Mormon Quotes

Repression

Heber J. Grant
There is no true Latter‑day Saint who would not rather bury a son or a daughter than to have him or her lose his or her chastity ‑‑ realizing that chastity is of more value than anything else in all the world.
Heber J. Grant, Prophet Heber J. Grant, Gospel Standards, p. 55
Spencer W. Kimball
Among the most common sexual sins our young people commit are necking and petting. Not only do these improper relations often lead to fornication, pregnancy, and abortions — all ugly sins — but in and of themselves they are pernicious evils...
Spencer W. Kimball, The Miracle of Forgiveness, p. 65
Spencer W. Kimball
Also far‑reaching is the effect of loss of chastity. Once given or taken or stolen it can never be regained. Even in a forced contact such as rape or incest, the injured one is greatly outraged. If she has not cooperated and contributed to the foul deed, she is of course in a more favorable position. There is no condemnation when there is no voluntary participation. It is better to die in defending one's virtue than to live having lost it without a struggle.
Spencer W. Kimball, Prophet Spencer W. Kimball, LDS Prophet, The Miracle of Forgiveness, p. 196
Gordon B. Hinckley
I know what my mother expects. I know what she's saying in her prayers. She'd rather have me come home dead than unclean.
Gordon B. Hinckley, Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley, Conference Report, April 1969, pp. 52‑53
Mark E. Petersen
Overcoming masturbation: Never touch the intimate parts of your body expect during normal toilet processes.
Mark E. Petersen, Overcoming Masturbation: A Guide to Self Control
Mark E. Petersen
Overcoming masturbation: When in bed, if that is where you have your problem for the most part, dress yourself for the night so securely that you cannot easily touch your vital parts, and so that it would be difficult and time consuming for you to remove those clothes. By the time you started to remove protective clothing, you would have sufficiently controlled your thinking that the temptation would leave you.
Mark E. Petersen, Overcoming Masturbation: A Guide to Self Control
Mark E. Petersen
Overcoming masturbation: Put wholesome thoughts into your mind at all times. Read good books ‑‑ Church books ‑‑ scriptures ‑‑ sermons of the brethren. Make a daily habit of reading at least one chapter of scripture, preferable from one of the four gospels in the New Testament, or the Book of Mormon. The four gospels ‑‑ Matthew, Mark, Luke and John ‑‑ above anything else in the Bible can be helpful because of their uplifting qualities.
Mark E. Petersen, Overcoming Masturbation: A Guide to Self Control
Mark E. Petersen
Overcoming masturbation: Avoid being alone as much as possible. Find good company and stay in this good company.
Mark E. Petersen, Overcoming Masturbation: A Guide to Self Control
Mark E. Petersen
Overcoming masturbation: If the temptation seems overpowering while you are in bed, get out of bed and go into the kitchen and fix yourself a snack, even if it is in the middle of the night, and even if you are not hungry, and despite of your fears of gaining weight. The purpose behind this suggestion is that you GET YOUR MIND ON SOMETHING ELSE. You change the subject of your thoughts, so to speak.
Mark E. Petersen, Overcoming Masturbation: A Guide to Self Control
Mark E. Petersen
Overcoming masturbation: When you bathe, do not admire yourself in a mirror. Never stay in the bath more than five or six minutes‑‑just long enough to bathe and dry and dress AND THEN GET OUT OF THE BATHROOM into a room where you will have some member of your family present.
Mark E. Petersen, Overcoming Masturbation: A Guide to Self Control
Mark E. Petersen
Sex education belongs in the home, where parents can teach chastity in a spiritual environment as they reveal the facts of life to their children. There, in all plainness, the youngsters can be taught that procreation is part of the creative work of God and that, therefore, the act of replenishing the earth must be kept on the high plane of personal purity that God provides, free from all form of perversion.
Mark E. Petersen, Apostle Mark E. Peterson, Improvement Era, June 1969, p. 7
Mark E. Petersen
Overcoming masturbation: If you are associated with other persons having this same problem, YOU MUST BREAK OFF THEIR FRIENDSHIP. Never associate with other people having the same weakness. Don't suppose that two of you will quit together, you never will. You must get away from people of that kind. Just to be in their presence will keep your problem foremost in your mind. The problem must be taken OUT OF YOUR MIND for that is where it really exists. Your mind must be on other and more wholesome things.
