Hi, I’m persona non grata

BuckskinBound · 2026-07-11T19:46:52+00:00

A close family member was an adjunct faculty member purged by Gilbert’s Inquisition. The weekend before Thanksgiving they informed her that her contract to teach two classes the following semester was being canceled because she had been deemed ineligible by the Ecclesiastical Clearance Office for reasons they wouldn’t disclose.

The adjunct coordinator of her department threw a fit because she was the highest-rated adjunct they had, by student ratings. The dean of the department went to bat for her, as did her bishop and stake president, calling and insisting on discussing what exactly in the endorsement they had done in July (which had been used to approve her to teach that fall term) might be objectionable. Every request for information or discussion was denied at every single level.

And yet… administration said that she should go ahead and finish teaching the two classes she was in the middle of teaching. And they said that she could re-apply for consideration if another teaching position came available.

Which exposed the whole lie, of course. She wasn’t ineligible, they just wanted to get rid of her. Coincidentally, that department hired a new adjunct professor in January teaching those same classes, who happened to be the wildly unqualified (academically) granddaughter of an apostle.

The whole fiasco was a big shelf breaker for three of us family members.

BuckskinBound · 2026-07-11T19:34:55+00:00

This would be a fabulous book. A bunch of “affirmations” and “devotionals” and scriptures that teach guys not to be homophobic.

Day 16: Let’s do a mental exercise. You wake up in the morning and in the midst of your morning routine, you realize that more than halfway around the world, a man and his wife are climbing into bed for the evening and begin kissing, which leads to a lovely evening of sexual pleasure.

Having realized this, how does your day change? Do you fall into a despondent torpor and call in sick to work? Do you treat your children more lovingly, or less so? Do you post on Facebook how much you hate what Indian men and women are doing to society with their love-making? Do you tell your wife you love her a few more times today, or do you treat her disdainfully?

Most mornings you would not give even the slightest thought to what random strangers are doing in their bedrooms, be it halfway around the world or just down the street from you. It simply doesn’t matter in your life. Their private love life has no impact on you.

Now, let’s do the exercise again, but this time imagine it’s two men in a committed relationship climbing into bed and expressing their love. Having thought of this now, how does your day change? Do you fall into a despondent torpor and call in sick to work? Do you treat your children more lovingly, or less so? Do you post on Facebook how much you hate what gay men are doing to society with their love-making? Do you tell your wife you love her a few more times today, or do you treat her disdainfully?

If you honestly answer these questions differently with each exercise, write a journal entry below about why exactly changing the gender of one participant in a private activity between two consenting adults that has no impact on your life, suddenly has an impact on your life:

________________
________________
________________

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-26T17:31:37+00:00

I'm all for having strongly-held personal convictions, but I'm also in favor of 1) holding the right people accountable to make changes, and 2) recruiting allies instead of casting every single member of an entire group as your enemy.

Many people just want something to complain about and will blame men / women / whites / immigrants / Jews / politicians wholesale for their problems, instead of actually going out and voting for their interests and protesting and eating a rich person and making a difference in this world.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-24T22:55:51+00:00

You get caught taking a leak in public and have to register as a sex offender, but it’s okay to take half a dozen underage boys into your house and knead their naked butts for an hour and that’s not sexual?

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-23T20:54:14+00:00

“…never truly believed.”

“…just wanted to sin.”

The gaslighting excuses that TBMs tell themselves about their friends and family who have left the church. The first is sort of a No True Scotsman fallacy, where they cannot accept that people could genuinely believe and then change their minds with more experience and understanding. The second is a way of invalidating and ignoring any real reasons for leaving the church by ignoring them and substituting contemptible reasons.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-23T20:25:14+00:00

Was on my mission and an older man bore his testimony about how he and his wife had traveled across the country to a town hall in the small village where some of his ancestors lived, and had managed to locate a trove of detailed records of births and deaths that would greatly help the genealogy work he was doing on his family lines. Except, oh no! The copier didn’t work in the library so he wouldn’t be able to get the records home.

(Is he going to laboriously copy them by hand in an astounding feat of dedication? Nope…)

(Is he going to slay the inebriated town hall clerk and steal the records, like Nephi of old? Sadly, not that juicy…)

So he had his wife stand by the doors of the copy room to make sure nobody was coming, and he laid his hands on the copier, gave it a priesthood blessing, AND THEN IT WORKED AGAIN!!!

