The Missionaries' Position Get the Book of Mormon Delivered to Your Living Room

Robert Ullman

The Book of Mormon is available for free, and fleets of dashing young men commit up to three years of their lives to delivering it. So if you want retribution for the Mormon-funded Proposition 8—the bigoted measure that banned same-sex marriage in California—requesting a copy is one way to burn some Latter-day dough. If the government won't tax the church's pyramid tithing PAC, at least you can tax its resources.

At Mormon.org, anyone can sign up for a free Book of Mormon. I thought they'd mail me a copy. But when I filled out the form, up popped this message: "Thank you for requesting the Book of Mormon from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You should be contacted by missionaries in a few days."

Actual missionaries? It sounded too good to be true. Four days later, my phone rang. It was Elder Guthrie—he and Elder Leatham would arrive around 6:00 p.m. And at 6:11, there they fucking were. I shook their hands and pointed them to the couch.

"You may have heard about Proposition 8," I said. They nodded. I told them that the California measure cast uncertainty on the marriage licenses of nearly 20,000 same-sex couples, that Mormon Church leaders directed their congregations to "do all you can to support the...amendment by donating of your means and time," resulting in two-thirds of the Prop 8 funding.

The boys stared at their shoes. They work and live on Capitol Hill, and are dispatched by text message every time some gay guy with a beef orders a book. But their convictions remain strong. "When I read the Book of Mormon, it makes me happy," said wide-eyed Guthrie, writing down passages in suspiciously bubbly handwriting for me to read later.

The Book of Mormon itself is a melodrama. The passages, printed on pages thin enough to roll into joints, read like Penthouse prose spiked with Shakespearian clichés: "Thy seed also had been as the sand; the offspring of thy bowels like the gravel thereof...." Bowel seed, First Book of Nephi? Verily gross.

The 779-page Book of Mormon, first written in an Egyptian-ish scrawl on gold tablets, was discovered by Joseph Smith in 1823. (Nobody has seen these gold tablets since.) Smith was surely transcribing the word of God directly when reporting that the Jaredites came to the Americas to find "elephants and cureloms and cumoms."

But the book doesn't directly address gay marriage. When pressed for an example of the harm that same-sex marriages would cause Mormons, Thomas Olson, president of the Mormon's Seattle North Stake, couldn't name one. He also wouldn't quote the Book of Mormon. Instead, he cited the church's so-called "Proclamation on the Family." It declares that "marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator's plan...." Church president Gordon B. Hinckley announced the proclamation on September 23, 1995.

In other words, Mormons updated their religion in 1995, and now that's what they all believe and you better believe it, too.

"We certainly don't condone bigotry or targeting gays or lesbians," says Olson. "I guess people would say... that we have done that, but that is not our intent."

I told the Elders that it doesn't matter what their book sayeth about what I can or can't doeth with my bowel seed. There's the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Flying Spaghetti Monster Cookbook, and they all maintain different recipes for salvation—but those books don't establish laws for shrimp eaters, ham lovers, or pastophobes. Any holy book or religion, if enacted into law, would deny the followers of another book their freedoms.

I asked the two young missionaries, "Wouldn't it be bigoted if I interpreted my book of faith to take away your rights?"

Awkward pause.

"As it happens, I do have a book that guides my faith and would repeal your rights if passed into law," I said. I'd folded a few pages of printer paper in half, and on the cover I'd scrawled "The Book of More Men."

"The first page here says, 'Mormons shall not foist their doctrine unto others lest those who hateth Mormons subject their rules upon others. Rule number one: Mormon missionaries must not proselytize.'" The guys laughed. They would return home to Arizona in a few months welted by the tongue-lashings of dozens more fags like me. We shook hands, and they left. I put my copy of the Book of Mormon next to the toilet, where all my houseguests could use its pages to wipe their bowel seed.