BIG LOVE
Century looking for religious freedom in the face of persecution.
Until Shelby’s decision, however,
she’d never imagined she’d make
her own public stand for freedom
and acceptance. It was a role that
would take some getting used to.
“AFTER LAST NIGHT, I don’t
fit in anywhere,” Sally said the
morning after the January party.
“I’m not angry at the church, but
I don’t fit in there, and I didn’t
fit in last night.”
She sat in a faded armchair in
her living room, one leg stretched
out on an ottoman, the other
curled beneath her. Brenda, a
lapsed Catholic from a Mexican-American family, sat on the
couch, drinking coffee. The two
made a contrasting pair. Where
Brenda is tall and striking and
has a bit of sarcastic edge, Sally
has a round, soft face and a warm
demeanor. Speaking in the honeyed tones of her native Georgia,
Sally recounted her reaction to
the sight of a lesbian party guest
wearing a man’s button-down
shirt and a boyish haircut. “I’m
like, ‘Oh, that’s a woman?”
“I’m not going to hate on lesbians,” Brenda replied. “I don’t care
what they look like.”
HUFFINGTON
03.09.14
“I know that it’s wrong of me to
judge people,” Sally consented.
Brenda had to smile at this. “I
feel pretty comfortable with people
being different,” she said. “You
kind of have a hard time with that.”
It’s a difficulty many Mormons
seem to face. As Lawrence Wright
She found herself at
a precarious juncture,
staring ahead at the
unknown territory of the
gay-rights movement
while trying to stay close
to the familiar guideposts
of her Mormon past.
wrote in a 2002 New Yorker article exploring the religion’s troubled legacy, “The paradox of Mormonism is that a faith with such
an embattled history has fostered
a community whose members are
ostensibly so conventional.”
The recent developments on
marriage have thrown this paradox into sharp relief. In the words
of Patrick Q. Mason, the head of
Mormon Studies at Claremont
Graduate University, in California, the church’s stance against
same-sex marriage reflects “a
widespread historical amnesia