Courtney Jarrell Former Teacher, Coach In Riverton, UT Charged With Raping Female Student

[politicat]

30. Glad you got out.

I was never LDS, but my step-mother, step-siblings and two of my sisters are. (Steps are BIC, sibs are converts.) My BFFs in HS were the gay sons of Bishops. The late 80's weren't much better in terms of tolerance. Most people just don't get how soul-searingly brutal being an Other in an LDS community is. I used to think it would be much, much easier if the community would just shun instead of the alternating bullying and love-bombing.

I, too, noticed that Bishops' and Stake Prez's kids were likely to cause trouble -- the boys physically bullied, the girls psychologically bullied. I know part of it was the power trip , but I've often wondered if it didn't have as much to do with attention, or lack thereof. The Bishopric is a demanding, almost full-time job for men who already have at least one full-time job (and more often than not, in the small town in which I lived, were the owner-operator of their business) and usually had large families. For their children, what attention they had been getting before Father got tapped usually vanished. Kids act out, and they live what they know. There's a level of institutional bullying that is not only accepted but part of the doctrine of the LDS church, and it is remarkably consistent over the generations.