Lynne Whitesides is a convert to the LDS Church and has a different perspective on things than a lifelong member. We’ll talk about her perspective on the Sept Six. Check out our conversation…
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Gospel Tangents
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Growing up Outside the Church
Interview
GT 00:25 So let’s, go back and talk about you growing up. So, you grew up Italian Catholic or?
Lynne 00:30 No, actually, my grandmother’s from Italy. My grandfather was from Germany. And my mom grew up with basically immigrants. My grandmother, I think, was either pregnant, or she was born here. But she spoke only Italian until she was in eighth grade. So I grew up with those people. They were my grandparents, I hung out with them. So. My grandmother made really just one, what’s the word, concession to my grandfather. She became a Lutheran and let go of Catholicism. So, I was raised Lutheran, actually. And it’s a long story, but my parents moved a lot when I was kid. I moved in 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grade. And at some point, I didn’t want to do that anymore. And I started investigating the Mormon Church. And I thought that there was something about it that felt stable, to me, I think, at 17. And they were totally against me becoming Mormon, completely, because they just thought it was the weirdest church. And so, I started investigating, and I’ve got to also say the missionaries were very cute, and I was 17. {Rick laughing} So I was in Florida, and then they moved back up to Pennsylvania. I went from Pennsylvania to Florida a bunch of times. So, they moved back to Pennsylvania, and that’s where I became a Mormon. I was baptized in New Jersey. And then my parents went to my baptism, and two months later, they became Mormon.
GT 01:54 Oh, wow.
Lynne 01:55 And then all of my Italian family became Mormon.
GT 01:58 No way!
Lynne 01:58 Yeah, I don’t know. There’s like [about] 30 of them that [joined:] my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my brother.
GT 02:03 Is that because of you?
Lynne 02:05 I wasn’t. It was my parents [who] were going around doing it all. I was at BYU by this point.
GT 02:10 Okay.
Lynne 02:10 So everybody just became Mormon.
GT 02:14 Wow.
Lynne 02:15 Like, maybe 20, something like that, became Mormon. That changed everything, too. Because by this time I was at BYU. At BYU, I was becoming a little clearer, because the Church in Pennsylvania is very different.
GT 02:30 Very different.
Lynne 02:31 Yeah. And then I went to BYU.
GT 02:31 Okay. {chuckling}
Lynne 02:31 Than the Church in Provo, Utah. And I remember thinking, “Oh, man, this is–now all these people are joining. What am I going to do?” Like, this is not the way they said, they didn’t– when I joined, they didn’t talk about racism. They didn’t talk about misogyny. They didn’t talk about–they didn’t talk about much, really. They just like, “Come in. It’s this lovely family thing.” So, when you’re 17, you’re not investigating too much because the missionaries are cute. So that’s how I got into the Church. So, I went to BYU.
GT 02:42 So you went to BYU. You were kind of a fish out of water at BYU?
Lynne 03:06 Totally a fish out of water.
GT 03:08 Okay.
Lynne 03:08 My second year at BYU, I got called in and they said, “We think another university might be better for you.” I think it may have been because I was hitchhiking to church, and I was wearing–it just wasn’t a match. It just wasn’t a match. And I realized it wasn’t. So that’s what happened.
GT 03:25 You were hitchhiking. Don’t you just go to your classes to go to church?
Lynne 03:29 No, actually, because the wards were all over the place back in ’70’s. I mean, they were all over Provo. But, anyway, the whole thing is they said [that] we think another university would be better for you.
GT 03:40 You should have come down the road to Utah Tech at the time, right?
Lynne 03:42 Yeah, I should have, right? I don’t even know if it was there, or gone up to the U of U. So that started my entrance into being a Mormon in the Wasatch Front.
GT 03:52 But, still did you graduate from BYU?
Lynne 03:55 No, I never did graduate. I didn’t. I started working. Part of it is, I grew up pretty poor, and there was not a lot of money. So, I started working. And when I started working, I had to work and then I just didn’t go to school, I was paying for my life. And then got married when I was 26, because I continued to work. And then I actually put him through med school, and then I went back to school right after I stopped working for Sunstone. And I was in school for a couple of years. I loved it, I was doing really well. But then I got kicked out of the Church. Getting kicked out of the Church created a whole, like talks, like there’s a whole bunch of stuff that went along with being kicked out of the Church as a part of the September Six. I was doing newspaper stuff and talks and all of that and then my marriage fell apart. And then I just didn’t go back to school. And then I opened up a practice. I’m a life coach. I have read a lot of stuff around the psyche and Jung and Freud. From the time I was 17, I had spent a lot of time really investigating the way the mind works. And then, in 1990, let’s see. It was 1993 when I got kicked out, I found a fantastic therapist who saw something in me, and I started attending a group that teaches people how to do a particular kind of counseling. So in the group, there are therapists and psychiatrists and psychologists. We’ve been in that group for 23 years, every Thursday night, and he helped me open a practice and now I’m a life coach.
