F**k the Mormons?

This past weekend, the Brigham Young University Cougars were handed a 41-20 drubbing at Oregon. That took me back to the bad old days of BYU football, when the joke was if you got pulled over for speeding in Provo, you got two tickets: one for the violation and one for a BYU football game.

Despite the lopsided loss, the big news to come out of the game was the behavior of the Ducks’ fans. It is no secret that in the last few years, the state has not distinguished itself in the annals of polite behavior. But on Saturday, there was a contingent of fans shouting “F**k the Mormons.”

Oregon coach Dan Lanning and athletic director Rob Mullens have tendered apologies to BYU and comments from Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Governor Kate Brown of Oregon. High school quarterback and Salem resident and Ducks fan TC Manumaleuna II, who is LDS, was excited to attend the game, but left at halftime because of the chant. BYU issued a statement Monday that read:

“We appreciate the sincere apology from the University of Oregon regarding the behavior of some fans at Autzen Stadium on Saturday. We recognize that this isolated behavior does not reflect the values of the University of Oregon. As we all work together to address incidents that seek to divide us, we are grateful for those who are willing to come together to build bridges of understanding.”

The Cougar Chronicle, BYU’s student-run conservative paper, noted that unlike with the Rachel Richardson non-issue, the media has been largely silent on the issue. Of course, the fact that Richardson’s complaint has been unverifiable did not stop Dawn Staley, the volleyball coach at South Carolina University, from cancelling two games with the Cougars. So why the animus toward the Mormons? After all, some might say that chanting “F***k the Mormons” is no different than chanting “F**k Joe Biden,” which was popular in many college venues last year.

However, the people who were disparaging the president were expressing their anger over rising gas prices and the obvious disdain, if not outright contempt, the administration had shown and continues to show to people not in their social strata or in line with their ideology. So while the chant may have been crude, it had a basis in genuine frustration and sense of betrayal. What on earth did the Mormons do?

I’ve lived in Utah as a non-Mormon for more than 20 years. The shadow of polygamy is long and it is not always as obvious as it is in the cults/sects of the Kingston and Jeffs clans. But they are there. You can see them in Costco from time to time, and I have known a few of them in which the arrangement was consensual, and met some who have escaped from life in the extreme communities. So yes, it is a thing.

More and more people come forward every day with stories of abuse at the hands of church authorities and discrimination by a male-centered culture. I have also known families who have struggled to pay their church tithes while trying to negotiate a pile of red “final notice” envelopes on the kitchen table. And there is the issue of how the church has stockpiled cash over the years, making it unfathomably rich. Traditional Christians have a problem with LDS theology and the stories that surround the faith, but at the same time forget that your average atheist finds most elements of Christianity laughable.

For years, mostly prior to the Great California Ingress, if you were not LDS, you just learned to deal with the fact that the state was mostly LDS and reflected LDS backgrounds. I know families whose kids were told by their classmates that they were going to hell for wearing a cross, and incidents in which Mormon kids were forbidden to play with non-Mormon kids because of faith-based reasons. I have attended Mormon funerals and talks by returning missionaries whose families I knew. As a single guy, I dated plenty of LDS women, who were all perfectly nice.

But I have had the full force of Mormon wrath come down on me, as has my wife. We ended up moving because of it. Some of the people involved even taunted me over the phone. But those incidents were in a small, culturally and geographically isolated town in rural Utah, and those instances involved maladjusted people and cronyism. When we moved to a more urban space, we experienced no discrimination at all, and my wife was never treated better than at a workplace with a 99% LDS staff. In fact, We dined with our local bishop and his family on a regular basis, and my wife used to attend the Relief Society meetings to spend time with the other women in the area. Because of my time in radio, I had so much exposure to the LDS faith I used to tell people that I could’ve passed for Mormon until I grew the beard. I’ve even corrected a missionary or two in my day on church doctrine. I also used to tell them to drop by for a sandwich since they are mostly wet-behind-ears kids, hundreds of miles from home. I thought about offering them a beer, but they probably wouldn’t have gotten the joke.

As time has gone on, more and more people have taken up residency here and Utah has its share of brew pubs, nightclubs, Pride parades, and a growing non-Mormon community. Despite the fact that new temples continue to go up for better or worse, the state looks less and less Mormon every day. And the LDS Church will have to learn to live with that fact and make adjustments for it.

The Mormons have some house cleaning to do. Apparently, some serious house cleaning, and its members should hold leadership accountable. The issues of sexual abuse, the abuse of power and  finances all need to be addressed. But other organizations  have issues, including the Southern Baptists, the Catholic Church, the American educational system, including colleges and universities, and the White House and Congress. The fact is that in any given group there will be systemic problems and people who are the north-end of a southbound horse. And there will be good people. As the Chronicle put it:

We at the Cougar Chronicle, and its founding organization BYU Conservatives, do not blame anyone at this game or the University of Oregon for the slandering remarks, except for those directly involved. Just as we do not believe, even if the allegations from Rachel Richardson were true, that those over 5000 people attending the game should be implicated in any more frivolous accusations of racism.  

So why “F**k the Mormons”? Why make up a hate crime and continue to perpetuate it even after it has been debunked? Why chant derogatory things about a church during a game, an incident which reportedly was also done in a previous matchup? Because whatever flaws the LDS Church has, its knee-jerk detractors have little to no knowledge of them. To the rest of the country, the church is a soft target because its most egregious offenses are that it is perceived as predominantly white, straight, and family-oriented. And in 21^st Century America, there are no greater crimes.  If the LDS church is to be judged, let it be judged on its actions, not its demographics.