving up their dreams to follow their “divine callings.” I saw people get into marriage traps by marrying someone they hardly know, only to discover later that they were not emotionally compatible; and either end in divorce or result in a long miserable marriage. And since porn never says no, it’s the perfect scapegoat. I saw many people stressed and worried about not doing or contributing enough even as the tasks they’re stressing about are trivial and meaningless. I’ve seen families broken apart over things that should be non-issues, bishops giving bad advice while trying to be counselors despite no training, returned missionaries smothered with guilt and often with permanent health problems, and ample evidence that the leadership of the church is well aware of their actions and simply do not care.

A few short months passed after Prop 8 when I received news that my grandpa had died. This was a man that I was very close to. Soon after, I wasn’t all too surprised to learn that the last man to see him alive was his home teacher on his visit to the hospital to perform a priesthood blessing. His blessing boldly declared that my grandpa would live and make a full recovery. He was dead less than two hours later. I knew the day would eventually come, but I had hoped it would be at least another 20 years or more. And it could have been, he was 70 at the time.

While I had attended many funerals, including some that were suicides, none were of people that I was close to until now. I determined that I should think on his memory in a positive light. Let those thoughts be on the times he made me laugh, that he made me happy. Of the joy he brought to everyone around him. As I approached the casket at the viewing it suddenly occurred to me. I’m atheist. I stood there a few moments staring at his lifeless body, shocked at this realization. I knew the church wasn’t true, but how long was I atheist? Since my Book of Mormon read-through? Though I wouldn’t admit it until the viewing that day, I had been an atheist all along, in denial about it.

Then a second realization occurred to me. I was the only one there that was coping half way descent with this. I stood there surrounded by family, all of them true believers, and all of them weeping with no real comfort from the church. Though I was distraught and going through a very difficult time, so were they; the church truly had nothing to offer me. It was debatable whether it even had anything to offer them. My apostasy was complete. There’s no going back, no way to force myself back into that environment as I once could. And as I examined my former beliefs, it became more and more absurd. It was embarrassing. How could I have believed in this?

As I returned to finish up BYU I turned to knowledge as my final coping mechanism. I learned everything I could about cult thought reform through books and online resources so I could understand what I had experienced, especially since I was morbidly fascinated by the fact that I could still participate like nothing happened for over two years before prop 8 really shook me out of it. But most of all, it has become abundantly clear that majority of the members of the Mormon church are very good people; but are victims of this organization. Being intelligent does not make you immune from indoctrination. I really needed to learn that to come to terms with the idea that I’m not stupid, and neither are most believing Mormons.

A small fraction of what I learned has been posted on this blog but the real fruits of this effort will come much later.

Until then, I’ll never stop ferreting out the truth.

One really significant tenet of Mormonism is the importance of a testimony, otherwise defined as your belief in what they teach. You always have to defend your testimony and build it up in as many ways as possible. But do other religions have testimonies as well? And what are their testimonies based on? I saw a post recently (credited below) that presented 20 testimonies. This inspired me to present the list in quiz form to see if you can tell which religion this person is bearing their testimony for. Can you guess? And since they’re all so similar, which one is true?

Choose from one of these:
Atheist
Buddhist
Catholic
Hindu
Islam
Mormon
New Age
Protestant
Universal Unitarian

There are, of course, many conclusions we can derive from this; but the key point I’m trying to make is that your “testimony” doesn’t mean anything whatsoever. It’s the same spirit that’s witnessing to all these other believers that they’re right and you’re wrong. There are many ways to find truth, but feelings and testimonies is clearly not one of them. Afterall, how do you know your feelings are genuine and someone else’s isn’t?

This list originally came from this page.

I love reflecting back on experiences that I’ve had while I still believed in the church. It seems that every time I do, I discover a little more about myself, and about how and why I believed in the things that I did. I’ve already mentioned in a previous blog post how looking at many aspects of the church often gives me pause as I have to ask… it’s really this obvious? Well, no, it’s not; at least if you are subject to the mind control that the church uses.