Mark E. Petersen, Overcoming Masturbation: A Guide to Self Control
Mark E. Petersen
Overcoming masturbation: Never read pornographic material. Never read about your problem. Keep it out of your mind. Remember‑‑"first a thought, then an act." The thought pattern must be changed. You must not allow this problem to remain in your mind. When you accomplish that, you soon will be free of the act.
Mark E. Petersen, Overcoming Masturbation: A Guide to Self Control
Boyd K. Packer
There is; however, something you should not do. Sometimes a young man does not understand. Perhaps he is encouraged by unwise or unworthy companions to tamper with that factory. He might fondle himself and open that release valve. This you shouldn't do, for if you do that, the little factory will speed up. You will then be tempted again and again to release it. You can quickly be subjected to a habit, one that is not worthy, one that will leave you feeling depressed and feeling guilty. Resist that temptation. Do not be guilty of tampering or playing with this sacred power of creation. Keep it in reserve for the time when it can be righteously employed.
Boyd K. Packer, 1976 General Conference, speech entitled To Young Men Only
Jeffrey R. Holland
Setting aside sins against the Holy Ghost for a moment as a special category unto themselves, it is LDS doctrine that sexual transgression is second only to murder in the Lord's list of life's most serious sins. By assigning such rank to a physical appetite so conspicuously evident in all of us, what is God trying to tell us about its place in his plan for all men and women in mortality? I submit to you he is doing precisely that‑‑commenting about the very plan of life itself.
Jeffrey R. Holland, Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments
Janice Graham
Prof. Morgan related that the BYU counseling center no longer works with students on overcoming homosexual attractions, but merely on learning how to deal with them. So, according to this professor, young people are being told, without the benefit of knowledge and understanding as to how this came about and the spiritual, mental, and physical health dangers, that gay is the way they are, and here's how to accept it. There is no concern for the mortal testing, temporal future, or eternal soul of the young person, no understanding of their impressionable, impulsive, and fallen human nature, no interest in past or future suffering, and no cheering for righteousness, excellence, and nobleness, only what appears to be a perverse motivation to advance the current worldly whim. Can this travesty be true? Perhaps partly. But we happen to know there are still some right‑thinking people at BYU, including at the Counseling Center and send them our prayers.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
By the way, the only defense of the social experiment called gay parenting students could come up with was to compare it as better than foster homes, orphanages, and bad traditional parents. Besides having no information on which to base this comparison, and besides respectable foster parents, honorable orphanages, and imperfect but striving traditional parents rightly taking umbrage at this comparison, the issue is not about comparing these situations. The issue is that gay parents are modeling sinful and highly harmful and risky sexual ideas and behaviors to innocent, untaught children.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
This meeting, where young people with homosexual attractions will talk about how okay SGA [same‑gender attraction] is, and how bad they have it at BYU, is ill‑conceived. Not only will it not be helpful, it will be harmful, harmful to the souls of those giving the talks, harmful to those young minds listening who will be supported in covering both inward and outward sins and initiated further into homosexuality, and harmful to all those these people come in contact with.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
Most recently, the media reported student outrage about a series of letters supporting traditional values in The Daily Universe concerning gay parenting/adoption, prompted by the TV show "Modern Family." A group of gay activist students who took especial offense to one letter to the editor made up an accusatory flyer and without permission stuffed a number of them in the next day's edition. Joe Campbell, the managing editor of the paper, faculty member, and also a columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune, catered to the lawless gay activists by printing an apology and affirming the Church's understanding and respect for homosexually‑attracted people, at the same time removing the offending letter from the online version of The Daily Universe, a letter that unequivocally expressed the timeless Biblical truth that homosexuality is sinful. SoL wonders, what about the person who wrote the letter that got removed? There seems to be no understanding and respect for him — or the Bible for that matter. Shouldn't he now be offended? Shouldn't God be offended? Apparently not. To quote the Salt Lake Tribune article, "BYU has no interest in pursuing or punishing the students who produced or distributed the flyer, Campbell said. 'We count this as a learning experience.'" And what has BYU learned? Never to publish scriptural doctrine in its paper because it might offend gay activists?
