First, I can't believe that "The Atlantic" published this story. Second it is too long and too personal to be interesting to me.

I am a Republican but I voted against Romney and for Obama because Romney did not disavow any of the Patriarchal, Racist and Sexist tendencies of the Mormon Church.

The Church's virtue is not lost on me but its vice is just as visible.

My first wife and I were married in a Methodist church, I am a lapsed Catholic and if the Catholic Church knew of my true beliefs they would probably excommunicate me. I don't believe Jesus is God. I told the Methodist Pastor as much but agreed that my wife and our her and my children (she already had two daughters when we married) would attend the Methodist church and I would sometimes attend with them.

A few years later my wife was evangelized by Mormon missionaries and converted to LDS. Was baptized and became a Mormon. I did not protest her tithing from her income and she never asked to give more. Her income was small and if she tithed based on our household income she would have been giving all of her income to the church. While we did not keep separate accounts she did not feel right giving money I earned to a church to which I did not belong.

The local LDS church leadership and the women's circle or whatever it was called put a lot of pressure to have me and her daughters to join the LDS church. When she converted her/our daughters stopped attending church services. My wife gave them a choice and they chose to not attend. I went to LDS services occasionally in support of my wife and we hosted missionaries in our home and fed them an allowed them to pray with my wife.

This only barely kept my wife out of the LDS dog house as her inability to convert me and her children counted as a failure to her peers and her not having a male advocate in the church meant she really had no voice. They treated her badly.

Even if the LDS Church leadership is coming around it is only slowly. The LDS Church is strongly Patriarchal, Sexist, Racist and Homophobic. A lot of that is rooted in its interpretation of the Bible which is not much different than Fundamentalist Evangelical Christian Churches.

Eventually my wife realized her mistake and left the LDS Church and went back to attending a Methodist church where we held her funeral a decade ago.

The LDS Church is still mostly about Power for White Men.

TEK