During the years when my cognitive dissonance was in rapid incline, I once prided myself on the fact that I could successfully and (I thought) thoroughly defend my beliefs and the church to anyone that would challenge me on them. And challenge me they did. I’ve even had atheist coworkers who knew little about the church ask what would normally be very tough questions, but my answers were swift as they were clever. The guy knew little about the Mormon church, and so could not effectively counter my arguments. (I can destroy my old arguments now though)

Despite the cognitive dissonance I already felt by then, I honestly thought I could argue against anyone that tried to challenge my beliefs. I thought I had the truth™ and everyone else was dwindling in unbelief. The thing is, it didn’t go so smoothly as I liked to think it did. If something I truly could not answer was thrown at me I would dismiss it, assume the answer is out there somewhere, and move on. For this reason I don’t think anyone, even master religious debater Christopher Hitchens, could have really convinced me that I was wrong about this.

But a religion teacher at BYU could.

When I started getting what I now describe as Bludgeoning by Bullshit in a religion class, being told things that I knew weren’t true and had reconciled as being metaphors or parables not unlike the Good Samaritan, I began questioning. The difference here was that the questions and criticism came not from someone challenging me, but myself. I finally found someone clever enough to counter my arguments. Me.

One of the tactics that the church uses is the “devil over the shoulder” approach, which works like this: Anything that is contrary to the teachings of the church, including anything that challenges your beliefs, is of the devil and should be combated at all costs. Even the most casual members, when challenged from the outside, will put up walls around themselves. In fact, the church intentionally made as many people into sinners as possible by making masturbation a sin, thus making the majority of youth cling to the church and ultimately become addicted to it. Why this is addictive is beyond the scope of this post, but the point is that as soon as the devil is felt the believer will put up walls around their “testimony” and cling to belief.

But what if the source of the attack is from behind those walls?

I’m actually somewhat grateful for the religion classes that I took, for without them, the tools to destroy my own brainwashing from within may never have been planted. But of course, there are a million other ways they can be introduced; which brings me back to the arguments I once used to defend the church. These arguments generally included reconciliations for conflicts between science, which I knew to be true because of the evidence; and religion, which I…well, I believed in. Those reconciliations were effectively destroyed in my religion classes, which forced me to go back and revisit them. What it took was me being introduced to information that destroyed the basis of my faith by a source that I trusted. What’s more, the assault wasn’t direct, it simply introduced me to ideas that led me to conclusions whose origin was behind the defenses. When defending beliefs, most people will drop their trump cards early on (real life doesn’t work like the movies, sorry kids) which means their early arguments are the ones that you want to thoroughly destroy… and you want to do it indirectly. Once they see that the argument is invalid the rest will come from their own mind.

No direct assault on the believer from the outside will conquer their bondage until it is destroyed from within. If you have a loved one who is trapped in a cult like Mormonism, don’t directly challenge their beliefs. Give them the tools to do it themselves.

There aren’t many events from the first grade that I can remember with vivid detail, but one of the few that I can stuck with me because of the profound impact that its lesson had on me later in life. In this class it was very common to do little projects, which included cutting up and gluing pieces of paper. When the teacher brought the box of safety scissors around the class she asked each student if they were right-handed or left-handed. I had never heard this term before. (remember, I was in first grade) so when asked I admitted that I didn’t know.

“If you don’t know you’re probably right-handed,” she told me as I received my pair of scissors. When it came time to cut one of the pieces of paper, I reached for the scissors with my left hand without a second thought. I found the scissors were awkward to hold, and the blades tended to pull apart rather than slide past each other. It simply wasn’t cutting the paper.

I reported this to my teacher, who immediately saw the problem. “Oh, you must be left-handed then.” She took my scissors then handed my a different pair, this one with the letter “L” engraved on them. I returned to my seat and, already holding them in my left hand, began cutting the paper. That was indeed the problem. So, continuing the assignment, I glued a few pieces from one worksheet to the other and picked up the scissors with my right hand. Once again, they wouldn’t cut! I walked up to report this to the teacher again.

“These scissors are giving me issues too.”

She looked up and saw that I was holding the “lefty” scissors in my right hand and asked in frustration “Okay, stop messing around! are you right handed or left handed?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

She took out a piece of paper and a pencil and handed both to me.

“Write something.”

“Write what?”

“Anything. Write your name.”

I picked up the pencil and instinctively wrote my name with my right hand.

