Three things happened between late 2015 and late 2016 that accelerated my faith journey.

In late 2015, an official church policy regarding married gay members and the children of gay parents (that was meant only for church leaders) was leaked to the news. The policy stated two things that I found shocking:

• Members in a gay marriage are “apostates” and are immediately subject to a discipline hearing.
• Children of gay parents cannot be baptized until they are 18 and denounce gay marriage.

The policy was later retracted in 2019, but I found the policy very disturbing for many reasons. While originally described as only a “policy” and not “doctrine”, at least one top church leader (Elder Holland) indicated on several occasions that it was doctrine and the will of God.

In the Spring of 2016, my daughter met another BYU student (Madi Barney) who was raped and was facing expulsion. They started talking and decided to bring their stories to the media. The Salt Lake Tribune ran a series of articles which resulted in their winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. My daughter was on CNN three different times and was interviewed by the New York Times.

Here are links to some of the media coverage for those that are interested:

https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=3808891&itype=CMSID

https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/29/health/brigham-young-university-rape/index.html

https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=5161643&itype=CMSID#gallery-carousel-446996

The day that the first article was published was absolutely crazy. My daughter was pictured on the front page, and the comments section was of two minds. For the most part, the non-LDS readers were incensed at the injustice, while the LDS readers defended BYU and blamed the victims. I spent the day addressing various comments, and many members of the church were unreasonably mean-spirited. I referred to Sarah Westerberg as Dolores Umbridge, and the nickname stuck for a while. She was later promoted to Dean of Students.

For a couple of weeks, BYU was in the news daily and the leaders were adamantly lying about the existence of a policy (we can prove it existed because they are mentioned in my daughter’s honor code file that we received due to a freedom of information act request). Three weeks before the start of the fall semester, we received the honor code file and learned that they were planning on expelling her when she returned that Fall. After some scrambling, the University of Utah offered to admit her two weeks before their classes started. She graduated from the University of Utah in 2018.

Later that year BYU addressed changes to how assault victims are treated by BYU, but their wording was vague in used phrases such as “as lead by the spirit”, which is code for however an administrator is feeling on a particular day. From what I’ve heard, things have improved a little but not much.

At the local level, most members of the church were very supportive (especially our stake president). Our bishop was not supportive, however, and told me that he always sides with the male in such cases. He could not see a problem with this.

The third thing that happened in 2016 was the rise of Donald Trump as the GOP candidate. I watched dumfounded as the most openly flawed candidate in history was embraced by most members of the church. Some even touted him as being very “Christ like.” For the first time in my life, I voted for the Democratic candidate (Hillary Clinton).

To recap, in 2016 I learned the following lessons:

• The leadership of the church has no problem sacrificing individual members. They will knowingly make misleading statements if the truth will tarnish their reputation.
• The church culture heavily favors males over females, and the females are ultimately responsible for anything that males do to them.
• Church members claim to embrace things like compassion, honesty, and integrity, but they are quick to abandon them due to politics or reputation.