How Mormons Building Bridges (et. al.) Are Awesome and Jacob Z. Hess Is Not

Tyler Perry

When I came out as a broken straight person who likes masculine bodies, the clear and apparent conflict with my Mormon upbringing was brought to the forefront of my conversations with others in the church.  How do I rationalize my faith with my identity?  How do I deal with the apparent lack of hope within the Plan of Salvation?  Where do I turn to for a sense of community?  These were difficult questions with difficult answers.  So, I am going to answer each of them as concisely as possible in order.

I don’t.  I wrote an essay on it [1].  Mormons Building Bridges and similar groups.

So, when I see the writings [2] of a stunning intellect, such as those by Jacob Z. Hess, PhD and mindfulness extraordinaire, telling me that Mormons Building Bridges is leading people away from the church, I have to wonder how much he actually understands about the issues at hand.  In fact, his entire way too long essay that is going to get a part 2 (because 2020 wasn’t bad enough already), is rife with a failure to understand the very community he is writing about.

Also, please don’t suffer reading through his entire essay.  It won’t do you any good, and I hope that this takedown of it is adequate to inform you that patronizing this pile of pseudointellectual fecal matter is not worth ruining your day over.

Hess starts things off great with a deep, insightful question about the protests at BYU earlier this year.  “How does a committed Latter-Day Saint arrive at a place of being willing to shout demands in Provo or in front of the Church office building?”  I believe that for most active Mormons in the Wasatch area, that answer is either a car or UTA.  Some may choose to walk or bike, but I think the dominant mode of transportation is a car.

Now, he does admit that if you had done your research on the protests of BYU’s abusive practices from the end of February to the beginning of March towards LGBTQ students (please, ESPN, cancel your broadcast contract with BYU until they stop being homophobic jerks #DefundBYU), you may have come across an answer from the “8 or 9 [unsourced] articles” that were written by the Tribune or other sources.  Hess doesn’t like the answer that the protests were because the church and BYU have a long history of abusing LGBTQ students and church members.  Hess seems to think that this a bad or dishonest answer.

What Hess does think caused people to protest the hateful, bigoted practices of BYU was not listening too good in church or something.  He talks about two types of listening that he observed in Mormons Building Bridges and similar groups.  The first is listening to the LGBTQ people and their allies about their struggles in dealing with the church and its leaders.  This is done with compassion and understanding.  As someone who has personally benefited from Mormons Building Bridges, I can attest that it is a very affirming, positive group that acts in love.

What Hess seems almost offended by is the “indifference and sometimes outright contempt” that the Mormons Building Bridges community has toward essays and writings and ideas that may suggest that it’s okay to be in the middle of a church that seems to actively despise who you are as a person.  What he fails to understand, because he has no capacity to understand, is the pain that so many LGBTQ members have actually experienced.

Now, you may at this point be thinking two things.  First, you may be thinking, “But, Tyler, aren’t you just showing indifference or outright contempt to Jacob Hess and his writing here?”  And the answer to that question is yes I am, but there’s a good reason for it.  The second thing you may be thinking is “I’m hungry and Hess’ essay is so boring.”  And if you’re thinking that, then go eat something, and I told you that reading that essay is a bad idea!  So quit your complaining.  You chose this.

What you didn’t choose was to be LGBTQ+.  Hess doesn’t understand that concept.  But I digress.

Hess ventures into this diatribe about the gay rights movement being this recent movement that acts as an inheritor to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.  Well, allow me to learn you a little history here, Hess.  The modern Gay Rights Movement, as we know it today, began outside a dingy bar in New York City called the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969.  Though Marsha P. Johnson is often credited for throwing the first brick (black trans women for the win on this one!), the truth is that no one knows who threw the first brick.  However, the record on this from the people who were there paints it as perhaps the most fabulously gay protest imaginable [3][4].

See, Hess seems to think that Stonewall or the associated Pride events that followed never really happened.  At least, he never acknowledges them.  He instead seems to think that the Gay Rights Movement started in the late 90s or early 2000s, when the church’s political activism against gay marriage really took off.  In this, Hess reveals a bias.  He supports the church’s position, and he does not understand the LGBTQ+ or ally position.