“There, you’re right handed.” She swapped me scissors and ordered me back to my seat. But when I tried cutting again, I was having the same problem as before. This teacher was notoriously impatient, and not wanting to push her buttons any more than I already had, I began trying to reason out what exactly was going on. I knew what right and left were, but could it be that certain scissors must be used by a certain hand? But why would some scissors be made for one hand and others for the other? Wouldn’t it make more sense for all scissors to be for one hand, and just train us to cut with that hand?

I switched hands, and sure enough, now I was able to cut just fine. I wasn’t sure what to make of this. I leaned over to another student who I knew was one of the smarter students in class and asked, “What does it mean when you’re right-handed or left-handed?”

“Oh, that’s just which hand you do everything with” he responded.

“Well I do everything with both hands.”

“But it’s easier with one hand than it is the other. Here, write something down.”

Once again I picked up a pencil and began writing.

“See? It’s easier to write with your right hand. That means you’re right-handed. Now try writing with your left hand and you’ll see what I mean.”

I switched hands, and continued writing just fine. I was covering what I was writing with my hand and smudged the pencil lead a bit but otherwise my handwriting was almost unchanged.

“It’s awkward not being able to see what I’m writing, but not a big deal.”

The other student watched, then smirked. “Looks like you’re ambidextrous.”

“Ambidextrous?”

“It means you can use both hands the same. Most people can’t do that, for me it’s really awkward and weird using my left hand.”

I sat there a moment taking this in. “Really?”

He took my pencil and demonstrated with his left hand. As he had predicted, he wrote very slowly, held the pencil awkwardly, and his penmanship dropped several notches. He assured me that this wasn’t intentional, and I was just different that way. “Consider yourself lucky.”

It would be years before my family knew that I was ambidextrous, only because it wasn’t a big deal to me. Yet. (although it did lead to some funny mind-fuckery with my grandma) The subject re-entered my mind in about fifth grade, about the time when my obsession for learning was just getting started. The Internet didn’t exist yet at the time, at least not in a usable for like we know it today (Gawd that makes me feel old) but I had discovered the school’s encyclopedia collection and began looking up any subject I could find that I didn’t know about.

For some reason anything that I didn’t know became fascinating for just this reason. This would explode later when I received my first Encarta CD in 1997, but even this early I was getting my fix from the school’s library. One of the subjects that I came across was laterality, or the study of the “preference for one side of the body over the other.” (as Wikipedia puts it, I don’t have a copy of the original encyclopedia I was using at the time)

According to the article, true ambidexterity is “rare,” though no actual statistic was given. Ambidexterity is far more common in people who are left-handed but were forced to learn to use their right hand. This absolutely fascinated me, but not nearly as much as what I had read next: There was once a social stigma for being left-handed, and still is in some parts of the world. In fact, the word “sinister” is derived from “sinistral” which literally means “left-handed.” Left-handedness was considered devilish and a result of the influence of Satan. It was common for “sinistrals” to be persecuted, and hide their orientation.

Because a sinistral is likely to be awkward trying to function with their right hand, being left-handed was often associated with being awkward or clumsy. In China the left was considered the “bad” side where as the right was the “good” side. Even in Mormonism, Christ (or anything righteous for that matter) was at the “right hand of God.” We were to hold the sacrament trays only with our right hand. We were to hold the right hand to the square.

“Psshhh,” I thought, “If I lived in a society that persecuted lefties it would be very easy for someone like me to pretend to be right handed. Just develop habits and suppress the urge to use my left hand for single-handed tasks.” But luckily, our society was so thoroughly beyond such a silly notion that I only learned of it from a book. What was more mind-boggling to me, however, was that this was something that the vast majority of society live with every day, and I don’t. I had to read about it just to wrap my head around the concept. That point absolutely fascinated me, because from a philosophical standpoint, anything that affects me may not affect everyone, and just because something doesn’t affect me, doesn’t mean that it affects no one.

I returned the book to its shelf, quite proud of my new wisdom.

The years went on in my schooling career, and soon very few of my friends knew I was ambidextrous. In fact I almost completely forgot about it, because I had so little reason to think about it. (except when using scissors). I had simply developed a habit of writing using my right hand, so I won’t cover up my words as I’m writing, and all other tasks were done with whichever hand was most convenient at the moment.