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
Our book Captain of My Soul, the true story of a young man's dark past experience during his freshman year at BYU ten years ago getting initiated into homosexual behaviors by older men via chat rooms and phone calls, shines the light on the grim reality of these covered sins.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
Suicidal feelings and attempts, and depression are always mentioned by those promoting the social acceptance of youth homosexuality. Our conversation with Prof. Morgan was no exception; these serious problems are always ridiculously simplified to putting the blame on others. A victim mentality passes off personal responsibility and never helped anyone. Young people who feel suicidal or depressed are immature and easily persuaded, distracted, and recruited into all sorts of escapist causes and addictions. These problems may have less to do with sexuality than with the terrible conflict between right and wrong raging in the soul. There may be mental illness, as in the famous but misrepresented case of Stuart Matis. Many may desperately need clinical and medical attention. Tragically, the deep core issues are not being emphasized or even addressed. Instead, all is focused on the popular and politicized, self‑identified gayness of the sick person.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
If you think BYU upholds traditional family values, think again. Certain department heads, professors, guest lecturers, and students have become a law unto themselves, regularly preaching all manner of progressivism including socialism, radical feminism, anti‑Americanism, revisionist history, outdated Darwinism, and popular homosexualism, and continue to be supported, employed, and welcomed.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
[We] called and spoke with Professor Morgan and Renata Forste, the department chairman. When asked why the meeting was being held, we were told that BYU students need a greater understanding of homosexual attraction in order to be kinder and more accepting of students who experience it. We were told these gay students are keeping the law of chastity and are not acting out sexually, so there is no honor code issue involved. We wondered how Prof. Morgan could know this, if all students who will attend the meeting have been screened for sexual abuse done to them or by them, or for wrong ideas and attitudes about sex and sexuality, or for current sexual impurity, how this is being defined, and if the gay students have told the truth. Homosexual behaviors are by nature practiced and spread in secret, BYU being no exception.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
Gay activism has done a great job presenting homosexuality as harmless, equal to heterosexuality, even virtuous, honest, praiseworthy. But homosexuality is not harmless, natural to the human body, chaste, pure, or wholesome in any form. The very nature of homosexuality is out of bounds.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
[We remember] that just a couple of years ago, being openly gay and advocating for homosexuality was considered against the honor code. Apparently it's perfectly fine now, no matter what the honor code still states about unchastity. This shows that rules and codes and laws don't matter so much as the popular consciousness does. Where is our will? Is it with God, with teaching His timeless correct and saving principles no matter how unpopular, or is it with the sycophantic political correctness of the day?
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
What is going on at BYU is incongruent and inexplicable. Unless we are instructed to turn in our Standard Works for new gay‑affirming scriptures and clean out our ward and home library shelves of all our LDS Church manuals, books, and magazines, homosexuality should still be officially, courageously, and correctly shown as sinful and harmful in both thought and deed in every ward, stake, and Church‑owned or endorsed group, business, or education entity.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
Apart from mental illness, it takes humility and repentance and an abandonment of sinful desires possible through Christ in order to change and improve ourselves. This can happen to everyone. In fact, thousands of people with homosexual tendencies and lifestyles have left it all behind.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
Interestingly, we don't have to worry about Soulforce anymore because now BYU has a very vocal home‑grown student advocacy group of its own called USGA, Understanding Same‑Gender Attraction. It meets every Thursday night at 7:00 p.m. in room 111 of the TMCB on the BYU campus with BYU's permission. Call this group what they will, from what we've seen firsthand, it's really about affirming out‑of‑bounds sexual lust.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Janice Graham
If there really are any innocent, clueless students jumping on the now public gay bandwagon for the novelty, youthful rebelliousness, sense of belonging, special attention, or politics of it, they had better find out quick what gayness really is —and so had Prof. Morgan — or they won't be innocent or ignorant for long. They will be recruited in earnest.
Janice Graham, Standard of Liberty ‑ Stephen Graham and Janice Graham
Kip Eliason
I know immorality is a very serious sin. I really want to repent and be free of this terrible and degrading burden of masturbation. I am willing to do anything I have to do, even excommunication, to be able to repent and be free of this sin. I would rather go to hell and suffer there than be unworthy.
Kip Eliason, Journal of Kip Eliason
Connell O'Donovan
The longterm effects of the electric shock "therapy" these men were subjected to has been crippling. Two of the men committed suicide soon after completing this torturous study. Every survivor I have interviewed has suffered life‑long emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical damage. In 1999, John Cameron, one of the 14 men who went through this horrific experience in 1976 when he was a 23 year old BYU student and member of the Young Ambassadors, wrote to me, "For 22 years now I have lived with the scars of the experience ‑ unable to articulate a personal suffering and longing that have almost crippled me....I didn't completely come out of the closet until I was 34, and only after much angry, pissed‑off therapy. I spent a lot of money just so I could yell at my psychologist and break things in his office for an hour every week for two years. But it was a hell of a lot more fun than Ford McBride and the electrodes."
