No, this isn’t a headline from The Onion. How does the Mormon Church respond to a woman critical of the Church’s treatment of women? By ex-communicating her. I guess they want to show and not tell.

Kate Kelly has been a Mormon all of her life. She served as a missionary in Spain when she was 21. She was married in the Salt Lake Temple. She has been a proud Mormon and, up until very recently, a regular church-goer. But on Monday, she found out that the Mormon Church, also known as the Church of Latter-Day Saints, ex-communicated her for apostasy, the repeated and public advocacy of positions that oppose church teachings.

The symbolism couldn’t be any better (or worse); Kelly was excommunicated in absentia by an all male panel for questioning the all male nature of the Church’s leadership. Specifically, Kelly advocated for allowing women to be ordained as priests. According to the Mormon Church, only men can become priests because all of Jesus’s apostles were men. That’s men. Not boys. Yet the Mormon Church has no problem ordaining boys as young as 12. Why do they follow Jesus’s example when it comes to gender but not age?

It’s easy for me to ask that question. I have nothing to lose. I’m not Mormon. But questioning the Church proved extremely difficult for Kelly, a human rights lawyer from Virginia who now lives in Utah. Kelly started the organization Ordain Women, which “aspires to create a space for Mormons to articulate issues of gender inequality they may be hesitant to raise alone. As a group we intend to put ourselves in the public eye and call attention to the need for the ordination of Mormon women to the priesthood.” She also organized demonstrations at the Church’s conferences at Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

Kelly was warned to take down the website for Ordain Women. But she refused, as she explained in a letter to the church:

I will not take down the website ordainwomen.org. I will not stop speaking out publicly on the issue of gender inequality in the church… I cannot repent of telling the truth, speaking what is in my heart and asking questions that burn in my soul.