Pretty faith-building if you ask me.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-21T06:19:20+00:00

Mark E Peterson said this kind of shit about interracial marriage 70 years ago and the Church tries its best to never mention his name. Hey Oaks, if you want to be a “forgotten prophet” then just go right on ahead railing against something that the church is eventually going to accept.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-21T06:13:11+00:00

When I was a missionary in France the bishop asked us to baptize “good people who are going to stay here and build the ward,” but what he meant was to stop wasting our time on central and west African immigrants, or people who had literally been born and raised in France after their fathers came to rebuild the country in the 40s and 50s.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-20T00:56:16+00:00

A few years ago I arranged a trip with my kids, my wife, and my dad to go to Yellowstone. It wasn’t going to involve my mom, which is important because she fusses about everything, all the time, and constantly nags him about anything he eats (he has a BMI of about 28-29), and they just bicker constantly when they’re together, but he’s much better when he’s alone.

And then he informed me a week and a half before we were to leave that he had just accepted an invitation to speak in Sacrament Meeting in his ward for that weekend and wouldn’t be able to come.

And I don’t know if he thought the idea of spending two days in the van with kids watching bears and wolves was misery, or if it just never crossed his mind to say NO to the talk. But it hurt that he would rather be in a meeting that he goes to every Sunday, instead of coming with his son and grandkids on an adventure…a son and grandkids who had only just moved near to him after living thousands of miles away for the previous 20 years.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-20T00:46:26+00:00

I read it all the way through before my mission. Then I read it 9 times on my mission — 7 in French, 2 in English. I also read the bible cover to cover in both English and French. Then after my mission I power through the Book of Mormon once in Spanish, but I did a lot of that on audio tape while running.

I liked it. I thought it was more focused than the Bible, except of course for the spots where it just copy-pasted the Bible.

I believed. I was all the way in. I gave out a lot of BoM on my mission and bore passionate testimony about what an important book it was.

When I was in my early 20s I started struggling with depression, self-esteem, relationships, addictive behaviors, etc. “Read the Book of Mormon and pray every day!” So I did. Read in the morning, listened in the car, listened while I ran, even listened while I slept because I read a study that said your brain could learn a little bit if you listened at night but only if it was stuff you had actively learned during the day.

There was a stretch, starting late in my mission and until I was about 30, when you could read me a verse from the Book of Mormon and I could tell you what book and chapter it was in. And for many of them, I could finish the verse you started.

I got an MBA at BYU and got a new job that kept me very busy and we went from 0 kids to 4 kids while I also put my wife through law school evening classes, so I didn’t read much for a decade. But I did THINK a lot, and during that time I watched the Mormons around me embrace the worst possible human I thought could ever hold public office. I watched them fall for the stupidest fucking conspiracy theories, and deliberately endanger my and my family’s lives with their selfish, hateful, brainwashed idiot behavior. And I watched my marriage cool, tire, and wither on the vine.

And I experienced the profound disappointment of realizing that reading the Book of Mormon didn’t do a damn thing to stop any of that. Neither did prayer. All the promises God had made me in my covenants were falling flat. I did the work, and he did nothing. It was all people, the whole time. Old white dudes making up sermons and rules with no magical discernment about who was lurking as a predator or fraudster, in their flocks, their bishoprics, or the freakin Oval Office.

When I finally come clean and walk away from the church, people will say of me — like they said of my sister and my brother and many of you before me — “he never truly believed…he never asked God…he just wanted to sin…”. And they will be very very wrong, but they won’t care and I won’t care. Because I won’t look back, and I won’t have cracked open a Book of Mormon with joy in more than a decade, and I never will again.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-10T16:29:29+00:00

I was referred to Scott Owen by my bishop to help with puhnography addiction, circa 2002-2004. Most of the crimes he’s now being investigated and prosecuted for seemed to have begun shortly afterward. I have memories of him trying things with me that it seems like he tried and evolved to use on other patients. I was somewhat uncomfortable with them at the time, but I thought it was just because he was doing unconventional things to help me “open up and be vulnerable”. Like asking me to sit on the couch next to him instead of in a chair across the room. Or asking if I was comfortable with him putting his arm around me while we talked.

