Proposition 8 made me quit the Mormon church

I have been a Mormon my whole life. But after the church's campaign of hatred to ban gay marriage, I finally renounced my membership.

Editor's note: A version of this story first appeared on A Series of Small Failures.

By Jodi Mardesich

Read more: Religion, Gay Marriage, Faith, Mormons, Jodi Mardesich, Life

Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

An 11-foot-tall marble statue of Jesus Christ in the visitors center of the Salt Lake Mormon Temple.

Nov. 13, 2008 | I cried with joy when I heard that Barack Obama won the election, but that joy didn't last long.

If not for the Mormon church and its campaign of hatred, California's Proposition 8 -- which would take away the right of men to marry men, and women to marry women -- wouldn't even be on the ballot. And without the millions of dollars it guilted and coerced its members to donate, the proposition most likely would not have passed on Nov. 4.

I blame it all on the Mormons.

Look at the database that the San Francisco Chronicle published. Look at all the money that came from out-of-state. Mormon Alan Ashton, one of the founders of the processing system WordPerfect (with its humble roots in Orem, Utah), donated $1 million just days before the election. One million! To be fair, his co-founder, Bruce Bastian (who is gay), donated $1,010,000 for the opposition. All this for a ballot initiative affecting a state in which neither of them even lives.

It seems like lifetimes ago, but I used to be Mormon. My mother converted to "the church," as they call it, when I was only 7. My father, a devout Catholic (despite being excommunicated when his first marriage was annulled), opposed her conversion. As a child, he had some sort of religious experience that left him in awe of the pageantry and the symbolism of Catholicism. When he saw that Book of Mormon the missionaries had given my mother (way back in 1968), he was rightly threatened -- first by her interest and then by her eventual conversion. Some 40 years later, they are still married, despite this major incompatibility. She is a true believer, and he isn't.

I suspect that my father's opposition to the church made me want to be part of it even more. It was forbidden! It was odd and exotic. I longed to go to church with my mother. It was mysterious, secret and possibly wonderful.

I think what happened is that, when my dad was faced with having to baby-sit us on Sundays while my mom went to church, he finally relented. My brothers and I were then introduced to the weirdness -- the strange "hymns" ("Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, to shine for him each day!," which might sound familiar to fans of Nirvana) and the doctrine, which I have to admit made me feel special. We had the Truth. We had the Secret to Life and the blueprint to return to Heavenly Father (God) after death. Again, I was only 7. Mormons believe that when you reach the age of 8, you are accountable. Eight is when you're smart enough to know what's right and wrong.

I've thought about this a lot over the years. I adored my mother. She was beautiful. She was my teacher. She taught me how to eat with a spoon, to drink from a cup, to walk, to talk and even to wipe my own ass. When she told me about God and Jesus and Joseph Smith, who was I to question or doubt?

After a few years, when my youngest brother was about to turn 8 (the age of accountability, and thus the age at which you can be baptized), my father finally relented. He interviewed each of us to make sure we knew what we were committing to. By this time, I was 11. I wanted to get dunked (baptism by immersion to wash away your sins).

I stayed with it all until college. (Brigham Young University, of course -- was there any other option?) I even spent 18 months as a Mormon missionary. The "prophet" called me to go on a mission to São Paulo, Brazil, so I was sent to the missionary training center (MTC) in Provo, Utah, to study Portuguese. Two months later, when my Brazilian visa still hadn't arrived, they sent me to San Diego to wait -- and, of course, proselytize. After three months in San Diego, teaching in English (translating the rote lessons we had learned in the MTC from Portuguese to English), they decided to reroute me to Uruguay. I never thought to wonder why the prophet got my calling wrong. Never mind that I'd spent five full months studying how to convert people to Mormonism in Portuguese. When my group finally got to Montevideo, they gave us two weeks to learn the missionary lessons (complete with handy flip charts) in Spanish. My poor brain was tripped up trying to translate the lessons from Portuguese to English and then to Spanish. I was so confused. After just two weeks of Spanish training, they sent us out "into the field," as they call it. Two months later, they made me a senior companion and gave me a "greenie" -- a brand-new missionary, who happened to be the niece of Gordon Hinckley,  a man who eventually became the prophet. She knew even less Spanish than I did. We were so lost. Still, I eventually converted 35 people. (Cringe.)