“Not the Church I Thought it Was”
Interview
GT 05:36 Okay, so did you, for lack of a better word, did you lose your testimony in 1993, when they kicked you out?
Lynne 05:48 No, by 1993, I think I was a little more aware of things, like that the Church actually believed that God lived on a planet next to Kolob, and had body parts and passions in a way that I hadn’t understood before. But mostly the misogyny and the homophobia and the racism, to me, that was like, I couldn’t understand why everybody wasn’t up in arms with Packer giving that talk, for instance, like he was saying, “We are misogynists.” He was saying, “We are homophobic.” He was saying, “We are anti-intellectual.”
GT 06:27 In 1993, that would have been pretty common for most of the United States to be homophobic, though. Wouldn’t it?
Lynne 06:33 But don’t say that you’re a church that [loves.] Don’t say that this is a church that isn’t about love. Because that’s not about love. I don’t give a crap what everybody was saying at the time.
GT 06:45 I’m trying to remember the political situation, it seems like that was when they passed the Defense of Marriage Act in the US Congress.
Lynne 06:56 But also the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) didn’t pass.
GT 06:58 Well, that was back in the 70’s.
Lynne 07:00 But that was also the misogyny part.
GT 07:03 Okay.
Lynne 07:03 That which, by the way, the Church did everything it could to not pass that, ERA.
GT 07:07 Right.
Lynne 07:07 And then the marriage defense…
GT 07:09 So there’s a lot, it seems like we’re condensing a lot of stuff. So you’ve got the ERA.
Lynne 07:14 You’re asking me why what helped me…
GT 07:15 That was in 1976, roughly.
Lynne 07:17 [It was] 1978 .
GT 07:17 So, in 1978, the Church puts a big push to shut down the Equal Rights Amendment.
Lynne 07:25 To keep women in their place.
GT 07:27 Keep women in their place, as you say. And so I mean, 1978, it sounds like you joined the Church, probably, in 1970 or so?
Lynne 07:36 [In] 1970.
GT 07:38 Oh, in 1970. So you probably recognized the racism between 70 and 78.
Lynne 07:45 Yeah, well, here’s what’s interesting. I left and went to BYU. At BYU, there was no color.
GT 07:52 Right.
Lynne 07:53 So, it didn’t really hit me…
GT 07:55 Right.
Lynne 07:55 …until a little while later, when I started really reading stuff and understanding. To me, let me just say this, let me think, so that I can be clear. To say; “Wasn’t that the way the world was, anyway?” To me, is the Church, is it really a part of the world? It’s the old, is it a hospital or is it a social club? And the fact that the Church that touts itself as Jesus is the head of the Church, and it’s all love and that and then to have one of the authorities actually blatantly say that. Not just that, but when I was reading the John Birchers, all of that stuff, too. All of a sudden, it was like, this is not the church I thought it was. This church is not this loving, kind, wonderful church. It’s as big of a mess as the rest of the world. And I know that’s a little naive to think that it wouldn’t be, but it woke me up.
GT 08:51 Okay.
Lynne 08:51 And I was like, I’m going to go find something else, because I don’t want to be part of that.
GT 08:57 So can you talk about your feelings of June 1978 when the revelation came to allow blacks to have the priesthood? Was that a good day? Was that a bad day?
Lynne 09:06 Well, it was a great day. I mean, don’t get me wrong. But what I found out from Mike Quinn, was that it was at the same time when they were doing temples in Brazil, and no one knew who was black or white. And so, they didn’t know what to do. And so, this revelation came. And so do I believe it was a revelation? Probably not. I think it was convenient. And they had to do that. The Church is a growing church. It’s a proselytizing church. So, it was too convenient.
GT 09:41 When you say too convenient, were those your thoughts in ’78? Or did that come later?
Lynne 09:48 Well, in 1978, I wondered. That’s an interesting thing that now this is coming out?
GT 09:55 The reason why I asked you, Matt Harris is a professor at Colorado State, in Pueblo, Colorado.
Lynne 10:01 Yeah.
