Jersey Girl wrote:"Jersey, did he tell you that you couldn't be friends with me?"
That's what my friend asked me when I called her after my meeting with my youth pastor. That's the question that landed me on RFM, then lds-mormon.com, ZLMB and here.
I had gotten a call from her the day before after she dropped off one of my kids after a Wednesday evening youth group at my church, after Girl's activity at her church. We alternated transportation for Wednesdays. Only that afternoon she called me upset with her kid crying in the background and as she told me how her daughter was upset because an adult in my church said "Mormons don't believe in God", I could hear her daughter yelling "All those Baptists are bitches!!!".
And I wasn't having it. I told her to hang up. I immediately called my church to arrange a meeting with the youth pastor for the next day. When I reported back to her, I didn't tell her that he said that the goal of LDS women was to become eternal incubators or that Mormons wear magic underwear. Those are the exact phrases that he used.
And when he told me that Mormons don't believe in the same God that we do, I said "If that is true and if you believe we have the truth, how do you expect to share the truth with LDS in this community when you send their kids home crying?" That part I told her.
That one caught him up short. After a long pause, he told me that I was right. That the adult was wrong and did I think it would help if he or the adult offered an apology. I told him that I didn't think that anything would help right now but I'd let him know if my thinking changed on that. I told her this as well.
But that question she asked me sent off alarms in my head. Why did she think my pastor could forbid me to be friends with her? Is it because her Bishop could do that to her? So I set off on a journey to prove my pastor wrong and find out what she meant by that.
While my own efforts aren't as large as Sam Young's efforts, I know what it's like to stand up for a child to your own religious leader and I definitely "get" Sam Young. I get how the thought of one child (much less thousands of children) hurting can lead you to go off on a journey that you never expected. I've devoted most of my adult life to children. I never once expected that after that meeting with the youth pastor that nearly twenty years later, I'd be on a board like this in a community like this writing about a child advocate whose church wants to excommunicate him for standing up for the well being of children in his church.
I have nothing but the highest respect for Sam Young. His meeting is yet to come.
Actions have many incentives and many effects, some intended and some not intended. Some effects are predominantly beneficial, some are predominantly detrimental. Sam's actions will have many varied effects. Some people are more self-aware of their true incentives than others.
In general, I'm less interested in people's characters (most of us are gray, not black or white) than incentives and effects.
Speaking with no intention to generalize to Sam or any other individual, I could tell more than one story about child predators who publicly fight child predation because one of the effects is a spectacular coverup. Again, of course I am not meaning for this statement to refer to Sam. I'm repeating this for clarity.