The vice president of Affirmation, a Mormon LGBTQ support network, resigned Monday over a $25,000 donation from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Kimberly Anderson, the former executive, believes that the donation is “morally reprehensible", The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
“To accept financial contributions from the LDS church is not the problem for me,” the transgender woman and post-Mormon wrote in a resignation letter. “To have that funding go directly and explicitly to suicide-prevention efforts is something that I cannot abide.”
There is “an incredibly large amount of trauma in the LGBTQ population raised within the LDS church,” Anderson said. “Research is screaming at us that nearly 75 percent of our queer adults in the LDS church are experiencing trauma, (particularly) from being taught … their gender identity or sexual attraction is deviant. This uniquely measurable trauma is at levels equal to a formal (post-traumatic stress disorder) diagnosis. Trauma and suicidal ideation go hand in hand.”
Kimberly Anderson
Anderson must be “clear of the institution that has caused me so much trauma and pain,” she remarked.
Anderson said she does not regret her work for Affirmation, however.
“I have laughed, cried, mourned and gotten silly drunk with many of you,” she said in the letter. “I regret none of it.”
Affirmation leaders don’t like that she is leaving, but they honor her for it.
“Kimberly had very strong personal feelings with regard to the source of the funds being tied to suicide-prevention training,” Laurie Lee Hall, a transgender Affirmation board member, told the Tribune. “She acted according to her personal convictions with integrity, which I admire.”
Anderson’s decision was a “matter of conscience for her,” Affirmation Executive Director John Gustav-Wrathall told the Tribune. “She did raise issues that helped us be more inclusive. Our process was better because she was there.”
Beyond friendly?
Anderson told Tribune writer Peggy Fletcher Stack that hundreds of post-Mormons are worried that Affirmation has become too close with the church.
She is in the University of San Francisco’s marriage and family therapy program, and labors daily in suicide prevention with “ex-Mormons and queer circles,” she told the Tribune.
The magnitude of “shame and guilt” from departed Mormons “is paralyzing and petrifying,” Anderson told Fletcher Stack.
Several of them don’t think Affirmation is a place for them anymore, she remarked.
Some folks who used to be part of the network are “very sad and angry,” Anderson told the Tribune. “They feel disenfranchised and pushed out … of an organization that was supposed to be keeping them close and safe.”
Hall said she understands each of the two arguments.
“I had the opportunity to be deeply within the (Mormon) institution (as a temple designer, as a church employee) and also have been deeply hurt by actions of the church,” she told Fletcher Stack.
Being connected to Mormonism when it’s applicable could help change the religion’s approach to LGBTQ Mormons and post-Mormons, Hall told the Tribune.
Keeping a connection to the religion can get rid of “harmful messaging” about LGBTQ Mormons being flawed by some means, Affirmation President Carson Tueller remarked.
“LGBTQ people are perfect and whole,” he told the Tribune. “If we don’t have a relationship with Mormon leaders, they might never have an opportunity to see this.”
Anderson said that on her end, she will pay back Affirmation the $500 the organization gave her that originated with the church for training concerning stopping suicide. However, she will take funding for other types of payments. She seeks to complete her three-year obligation to the organization’s suicide prevention instruction throughout the globe and will take part in Affirmation’s conference.
“My loyalty is to members, not to the organization,” she told Fletcher Stack.
A difficult conclusion
At first, not one board member wondered about the church’s donation, Gustav-Wrathall told The Salt Lake Tribune on the newspaper’s “Mormon Land” podcast.
However, many eventually opposed it.
That started a dialogue where Affirmation leaders saw two legitimate worries opposite each other, Gustav-Wrathall told the Tribune.
Those were the cruciality of getting at a problem that concerns the whole LGBTQ society, whether in or out of Mormonism, and the imperative to make sure that Affirmation’s efforts in the public eye avoid causing the society to consider themselves to be in a perilous situation.
"There were almost no individuals on the board who felt exclusively one way or the other about the decision," Tueller told the Tribune. "Everyone could see both sides of the conflict."
Tueller was among them.
He could regard the agony of the significance of a young gay man departing from the church, he told the Tribune.
Eventually, Affirmation determined that the church’s gift could assist those in greatest need of help by offering important means to stop suicide.
Finding harmony among contrasting demands for help can be complicated.
“If we hold the church accountable for harms, then we are anti-Mormon or hostile,” Tueller told the Tribune. “If we don’t sever all ties and blame it, we are under the church’s oppressive powers.”
Tueller does not think there needs to be that type of division.
Working with the church does not mean that his organization isn’t autonomous from it, he remarked.