GT 10:01 And he’s got a new book coming out, that I cannot wait [to read.][1] One of the thesis that’s going to come out is; there were some apostles that were hard liners that believed in the race ban. And so, President Kimball purposely announced the temple in ’74, I think it was, to get apostles to say, “There’s a big race problem in Brazil. What are we going to do?” And so, Matt’s…
Lynne 10:36 That’s one way. I mean, it’s possible. You know, it’s possible. Of course, he wrote that lovely book, The Miracle of Forgiveness, Kimball.
GT 10:43 Kimball.
Lynne 10:43 So, I mean, I just, I don’t have a lot of faith in them. I guess that’s the bottom line, you know? Well, the fact that, that was even a question, that they were hard liners about race in this church. It just doesn’t work in the way that I see the world. It just doesn’t work. Like, why wouldn’t whoever was the President of the Church or the Prophet of the Church say, “This is ridiculous. We’re not going to do this. This is not okay.”
GT 11:13 Okay.
Lynne 11:14 And, I mean, it’s still a problem.
GT 11:18 So, because we’ve also got the Equal Rights Amendment. President Kimball was against that. Did you know Sonia Johnson?
Lynne 11:27 No, but I was influenced by Sonia Johnson. I gave a talk at Sunstone saying, “We’re standing on her shoulders, as feminists, and she was standing on other feminists. We all stand on each other’s shoulders.” She was a real wake up for a lot of us. That was a wake up. Do you want to know what the actually big wake up was, although Sonia was part of it. But it was, who was it? I think it was, it wasn’t Kimball. It was in the ’80s, whoever was the President of the Church might have been…
GT 12:00 Benson.
Lynne 12:01 Benson gave a talk. And he quoted Kimball, I think, saying; “Women come home from the typewriter. Come home from the office. Come home and make beds and clean house for your family. Because that’s what you’re here to do”. And for a ton of us, that’s how Mormon Women’s Forum got formed, out of that talk.
GT 12:25 Oh.
Lynne 12:26 Because everyone watched it. And we’re like, wow. That’s actually the way you see women. That’s what this church sees for women. But it was also, like, don’t come home from the attorney’s office or anything, but come home from the typewriter. Come home from the– as if women were here just to serve. And I think that was—it’s a culmination of things. I think it builds on things.
GT 12:26 Because what I’m hearing is, so late ’70s, early ’80s, the priesthood ban was removed, which was good. You were like, why did it exist in the first place?
Lynne 13:03 Yeah.
GT 13:03 ERA’s going and you’re like, women’s rights, I believe in that. It sounds like you were ahead of the nation, I’ll say, as far as gay rights. Because,= Defensive Marriage Act was early ’90s. Bill Clinton, I remember signed that into law. And so we’ve got this bubbling up of– Elder Packer would say the three threats of the Church, gays, intellectuals, and feminists.
Lynne 13:32 Yeah, feminism, intellectuals and homosexuals, which is an interesting thing to say.
GT 13:38 And so those were causing you a lot of personal anguish, I guess, with the Church?
Lynne 13:44 Well, partly with the Church. You know what, also, women weren’t giving prayers in sacrament [meeting] until ’78. They had taken a lot. There was one other thing that happened, too, which I think is okay to talk about now. So, at the time, I’m trying to remember who was the Relief Society President in the Church? Chieko was one of the counselors and there was Aileen Clyde who was a counselor and…
GT 14:12 Sherri Dew?
Lynne 14:12 No, Jack?
GT 14:14 Elaine Jack.
Lynne 14:14 Elaine Jack, yeah. So we had a Mormon Women’s Forum meeting at my house, and Aileen Clyde came to that meeting, and said, this to us. This is when everybody was waking up. She said, they’d been in the Relief Society presidency for like three or four years or something. And Mrs. America, who was a Mormon had just met with whoever the Prophet was, which was…
GT 14:42 Miss America?
Lynne 14:42 Mrs. America.
GT 14:43 Ah, Mrs America.
Lynne 14:44 [She] met with, was it Hinckley at that time? Maybe Hinckley or Benson, Hinckley one of them.
GT 14:48 In the 80’s it would have either been Kimball or Benson.
Lynne 14:49 No, no Kimball, Kimball was gone.
GT 14:51 So Benson?
Lynne 14:52 It was the ’90s.
GT 14:54 Oh.
Lynne 14:54 It was the 90’s.
GT 14:56 That would have been after Benson was Hunter.
Lynne 14:59 Yeah, but he didn’t last long. It was Hinckley, I think.
GT 15:01 Hinckley, okay.
Lynne 15:03 I’m not sure, but whoever it was, she said “Mrs. America had just met with the Prophet. How often do you think the Relief Society President has met with this prophet? We’ve been in there for five years or something?” We said once a year? She said, “Zero!”