This is also the section that made it clear to me that Hess is not acting in good faith.  He does not present steelman arguments of his LGBTQ+ readers’ positions on the issues.  He presents this weird strawman that ignores the history of the Gay Rights Movement.  He tries instead to describe the Gay Rights Movement as arising from the Black Civil Rights Movement.  While there is certainly some connection there, it is not as though Stonewall was a natural consequence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  He also makes this weird comparison to the way “Christians lost the 1970’s debate around abortion” that I think is telling about his mindset in approaching LGBTQ issues.

And another question came to my mind as I read this section: “Why, Jacob Z. Hess, is the church always behind the curve on accepting marginalized people?  Why was the Lord’s church among the last to accept black people?  Why is the Lord’s church still not accepting of the Lord’s LGBTQ children?  How does it make sense to you that it is okay for the Lord’s Kingdom to feature such a long and storied history of bigotry and exclusion?”  For the record, there is this street in Layton, Utah called “Gentile”, because that street was once a popular place for the non-Mormons to live.

Mormon inclusivity.

Following some more nonsensical rambling, Hess gets on to the point with this common “boo hoo, I have to learn new words” section, where he mentions words like “cis”, “heteronormative”, “pansexual”, and “trans”, as well as others.  Allow me to define those mentioned terms, briefly:

• Cis – refers to someone whose gender identity aligns with their sex at birth
• Heteronormative – the societal standards that expect or even require heterosexuality
• Pansexual – people who have a sexual attraction to cookware; people who can be attracted to a person irrespective of their gender identity
• Trans – refers to someone whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth

I know that it can be really hard to learn new words, but I think you can use that PhD brain and figure it out.

Hess then uses comments about members of Mormons Building Bridges or Encircle sharing stories about places in the church where they found acceptance, and then he paints that as bad thing.  It is weird.  I mean, he has spent the body of this article complaining and insinuating that Mormons Building Bridges and similar groups are leading LGBTQ members out of the church, so I am not certain why these comments that would actually be useful for keeping someone in the church are bad.

Truly, the master of mindfulness understands the greater mysteries that I, myself, cannot bear witness to.

Now, I hope y’all were ready for the real homophobia of Hess’ essay, because we are about to get all sorts of weird, backwards claims about queer identities.  So, strap in folks!

Okay, so these questions are often asked in quite convoluted and frankly stupid ways, so I am going to ask them better.  Ask yourself, have you ever considered any of these questions?

• Is the message we share on Mormons Building Bridges more correct than the teachings of the Brethren on LGBTQ issues?
• Are the fruits of our messages good?  Do they promote faithfulness?  Do they cause harm?
• Could it be that the reason why you, a broken straight person, feel hurt be because you cannot reconcile your identity with your faith?

If you thought, “Of course I have considered all of that.  The reason why I joined MBB was because I felt that the Brethren needed to change their messaging, and I was glad to find a community of people who support those who have been hurt by those teachings.  The fruits of these messages we share are good because studies have shown that queer kids who receive affirmation are less likely to attempt suicide than those who don’t [5].  And I think that most of our messaging is not going to change the faithfulness decisions of those in the group.  We have active church members in our group, and we have inactive or post-Mormon members of the group.  Everyone is welcome.  And yeah, something that leads a lot of LGBTQ members out of the church, or into even worse circumstances, is that they cannot reconcile their identity with their faith.  Seems pretty cut and dry to me.  What was your point in asking that?”, then you and I can hang out.

So, after these questions that seem to suppose that LGBTQ Mormons have not spent years of their lives grappling with these exact questions, Hess proceeds to make some seriously ignorant comments.  He demonstrates that he has no understanding of the pain, confusion, and anger that comes with accepting who you are as an LGBTQ person.  Since he has no means of conceptualizing this problem, Hess gives a long list of ignorant comments that I do not have the patience to tackle individually.  Honestly, even thinking about them just costs me so much energy that I don’t have just to keep from setting my computer on fire for daring to show that text to me.