Connell O'Donovan, The Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature
Jack Annon
It is my professional opinion that the LDS Church has gone a step beyond propounding a certain viewpoint that masturbation is a sin, and has actually instructed its leaders, teachers and bishops to provide counseling and to utilize behavior‑modification skills that can have very dangerous and adverse effects.
Jack Annon, Affirmation, Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy, April 1986
Jack Annon
Based upon my review of even a limited amount of literature and on documentation specifically pertaining to Kip Eliason, it appears clear that the LDS Church promoted and engaged in behavior‑modification counseling in the specific areas of masturbation.
Jack Annon, Affirmation, Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy, April 1986
Jack Annon
It is my firm professional opinion, based upon information that I have at hand, that the LDS Church attempted to teach very stringent and difficult standards to a boy who was vulnerable to emotional conflicts, and that the counseling was inadequate and appears to have contributed to the boy's suicidal ideations.
Jack Annon, Affirmation, Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy, April 1986
Peter Bart
Some bishops distribute a handbook that dispenses some unusual recommendations to male students on how to curb their onanistic urge: avoid spicy foods, keep your shower door slightly ajar, and if all else fails, tie your hand to the bedpost... when Playboy magazine declared recently that, based on its survey of major college campuses, BYU had the lowest sexual temperature, the news was greeted with a sense of relief on campus.
Peter Bart, Peter Bart, 'Prigging Out,' Rolling Stone, April 14, 1983, p. 92
Curtis R. Canning
In Mormondom, there is a social expectation‑‑particularly among the females‑‑to put on a mask, say 'Yes' to everything that comes at her and hide the misery and pain. I call it the "Mother of Zion" syndrome. You are supposed to be perfect because Mrs. Smith across the street can do it and she has three more kids than you and her hair is always in place. I think the cultural issue is very real. There is the expectation that you should be happy, and if you're not happy, you're failing.
Curtis R. Canning, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 20, 2002, "Study Finds Utah Leads Nation in Antidepressant Use," by Julie Cart
Julie Cart
Doctors here have for years talked about the widespread use of antidepressants in the state. But there was no hard evidence until a national study that tracked drug prescriptions came to an unexpected conclusion: Antidepressant drugs are prescribed in Utah more often than in any other state, at a rate nearly twice the national average.
Julie Cart, New York Times, February 20, 2002
Mark A. Taylor
On Valentine's Day, February 14, Kip made another attempt to end his life by again drinking a mixture of iodine and alcohol. He was taken to the psychiatric unit of the St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center, where he was diagnosed as suicidal. (The medical facility is a codefendant in the Eliason suit.) Eight days later Kip was released to his father. Eliason recalls picking his son up at the hospital. "He seemed happy to be going home. Before we left, he introduced me to a 16‑year‑old girl he had met there. She had told him she was there for the same reason he was. Kip seemed very taken by his new friend and, when they said goodbye, he took her into his arms and kissed her. I'll never forget it." On March 2, 1982, Kip was home alone while his father made an overnight business trip, About 9 p.m. Eliason called him from his hotel. "Kip seemed all right. I asked him if he'd taken his medicine, and he said he had. I told him I'd be home soon, and that was about it." Sometime after the call, Kip wrote a suicide note. He went to the closed garage, started the family car and went to sleep. Dead at 16, Kip Eliason had but two "vices," masturbation and telling the truth. He was unable to stop masturbating and too honorable to lie.
Mark A. Taylor, Affirmation: Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy
Mark A. Taylor
The son of Gilbert Fay and Lucy Pettingill Lauritzen, Brad G. Lauritzen born in Brigham City, Utah on October 26, 1947. In 1966, Brad registered in Brigham Young University's Study Abroad Program and spent a semester in Grenoble, France. While a student at BYU, Brad became affiliated with a social group for gay people in 1967 and early 1968 that met regularly in the "step down lounge" at the Wilkinson Center. Brad was outed by Donald Attridge, another gay student, in the early spring of 1968. Attridge had turned in a lengthy list of names to Apostle Spencer Kimball after receiving assurances from both BYU's head of Standards Office, Kenneth Lauritzen (no relation to Brad), and Kimball that those on the list would be "helped" by Kimball. Instead, Brad was hospitalized in the psychiatric ward of a mental institution by his family. He later escaped and ran away to San Francisco, where he committed suicide just before Christmas, on December 18, 1971. He was 24 years old.