The reason I went on a mission gets to the heart of my failure to marry. I had a boyfriend in high school whom I introduced to the church. He wanted to marry me. I thought I loved him but wasn't really sure. I was worried I was too young, that I didn't really know what love was -- so I fasted and prayed about it, which is what you're supposed to do to get an answer from God. But I didn't get an answer. Absolute silence.

So I fasted some more and went to the rooftop of my dormitory. I prostrated myself on the roof, under the stars, and begged God to tell me what I was supposed to do.

Still, nothing.

I took that "nothing" as a "no." So I turned my boyfriend down. He then did what good Mormon boys are supposed to do -- he went on a mission. While proselytizing somewhere in Ohio, he died.  Scott was born with a heart defect and had had open heart surgery as a child. When I knew him, he seemed healthy. He had a thin, wiry build. He surfed and ran. Before he left on his mission, he went to a Mormon cardiologist, who proclaimed him fine; I don't think he was fine. After he died, his mother shared his journals with me. He was out running when he had a heart attack. A congenital weakness. He was only 23.

I know it wasn't my fault, but I felt responsible. What made it worse was that I had I convinced myself that we were going to get back together when he got home from his mission. We were writing love letters. This all seemed part of the eternal plan -- he was supposed to go on a mission, all good Mormon boys do. Marrying someone who wasn't a returned missionary meant you were somehow defective or unworthy.

The only way I knew how to deal with my grief was to sublimate it. I decided to finish his mission for him. (Can you see the brainwashing?) So I became a missionary, too.

Being a missionary was a very convenient way of not having to deal with my grief. Being a missionary was all about serving others. I wasn't supposed to really exist; I was just a vessel through which the Lord worked. I was supposed to find the worthy people who were ready to hear the gospel. I started to have doubts, though. One of my converts was a black woman who had been living with a man for years. They had four children together. (Back story: I got my conversion numbers up by cherry-picking people in situations like this.) He had been baptized but was "inactive." If I could convince her to get baptized, and she stayed faithful for a year (and he got reactivated, duh), they could all be sealed together in the temple as an eternal family, which is the ultimate goal of all Mormons. Plus her baptism and the baptism of their four children? Bingo! Five baptisms! Very impressive on the weekly reports.

This woman (I wish I could remember her name) was intrigued. Our lessons were all about the happy proposition of being in the True Church and obeying the commandments so that she and her entire family could get back to God eventually. But there was a snag. She wanted to know why the Mormon church had discriminated against black members until the 1970s. White men could hold the priesthood (the power to perform rituals like baptisms), but black men were only granted that right in 1978, well after the civil rights movement. Why?

I told her I didn't know why, but I would find out. So I searched the scriptures. I looked in the Book of Mormon. What I dug up was not pretty. The Book of Mormon talks about righteous people having white skin and sinners having dark skin. When the dark-skinned evil people repented, their skin turned white. How was that supposed to help me explain things to her? Digging, researching and investigating is not a good idea if you're a Mormon. You tend to find out things that don't make sense. All I could come up with was that either God was racist or that Joseph Smith (who supposedly translated the Book of Mormon from the mysterious golden plates, which the angel Moroni had given him and then conveniently taken away) was a racist. Why did it take until June of 1978 for God to tell his prophet that all worthy men (of course, only men) could have the priesthood? We're talking 10 years after the civil rights movement! Not finding anything helpful, I used the basic argument on her -- that there were things we didn't know but that they would be revealed to us eventually, if we were worthy. We had to have faith. It worked for her, and she was baptized.

Next page: So many times, I've wished that I had "come out"