He snorted. “Of course not. Mom, I’m just trying to make sure you understand her history. And when you meet her parents—her father and her mothers—you aren’t caught by surprise.”
I felt an enormous wave of relief. Mormons hadn’t been polygamous since the late 1800s, when the prophet and president Wilford Woodruff had ended the practice. Sometimes I heard older Mormons say that God was polygamous or that polygamy was still going to be required in heaven, but it wasn’t a topic I’d heard mentioned in General Conference and I figured that was clear evidence that it wasn’t part of the modern church anymore.
“How did you meet her?” I asked, glad to get back to being a nosy mother.
There was a long pause and I realized we weren’t done with the difficult part of the conversation. “We met at a former Mormons group. We call it Mormons Anonymous.”
Mormons Anonymous—like Alcoholics Anonymous or Gamblers Anonymous? As if my religion were some kind of addictive behavior that you had to recover from?
“I knew you were having trouble with the church,” I said carefully, waiting for him to explain.
“Mom, the final straw was the exclusion policy.”
I felt a gut punch at this and found myself holding onto the kitchen counter to keep from sinking to the floor. The exclusion policy had been leaked to the press in November of 2015, and it directed that all same-sex married members must be excommunicated and their children disallowed saving ordinances like baptism, as well as participation in other church activities. I had always loved my church, but this was the one thing about it that I simply could not defend. Samuel had struggled with the policy right after he turned in his mission papers, but he had decided to go anyway. Kurt and I had argued viciously about the policy, especially its consequences for Samuel.
I had never even considered that the new policy might have affected Kenneth, as well. I must have been too wrapped up in my own anger and pain.
“You weren’t one of the people who went to that mass resignation event, were you?” I asked Kenneth. It had been all over the news. Ten days after the leak, thousands of people had lined up in City Creek Park in Salt Lake City to have their names struck from the Mormon church’s register in protest.
I hadn’t thought seriously about resigning, but I hadn’t known how to go to church the next week, or the week after that. My marriage had been on edge ever since because Kurt, who was the kind of man called to be bishop, would never admit that he thought the policy might be a mistake, that it could be anything less than a revelation from God. Kurt hoped that Samuel could find a nice woman to marry who could accept him as he was—that Samuel would reject his sexuality and live a heterosexual life. This had infuriated me on my own account as well as Samuel’s—Kurt knew that I’d been married to a gay man—my first marriage, to Ben Tookey—and he knew how awful that experience had been for me. How could he want that for his own son, or for the poor woman?
I’d also argued with my best friend, Anna Torstensen, who had defended Kurt. We hadn’t spoken since. I couldn’t get her words out of my head—she’d told me I should be open-minded about the idea of Samuel’s marrying a woman, that I had hit the jackpot with Kurt as a husband and didn’t understand that other women accepted much less in marriage in order to find someone to be sealed to for time and all eternities. But how could I hope anything less for my sons than a loving marriage to a partner they were actually sexually attracted to?
So over the last few months, as I struggled to accept what was happening in my church, I couldn’t share my pain with my husband or with my best friend. The only thing that had saved me had been joining a closed Facebook group called “Mama Dragons,” a group of Mormon women who were fierce in defending their LGBTQ kids. I could say anything I wanted to them and no one else (including Kurt) would see it. Some of them had left the church, but others were trying to stay, like I was, and change it from the inside.
“We didn’t go to the mass resignation,” Kenneth said. “Actually, Naomi and I hadn’t met yet in November. And I didn’t want to do anything rashly that would affect the rest of my life and my relationship with all of you. But ultimately, I felt sick about having my name connected to the church in any way. So I looked for a support group and started going to the Mormons Anonymous meetings. Naomi was there, too.”