In 2000, when I was in high school, some students in my programming class began talking about a suicide. Naturally I asked if this was a friend or someone I might know. They said it wasn’t, and that the suicide happened in California, but I still might be interested in it. Stuart Matis was the victim’s name, but that wasn’t the part that caught my attention. He was gay, and was so distraught over it that he took his own life.

I didn’t believe this at first. The [Mormon] church teaches that no one is actually gay, they are social deviants with a heinous sin. So how could this possibly happen? How could this be true? Why didn’t he just choose to be straight, like everyone else? The moment I got home, I visited Google and searched for the suicide. I found an article on Newsweek about the incident and found that there was not one, but two suicides. Clay Whitmer was the second. He took his own life after his friend died, who he failed to save. Whitmer was also gay.

By now I had a torrent of thoughts going through my head. All those years of seminary teachers talking about how awful the world is because they think that homosexuality is acceptable. How the world is so perverse that it accepts “Gay,” “Lesbian,” “Bisexual,” and “Transsexual” all as legitimate genders. How disgusting those people are for their unrepentance. How homophobic I realized I had felt.

Then my own words seemed to whisper in my ear: Just because something doesn’t affect me, doesn’t mean that it affects no one. If there was any moment where I felt the “still small voice,” this was it, even though I recognized those as my own words from years earlier. I didn’t know Gay people exist because I’m straight, unaffected by the issue, and never witnessed any manifestation that my belief was wrong. How could I have known? Gradually, my homophobia melted away, and was replaced with shame and compassion for people who had been bullied. No one chooses to be left or right-handed. They discover which they are by observing which hand they write with. I never confronted my seminary teacher over this, but I played out the scenario in my head:

Being gay is a sin, and a choice!

I never chose to be straight, and even if I did, why would I choose to be Gay and be bullied? Stuart wanted to be straight so desperately he ended his life over it!

But there are people in the church that have overcome their homosexuality!

I…wait, how can that be? Did they fake it?

This one had me stumped. Were the “recovered” gay people in the church faking it? The answer, it turned out, was sitting right in my hand; in the form of a ballpoint pen.

If I was living in a society that persecuted sinistrals, I would get caught using my left hand, and would be bullied over it. With no reason to believe that I wasn’t left-handed—I had been caught using my left hand afterall—I would then change my habits and use my right hand exclusively, and do so without any awkwardness; and thus be “cured” of my left-handedness, all the while unaware that I was ambidextrous all along.

Something else struck me. Years earlier I had assumed that if I was ambidextrous in a society that persecutes sinistrals, I could just change my habits and move on like it’s no big deal. But what if I only found out in the first grade when I had no idea what laterality was? I would have been immediately persecuted the moment I was caught using my left hand, and with no context on which to base my assumptions, I would have actually believed that I was left-handed and somehow inferior because of it. I would have been subject to the same fearful self-loathing that religious gays experience, simply because I didn’t know any better. That assumption that I would have been just fine was clearly way off base. And if something as ultimately meaningless as laterality could cause such trauma and emotions, imagine how much more intense the emotional situation must be for something that’s actually meaningful such as sexuality?

I sat there staring at that pen for what must have been a half hour, in shock at this realization. Not only do gay people actually exist, contrary to my previous belief, but bisexual people did too; and it’s not a stretch for someone who is bisexual to find someone of the same gender attractive, think they are gay or lesbian, then fight the urge and suddenly be “straight.” I could easily see myself in that situation over dexterity. It fit perfectly, and was consistent with these suicides from people who couldn’t be “cured” no matter how desperate, and with the idea that other people really can be “cured.”

I had to develop a new set of morals that would supersede anything told by the church. This set turned out to be relatively simple: Does this action harm anyone else in any way? And if no, does it harm me in any way? Finally, the optional third item: Does inaction harm anyone?

Adherence to the optional third item became my metric for how good a person is, but that’s a blog post for another day.

It took me some time to identify what the first chink in the armor of my brainwashing was, and this was it. It would be another six and a half years before it unraveled and I truly saw reality for what it was, but from this point forward, my cognitive dissonance kicked into overdrive and I became a “liberal Mormon.” Now that I have identified ambidexterity as the source of that realization—and interestingly, the reason I swore never to bully or allow bullying of homosexuals—for the first time it became something special and self-identifying. If only I knew in that first grade class what a gift that would turn out to be, for the first chink in my armor was the direct cause of the second, far more devastating one.