The Mormon Church and the Dehumanization of Non-Mormons

It finally hit me this morning what the Mormon Church had done to me as a child, and it explains perfectly why "they" (the collective "they" of those who blindly follow the prophet) are so befuddled by the public backlash over the involvement of the Mormon leadership in "ordering" the sheep to give of their savings and every spare moment of their time to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign.

What hit me this morning is that in my back-water cesspool hometown of Cardston, Alberta, Canada (which is 96% Mormon), there was (and still is) a systemic effort (not systematic, but truly a "systemic effort") to dehumanize the "gentile world". Now, you've got to understand that only in the Mormon Church is a "Jew" considered to be a "gentile". The Mormons consider any non-Mormon to be a "non-believer", which in Biblical terms, makes them a "gentile".

Let me use a recent example that I hope will illustrate the parallels between how the Mormons conduct themselves behind the "Zion Curtain" and how other events of de-humanization in American history have similarly unfolded.

I want to start with the treatment of the poor in New Orleans. There is a deeper connection between those "poor" and the fact that they were primarily African-Americans, but for clarity I will just refer to them as the forgotten poor of New Orleans.

The various levels of government were able to ignore these people in the preparations for Hurricane Katrina because "the rest of America" had dehumanized them. There are satellite images of the entire school bus fleet from New Orleans leaving the compound and heading out empty to the much less deserving suburban areas and high ground. The city jail workers fled the prison with the "less-than-human" prisoners still locked in their cells.

So then what happened when the only option available to "the forgotten poor" was the Super Dome? Nobody organized any concerted relief effort for days. The cameras focused on the looter who was carrying the big screen TV. Why didn't the media focus on the news that made these people more human? Why didn't they broadcast the images of the first shelves to be emptied...the bottled water? Why didn't they keep repeating the image of the empty shelves where the diapers once stood?

No, America had long ago dehumanized the forgotten poor of New Orleans. In the face of warnings from the Louisiana Hurricane Center that the levees would fail, there had been no effort to upgrade the levees. While Metarie (the "safe community" where people with money all live and commute to New Orleans) was getting money to reinforce levees to protect their homes, nobody was spending any money to protect the Lower 9th Ward. No, the people who live there had long ago been dehumanized so that they were now invisible.

In the end, the media broadcast the images of the way the forgotten poor of New Orleans treated their dead. "How can anybody just walk around the dead bodies like that...pushing the dead lady in the wheelchair up against a wall and leaving her there?" Well, my answer to you is this; "How can you just push the forgotten poor into the Lower 9th Ward and leave them there?" They didn't even have a spare blanket to cover the lady with, instead simply covering her with some of her own belongings. What's your excuse for not doing anything for the forgotten poor of New Orleans? America cannot claim that we didn't have anything to give them. In our case, you (with our complicity), consciously chose NOT to give anything.

Let me tell you how a class of people can accomplish this. I learned this technique when I was a three-year-old in Cardston.

First, you elevate your own position so that you see yourself as "more deserving" than them. For me, as a three-year-old, I was taught that God had chosen Mormons as "His Elect".

John Leland touched on this in the early 1800's when he wrote;

“The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest to grant indulgence, whereas all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians.”

I learned about this "tolerance" as a child...that I was expected to "tolerate" the gentile world. God had chosen me, as a Mormon boy, to be in this position of pre-eminence that John Leland talked about.

"White America" had similarly anointed itself to a position of pre-eminence with the first landing of the Mayflower. For the next three hundred years they used this position in one of the most egregious crimes against humanity. Slave owners were among the first to master the art of dehumanizing their fellow man.

Yes, if you get good enough in the dehumanization process you can actually beat a man until he is bleeding and then put salt in the open wounds so that they will scar over more quickly. After all, a slave with an open wound will not fetch a very good price at market.

Well, this is a new century, so this dehumanization process has to be more refined, but it is still there. In Iran they proactively still teach their kids in school, and it is the official government position, that the Holocaust was just a massive propaganda campaign by Jews to garner sympathy for their faith and people.

Let me get to my point. In the minds of fundamentalist Christians like the Mormons, the gay community is said to have an "agenda". This gay agenda is their way of pitting "us" against "them", and as true followers of Joseph Goebbel's (Hitler's propoganda man), they set about repeating "the big lie" so often that now many Americans truly believe that there truly is a "gay agenda" of some kind.

Since when is "equality for all" an agenda?

Last year saw a 15% increase in crimes of violence that specifically targeted the gay and transgender community. This is a direct consequence of the dehumanization process that is the real agenda of the fundamentalist Christians (including the Mormon Church). The post-Katrina images that are forever etched in your mind were similarly a consequence of the dehumanization of "the forgotten poor".

No, when the Mormon Church is actively using $20,000,000 to fund thousands of commercial airings for "The Six Lies" ad on every California TV network, then you know that they are students of Joseph Goebbel's methodology.

"The Big Lie" today that is propagated by the Mormon Church and other "Crazies for Christ" is that if we ever reach the point where there is equality for gays, there will somehow be a cosmic shift in morals and they (fundamentalist Christians) will lose their freedom to practice their beliefs that only serve to entrench bigotry into the minds of their 3-year-olds.

Would that necessarily be a bad thing if public schools actively seek to reverse wrong-headed religious dogma?