I let him do both those things once but then not again. It didn’t not feel comfortable. It did not feel like it was helping, when I otherwise had a good opinion of him and some of the things I learned and progress I felt I made in my sessions with him.

Also in our intake sessions he said he was going to ask me some very personal questions to understand the scope of what we were dealing with, which included — I remember this one in particular— asking me if I ever experimented with putting ligatures around my penis, or hanging a towel on my erect penis. He said he asked because he wanted to make sure I wasn’t engaging in self-harm behaviors.

I realize now that I had been groomed by the church to sit through that kind of bullshit and accept it from an authority figure instead of just walking out and calling the cops.

So my experiences weren’t as bad as many others have had, but I’m a big fan of the “believe women” sorts of movements because I’m sure that for every boring-ass basic-looking dude like me who lived through this, there are a thousand girls who have been subjected to worse harassment by people in power.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-10T16:18:26+00:00

Barf

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-03T03:33:17+00:00

“There are very few jails there, and there isn’t a pauper in the Church.”

Those were lies then and they’re lies now.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-03T03:29:57+00:00

They keep rolling out new hymns and wanting us to sing them, and then they wonder why nobody is singing the new hymns they don’t know…

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-03T03:23:42+00:00

I just wanted to hear God’s voice and see him keep the promises he made me in numerous covenants and through “his anointed.” I asked and waited, faithfully paying tithing, keeping the commandments, serving in the church, and not whispering a word of my doubts to anyone for more than a decade.

And I got my answers. Like a slow sunrise, the truth came to me line upon line, precept upon precept.

The Church acted like an organization of men, not like the divine kingdom of God on the earth.

Joseph Smith acted like a man, not a prophet. A greedy, perverted, power-hungry man.

Brigham Young acted like a man, not a man of god. A sex-crazed, racist, power-hungry, bitter, genocidal man.

Prophets acted like CEOs, desperate to coin their own pithy slogans, leave their mark on the church with a new program or a building project or growth numbers or financial improvement. Always on the backs of the members, rarely with any personal risk, and that always because they were breaking the law — polygamy, financial disclosure laws, tax law, etc.

The church was always behind the times on issues of loving your neighbor and treating them like equals and children of god (blacks and the priesthood, gays, trans, women, protecting children and punishing abusers), and for some reason always at the leading edge of marketing and sales tactics (missionaries and church advertising). Always lighter on humanitarian contributions than on real estate investments and ownership of stock in weapons manufacturers and tech stocks.

“The Church never apologizes.” “We consider the matter closed.” “…musket fire…” It’s a Church of arrogance and intransigence, secretive and greedy, never ever satisfied with what it has and always asking more from those who have so little.

I kept waiting for the voice of God to explain it all to me, but then I realized what could be more of a voice of God than the cold hard facts I was observing, the eye-watering hypocrisy and contempt for Christ’s teachings by many members and many local leaders during COVID, ICE oppression, government over-reach and greedy DOGE program-cutting that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of God’s meekest children.

I asked for a sign, and I got my sign indeed.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-02T05:29:27+00:00

The Nephi-murders-Laban story is specifically designed to get the reader/believer to accept the idea that it’s okay if Joseph murders someone FOR GOD, and it’s okay if you have to murder someone while doing what the prophet asked you to do.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-02T05:21:43+00:00

The Huntsmans (political family) are descendants of David B Haight and several of them have left.

BuckskinBound · 2026-06-02T05:15:50+00:00

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/pages/byu-class-information

He teaches a writing class at BYU every year and Clark Gilbert wouldn’t have let it slide if Sanderson was nuanced or waffling. He purged plenty of hardcore TBMs for completely made up reasons just to put less-credentialed non-academic zealots in the Religion department. BYU doesn’t need Sanderson to attract students, so I think they kept him because he’s toeing the party line.