Hess’ bigotry and ignorance really crescendos when he lists five “casualties” that result from the “ideology” of accepting gay people for who they are.  In summary, they are people leaving the church, the termination of mixed-orientation marriages, the fact that some gay men just refuse to pretend to fall in love with a woman and marry her, teens who accept themselves and feel that they have no place in the church because of it, and a lack of scrutiny of the people who convince kids to leave an institution that disproportionately drives them to suicidal ideation.  Hess thinks that these are serious charges.

I laugh at these charges for the blatantly ignorant views that they uphold.

First off, I am just going to say it, either the Brethren are wrong about LGBTQ issues and they need to get a clarifying revelation from God to fix that problem (where’s an angel with a flaming sword when you need one?), or God treats his LGBTQ children sadistically and eternity with Him would be Hell, or the church isn’t true.  Now you can pick your flavor of the week.  Hess seems to have chosen option 2, though he dresses it in sophistry and dull, uninspired writing.

Hess does not seem to realize that mixed-orientation marriages are generally not a good thing.  While they work in extremely rare circumstances, often they leave the participants in the marriage hurt and broken [6].  They are generally unfair to both the queer and the not-as-cool-but-alright-I-guess partner in the marriage.

And then there are the children.  Hess, your views here are frankly despicable.  The church is responsible for the innocent blood of queer teens that has been spilled in its communities.  Whether that blood is shed through bullying, attacks, or suicidality, there is blood on the hands of every church leader who professes to speak in the name of the Lord while uttering words that sink the hearts of these children into despair.  It would be better that a millstone be hanged about their necks (Luke 17:2).  Hess talks about physical and spiritual casualties of what he calls a war.  If so, then the physical casualties have been caused by the church, and the spiritual casualties were inevitable because of the church’s doctrines and teachings that leave LGBTQ members with little recourse within its confines.

Hess seems to think that he has struck gold with this argument that the protests of BYU happened because of queer-affirming organizations like Mormons Building Bridges, Affirmation, and Encircle.  What he has found is a concoction of one part iron and two parts sulfur.  Fool’s gold.  Of course that was why people were out protesting.  This is not some grand revelation of some hidden mystery that he managed to stumble upon.  This is a basic, low-level observation that did not necessitate a ten-thousand-word essay to explain.

Yeah, we were pissed, and we made our voices known.  Pretty simple story.

Hess ends by asking if true bridge-building is possible.  The answer to that question is yes.  It may be the only time in this whole essay that I actually agree with him.  However, he is probably going to ruin that in part 2, which is supposed to detail how building these bridges is even possible.  To be honest, it doesn’t take that long to ruin it, though.  He spends his time concluding the essay with sophistry about building bridges, but doesn’t even get into how trusses work, so, I don’t think he actually has the training for this.  He should probably consult with a structural engineer before he even considers getting started on building a bridge.

Hess’ article is bad.  The points raised in it are bad.  The argumentation is bad.  There is no point where Hess makes a substantial, actionable point.  Instead, he disparages groups that are actually trying to help the situation because they gave his feelings an “owie”.  This article is not worth your respect, nor is it worth your time.  If you have already read Hess’ article, and you were at all hurt by it, know that you are not alone in that feeling.  And know that Hess has presented himself as ignorant and a bad actor.  His efforts to build bridges should be seen with Admiral Ackbar eyes.

It’s a trap.

References

[1] https://perryekimae.blogspot.com/2020/06/is-there-place-for-me.html I referenced myself.  I think that means I’m a real blogger now!

[2] https://www.millennialstar.org/how-mormons-building-bridge-et-al-became-a-bridge-distancing-many-from-their-spiritual-home/comment-page-1/?fbclid=IwAR0S6vZzVjVhCUhbYwbkC_ZOzAh-U5M9CWUPDNdu0ejnpiJhNYea-jBo9nQ#comment-176253 Filled with homophobia and misinformation. 1/10.  Would not recommend.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7jnzOMxb14 A fabulous set of interviews about the myths and facts surrounding the Stonewall riots.

[5] https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2020/?section=Introduction The Trevor Project is another fantastic organization that does good work.  We should support them, alongside groups like MBB and Encircle.

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duzfHnYnTro I know, gotta watch out for that scary John Dehlin, but this is honestly a fantastic interview from a man who entered into a mixed-orientation marriage.  Generally speaking, doing a mixed-orientation marriage is a bad move.