GT 15:19 Really?
Lynne 15:20 She said, we don’t get to do that. We don’t get to meet with him. In fact, they had been set aside, you know, the things when they set people aside.
GT 15:32 Do you mean set apart?
Lynne 15:36 Yeah, set apart, set aside, whatever. But and I’m telling the story, but it was so long ago, I don’t think it’ll matter. Because those guys aren’t even around anymore. But they had been set apart as being in charge of all the women. And then whoever did that went out and another General Authority came in and said, “That was the wrong setting apart.” And he set them apart to be only over them. So that in the past, if there was a problem in Ohio, the women could decide they could go do that. But now, if there was a woman in Ohio, who are having a problem, they had to go to the general authority and go through them in order to go out there. So they had lost a lot of their power.
GT 16:18 The Relief Society.
Lynne 16:19 The Relief Society. And so, this was also really interesting for us. And I know that what they were hoping, because they were really wonderful women, Aileen and Chieko are wonderful women. I mean Chieko just said, “Hey, these people at Sunstone are just like, kids in the program for smart kids. Why don’t you just leave them alone?” But I think they we’re hoping that we would push the envelope out a little bit for them. So, they had some movement. In fact, the day of my court, I got a call from Aileen Clyde saying, “Please don’t get excommunicated. We need you guys to do this thing. We want you to move out the envelope, so we have more room to move.”
GT 17:04 This is Aileen Clyde?
Lynne 17:06 Clyde.
GT 17:07 From the Relief Society General presidency?
Lynne 17:09 Yes. And I also got a call from Connie Chung’s people asking me if I would take in a hidden camera, which I said no. Because remember, Connie Chung had a news report thing at that time. She had called me the same day.
GT 17:22 Oh, wow. She was CBS news.
Lynne 17:25 Yeah, she was CBS News. It was interesting. But I said no. But it was interesting, because I could tell how much they love the women of the Church, these women. Every power was getting taken away from them. And so that was coming into us, too. We understood that Mormon Women’s Forum was becoming more and more aware of the limits of what was happening and taking away instead of giving women more and more room to actually be who they are. So that pushed us on, as well.
GT 18:02 Okay. So I think I get a better sense of the things that were bothering you from probably the late ’70s, because it sounds so when you’re first baptized, you came in. You didn’t know anything. And then I mean, when did you first notice that racism or sexism was a problem? Was it ’78 when the Church announced the rescission of the ban and they were against ERA?
Lynne 18:32 Well, let me also say this. When I became a Mormon, I was 17 when I was investigating, 18 when I joined, I looked very young. And so I went for my interviews, and no one asked me any sexual questions, at all. None.
GT 18:49 Well, those aren’t typical baptism questions.
Lynne 18:53 Yeah, they are. Have you had sex?
GT 18:55 Oh, do you obey the law of chastity, I guess, yeah.
Lynne 18:58 Yeah, not a word.
GT 18:59 Really?
Lynne 18:59 Not a word. So when I went in for my patriarchal blessing, my bishop asked me those questions. And I looked at him and I said, “I think you’re a lecherous old man. This is none of your business.” And he did not know, he said, “No one’s asked you these questions?” And I said, “No!” So, I came in not knowing a lot of this stuff.
GT 19:18 Okay.
Lynne 19:19 So it was really like shock after shock. I was like; “Really? You think that’s your business? That is really weird.” So I was reeling from that, as well, just kind of like, okay, this is really different. The race thing, I’ve always been aware of race issues. But because I was in Provo and there were no people of color at all, really…
GT 19:46 They didn’t even have any on the football team back then.
Lynne 19:47 I don’t think so. Nobody was. It didn’t sink into my consciousness until probably, maybe a couple of years before, understanding wait a minute. There’s a ban? You can’t even have a drop of blood and be Mormon, a drop of blood that they consider black.
GT 20:08 Well, we would baptize them. We just wouldn’t give him the priesthood.
Lynne 20:10 But, you couldn’t go to the temple.
GT 20:11 Right.
Lynne 20:12 Yeah, you couldn’t do anything. It was ridiculous. It was just ridiculous. And so that stuff was really bubbling up to me as well. I’d spent my childhood reading about, well, reading about everything that I could possibly read, beginning with the Holocaust, and then racism and then the Native Americans and understanding the problems. And for some reason, I don’t know why. But because of the way the Church presented itself, I thought it was a different, I thought it’d be different. So it shocked me, just a little bit, that it wasn’t. And that’s how it started.