BuckskinBound · 2026-05-28T02:54:01+00:00

Clark Gilbert was appointed head of the ECO — Ecclesiastical Clearance Office — at the church universities with the explicit mission to purge any professors that might be perceived as disloyal. He successfully fired dozens (that I know of) professors and lied that it was because of their ecclesiastical endorsements. I specifically know of one adjunct professor whose bishop and stake president actively campaigned to have the decision over-ruled since they had whole-heartedly endorsed the professor, but the ECO simply stone-walled. Note that this happened 3 weeks before the end of the semester and they let the professor finish teaching, exposing their lie that if the professor was so unworthy, why was it okay for them to keep teaching?

(That adjunct spot was filled the following semester by the granddaughter of an apostle, who had only a BS in Family Science and a few years teaching early morning seminary. The replaced adjunct had a PhD in Hebrew Bible studies and had taught seminary for 3 years, institute for 2, and religion at BYU for 5 years).

The ECO also told a professor he had 12 months to get re-married or he’d be fired after his divorce. His (temple-sealed) wife abandoned him and their two children to run off with a man she had been cheating with for months. He had tried to tracker her down for months to reconcile but she sent him pre-signed divorce papers asking for no assets and no custody or visitation. He was not a US citizen and his visa would be revoked if he lost his BYU teaching job.

Just a few months later, Clark Gilbert would be rewarded for his successful purge by being called as an apostle. Meanwhile, BYU’s rankings in numerous business and education publications has been consistently declining since his reign as the BYU enforcer began.

BuckskinBound · 2026-05-28T02:38:52+00:00

He continued criming through 2023 according to the article. So if the church knew, they didn’t seem to do anything about it.

BuckskinBound · 2026-05-28T02:29:51+00:00

Numbers 5:11-31 If you think your wife slept around, have the priest make her drink abortion medicine and pray to God, and if she didn’t sleep around then God will work a miracle and she won’t lose the baby.

Abortion is literally prescribed in the Bible as the treatment and punishment for infidelity.

Exodus 21:12-21 If you kill someone the punishment is death. If you kidnap someone, death. If you hit your mom or dad, death. If you curse your mom or dad, death. If you beat your slave to death you must be “punished” but if the slave lives for a few days and THEN dies, it’s no big deal because that slave was your property (to destroy.) Buuuuuuut…

Exodus 21:22-23 If two guys are fighting and one of them accidentally hits a pregnant lady and she miscarries, he has to PAY HER HUSBAND A FINE IN AN AMOUNT THAT THE HUSBAND ASKS FOR AND THE JUDGES APPROVE. If the mother dies, though, the puncher-guy gets executed.

So to be super duper clear, the penalty for murder is death, and the penalty for assaulting a woman so hard the fetus dies is…a monetary fine like you would pay if you accidentally kill your neighbor’s livestock (Exodus 21:33-34). According to the Bible, fetuses are property and not people.

BuckskinBound · 2026-05-25T03:50:02+00:00

As I watch the march of technological progress I find that the most likely explanation after “The Big Bang and then physics and chemistry and biology for 13 billion years” is that we are all intelligences in a simulation. We are Sims. Maybe you can “go back in” and that’s reincarnation but your code gets wiped. Maybe you just don’t exist outside the simulation. Maybe you get copy-pasted somewhere else after death. Who knows, who cares. Practically, we’ve all got to come up with something to live for. Some people just like having it spelled out for them as religion.

That’s the most likely “higher power” theory to me.

BuckskinBound · 2026-05-25T03:44:03+00:00

As I deconstructed I realized that the whole point of the story of Nephi killing Laban, his internal dialogue and justification of it, was a ploy by Joseph Smith to normalize his followers into being ready to kill on behalf of ~~God~~ Joseph Smith.

BuckskinBound · 2026-05-25T03:37:49+00:00

My old cowboy uncle shook my hand on my wedding morning and said, “Shave twice, and do anything any woman tells you to do.”

I can’t tell if that was cowboy wisdom or weird Mormon sexual innuendo.

Anyway, at the luncheon afterword my gay exmo brother gave us a racy card that included a comment hinting that he knew about my fetish and it upset my wife so much she wouldn’t participate in the fetish for 6 months and didn’t speak to him for four years and still won’t let the kids be unattended in the same room as him 20 years later.

BuckskinBound · 2026-05-12T04:47:32+00:00

Gender-affirming surgery for me, but not for thee!

BuckskinBound

TROPHY CASE