My name is Arthur. My wife Lietta and I live in Spokane Washington and are currently members of the Moran Prairie Ward in the Spokane Stake.
After having left the Mormon Church over 20 years ago, I was re-baptized in 2011 the same day my wife was baptized into the Church.
I believe my story of alienation, estrangement, and separation is something of worth to those who would leave the Church, to those who would stay in the Church in closeted agony, and particularly those who dwell in fear of friend and family reactions to a crisis of faith. If I were to use the term, “crisis of faith,” that moment happened in the late 1980’s when I began to resent some of the tactics of motivation commonly used in my ward … including my own tactics as one of the leaders.
As the High Priest group leader, I was “Brother Vinegar” whose tools of fear, shame and guilt were all worn, tarnished and dented in places from overuse. The awakening occured after a few incidents strung together within a timeframe that brought my spiritual thinking to a point of outright guilt and anger. The flash point was the day I stumbled across the Sonja Johnson auto-bio (From Housewife to Heretic) in the library, checked it out and hid it under my coat so no local members who might be in the library wouldn’t see it. I took it home and read it in one evening … couldn’t put it down until I had finished. I was exceedingly angry about how she had been treated and saw in how she described her stake and ward leaders, the very behavior in my own stake and ward.
It’s time for the patriarchy of the Church to go to the Lord for a revelation about the 21st Century reality regarding the roles of men, women, children and marriage. They ought to do it before social attitudes and media hype force them to do so. It would be better to avoid such entrapment along with the temptation to claim that the God – who is the same yesterday, today and forever – changed his mind … again.
I believe the time is perfect for women to be ordained to the priesthood and function on an equal basis with those who ought to be merely their ecclesiastic peers and nothing more.
I genuinely believe and advocate that all women should be ordained.