GT 20:45 Okay. So, you’re wrestling in the ’80s with feminism, racism, even gay rights?
Lynne 20:52 Even gay rights. Because I had a lot of gay friends by then.
GT 20:54 Okay.
Lynne 20:55 It’s BYU. I have a lot of gay friends, even back then. So yeah, I had gay friends. I had gay friends who killed themselves, actually, because of the Church and the standard. So, all that stuff was, it was pretty tumultuous time with racism and misogyny and homophobia. All of that was part of what we were doing at Sunstone, trying to raise the consciousness of how do we do this? And at that point, I really was hopeful that the Church would want to shift the way it was responding to people. And so, when we were doing it, and we were having all these sessions, I kind of thought, well, this is great. This is kind of working, right? This is, people are coming, we’re talking about it, all of that. And then they went after anybody who was a professor at BYU, which was trying to shut down Sunstone.
GT 21:51 Yeah. Which they never did. {chuckling}
Lynne 21:53 Which they never did, but they tried.
GT 21:57 So, they told the BYU professors, “You can’t go to Sunstone anymore.”
Lynne 22:00 Well, who got also kicked out? Cecilia.
GT 22:05 Farr?
Lynne 22:05 Cecilia Farr and David Knowlton. Right after us, they were also kicked out of BYU. There’s a lot of stuff. It was almost like a it was a purge. It was a purge going after anyone who wasn’t really towing the line.
GT 22:20 Okay.
Lynne 22:20 Yeah. And that was also–we were, I was shocked. First of all, we were stay at home moms, a lot of us. So, I couldn’t figure out what they were so all worked up about. We were just doing stuff. Right? I was raising kids and putting people through, through his residency and all that stuff. And what was the big deal? But apparently, it was a big deal.
GT 22:47 And so basically, when your church court happened, did you attend?
Lynne 22:52 Oh, yeah.
GT 22:52 Okay, so you attended, met in the bishops office, he said…
Lynne 22:55 No, because I was the first. I didn’t know what, nobody knew what was happening. I was the first.
GT 23:01 You were the first one.
Lynne 23:02 Yes.
GT 23:03 And so then the dominoes started falling after you.
Lynne 23:05 Yeah. Here’s what’s really funny. So, I go to the church. I don’t know what’s going to happen there. A couple hundred people [are] singing hymns outside with signs that say” Lynne is not a heretic.” First of all, that was an interesting moment. And then two of my witnesses, Margaret and Lavina were witnesses.
GT 23:23 Margaret Toscano?
Lynne 23:24 Margaret Toscano and Lavina were my witnesses.
GT 23:25 Uh-oh! {chuckling}
Lynne 23:26 These people who I adore beyond belief, right? But then they’re in there, too. So, the here’s the people who are standing up for me. It was just after, when everybody [got disciplined,] when it started happening. [It] was just amusing. Like, well, there you go. There you go. {Rick laughing} That’s not going to hold any water. But I was so happy that they did it. We had, like, five witnesses. My father at one point looked at the bishop and said, “If you excommunicate my daughter,” because he was a very big Mormon believer by that time. But anyway, so when I look back and see that, it’s pretty funny.
GT 24:04 Ok, so you had the church court. The bishop didn’t have the heard to excommunicate you so they disfellowshipped you.
Lynne 24:12 Disfellowshipped me, yeah.
GT 24:13 But at that point, you were like, if you don’t like me, I don’t like you. I’m done with this?
Lynne 24:25 Well, other things happened. Things began happening. Part of it was I found this amazing therapist, and I started really working with that, and then my marriage fell apart.
GT 24:37 Was because of your excommunication? Well you weren’t excommunicated, but because of the punishment?
Lynne 24:41 I think it was more because we got married after knowing each other for months, and had three kids really fast and went to med school. And then, all of that was really, when you look at that, we were in our twenties. We were stupid, putting so much on your plate. That’s part of it. He was an introvert and that was a pretty extroverted experience. And so I think that was difficult for him because the phone was ringing constantly and I was running the symposium. There were always people at our house. So, yeah, it was partly that. But you can’t blame it. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t ever blame it just on that. It was the perfect storm of: this is what’s going to happen. So when that fell apart, I was supposed to have alimony till I was 65. But he got Parkinson’s a few years after we got a divorce. And so I ended up not having alimony and I had to figure out a way to financially take care of myself. And I have a natural gift of working with people. And so, I started a practice and that’s what happened.
[1] The book is called Second Class Saints and can be purchased at https://amzn.to/3Aemyb3 . See our interview about the book: https://gospeltangents.com/mormon_history/2nd-class-saints/
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