Mark A. Taylor, Affirmation: Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy
Mark A. Taylor
After Kip's death, Eliason moved to Salt Lake City. He was angry and hurt. There he met parents who had stories like his ‑‑ youngsters ending up in mental institutions or worse, committing suicide. Eliason worked through his grief and anger by talking to anyone willing to listen and by going to the library and researching teen suicide and the Mormons. In October 1983 he filed a $26‑million wrongful‑death suit against the Mormon Church, alleging that the Latter‑day Saints went a step further than just providing his son with spiritual, moral and personal guidance when they subjected him to sex‑ and masturbation‑counseling. The suit accuses the church of negligence for providing counseling that fell outside the realm of religious teaching and for not requiring or providing training for its counselors. The suit charges that this counseling, combined with the church's harsh anti‑masturbation indoctrination, were the direct cause of Kip's depression, self‑hate, suicide attempts and eventual death. Moreover, it alleges that the church knew or should have known that its attempts to indoctrinate and provide sexual counseling for Kip were having a severe and adverse reaction on him; yet they continued. The suit charges that this failure to exercise a proper standard of care was negligent. The suit also contends that the Mormon Church subjected Kip to what amounted to an intentional attempt at mind control by using brainwashing techniques under the guise of spiritual teaching.
Mark A. Taylor, Affirmation: Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy
Mark A. Taylor
Kip and countless others have fallen victim to guilt, self‑hate, mental illness and suicide created by their inability to control healthy sexual desires as mandated by the Mormon Church. Making things worse is its amateurish attempts to provide counseling that utilizes powerful behavioral‑modification techniques with inadequate training.
Mark A. Taylor, Affirmation: Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy
Mark A. Taylor
On March 2, 1982, Kip Eliason, age 16, distraught and filled with self‑hate over his inability to stop masturbating, committed suicide. Before asphyxiating himself, Kip left his father a note: "Dear Dad, I love you more than what words can say. If it were possible, I would stay alive for only you, for I really only have you. But it isn't possible. I must first love myself, and I do not. The strange feeling of darkness and self‑hate overpowers all my defenses. I must unfortunately yield to it. This turbulent feeling is only for a few to truly understand. I feel that you do not comprehend the immense feeling of self‑hatred I have. This is the only way I feel that I can relieve myself of these feelings now. Carry on with your life and be happy. I love you more than words can say. —Your son, Kip" Kip Eliason's five‑year struggle to overcome masturbation started at age 11 when his grandmother persuaded him to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints (LDS), whose members are better known as Mormons.
Mark A. Taylor, Affirmation: Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy
Mark A. Taylor
Mormon anti‑sex indoctrination start early. Children are taught that sex is dirty and disgusting, that it is the tool of Satan. The church uses guilt and the threat of eternal damnation to drive its message home. When a child reaches adolescence, the conflict between what he or she has learned and sexual feelings experienced can create devastating consequences.
Mark A. Taylor, Affirmation: Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy
Mark A. Taylor
After a while suicide looked like the most honorable thing to do. Many Mormon gays do it. I had it all planned, an automobile accident on a certain curve in the mountains; it was a way my children and family would be spared.
Mark A. Taylor, Affirmation: Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy
Mark A. Taylor
He loved the Mormon Church — which has 5.5 million members worldwide — and was devoted to its teachings. His father, Eugene Eliason, a non‑Mormon, believes that in some ways the church may have played a substitute‑mother role for the boy. (For clarity, Eugene Eliason will be referred to as Eliason throughout this report; his son will always be called Kip.) Kip was not the kind of youngster you'd think would commit suicide, but when his church told him that he'd find guilt, depression and self‑hate if he masturbated, he believed so. When it said he'd go to hell if he didn't stop, he believed that too. And when he was told that masturbation was a "building block of suicide," he took the church at its word. Kip's death rocked the predominantly Mormon agribusiness community of Boise, Idaho, where he was a high‑school senior at Capital High School. Of course, there were the stories that occasionally filtered through the congregation about young people who, like Kip, committed suicide because they couldn't live up to the church's stringent anti‑sex doctrines. But they were just stories and, if they were true, they didn't happen in Boise; they happened some 300 miles southeast, in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Mark A. Taylor, Affirmation: Sin & Death in Mormon Country: A Latter‑day Tragedy
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