When Bryan Egnew came out, his wife left him and took his five kids. And then…
Within two weeks, Bryan was excommunicated from the LDS Church. From the perspective of Mormon doctrine, his excommunication severed Bryan’s relationship to his children not only in this life, but also in the hereafter.
Alone in his home in North Carolina, Bryan was devastated. His parents flew out to be with him, then brought him back to Arizona for intensive treatment for depression.
After a few weeks of therapy, Bryan convinced his parents and his therapist that he was stable enough to return home to North Carolina, so he could look after the family home. Back in North Carolina, on Saturday, September 10, Bryan bought a gun at Wal-Mart. He fed the family’s animals, cleaned the house, handed the keys to a neighbor, sent a message to a family member that they needed to come to the house, and then went on the front lawn and shot himself.
@22 Alright so it’s been a while since I last logged in and I think many people (Rev. Dj, in-frequent, Out in Bum F) have covered points I was going to make, but I do want to address one particular issue you raised:
I would call their financial backing of anti-gay organizations many things, unsurprising, harmful, regressive- but I wouldn’t recommend spending time attempting to pin down exactly where blame attaches to these agents of intolerance- you’ll go mad.
Let me be as clear as I can: I am not saying that the men and women who administer and support anti-gay efforts in this country aren’t our concern- they most absolutely are. But I don’t see any reward in attempting to distinguish between the agent and the structure they support, neither can exist without the other. For me, the only question is: what are we going to do to combat it?
Some day gay equality will be realized in this country. When that day comes, what would you do with those who unsuccessfully fought against it? I am perfectly content to allow them to become the Hiroo Onodas of their time- disheveled, embarrassed, and disconnected from the machine that once informed their beliefs.
@26 Race is a social construct, does that make it any less ‘real’ for victims of racism?
@13: Having to live a lie that could have been avoided for his entire life and avoiding so much heartache for everyone involved? This is spiritual bullying, and if you sincerely believe in an afterlife, it would affect you just as much as the schoolyard pranks. People who suffer from abuse deserve our sympathy on many levels.
It’s a very sad story. I shudder to think that it very well could have been me if i had been unlucky enough to follow my bishop’s and family’s encouragement to get married in my early 20s. Coming out (withOUT kids/wife) was the hardest thing i ever did in my life, but thank god i did.. Before coming out, i was also depressed at the dead-end, no solution hand life seemed to have dealt me.
I consider the church’s influence on the way i was raised child abuse plain and simple.
Mormonism isn’t an ordinary religion in the sense that we understand one. It is an extreme example of totalitarianism, under central command, based on a religious dogma. It is so intertwined with the ordinary lives of its members that it can coerce and destroy them if they stray. And so intrusive, that privacy and personal autonomy are seriously compromised.
If it wasn’t so big, it’d be on the radar as a dangerous cult.
@50 Thank you! Most of you are missing the point completely. OK, the Mormon church are within their rights to say he can’t be in their club any more. I can understand his wife never wanting to see him any more – I cut my ex out of my life for less. But to take the man’s children away is just evil! This damn cult made sure coming out meant losing the children he loved, and that isn’t a question of theology. That’s just pure evil.
@3,
#2 is accurate. Religion is a choice. Sexual orientation is not.
Does anyone know if the LDS’s stance on suicide Is the same as mainstream Christianity?
Just as a rhetorical question, what is the LDS stance on divorce?
Peace.
This is so sad.
I feel for his situation. I didn’t grow up Mormon but I did grow up Jehovah’s Witness and there are a lot of similarities when it comes to their beliefs/views.
If you haven’t been a part of such a life-encompasing religion, you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about in regard his ability as an adult to leave.
I think sharing my experience might help some of those lacking empathy…
I didn’t leave until I was 32. I wish I could have left earlier but when you’ve grown up in such a religion (read indoctrinated/conditioned), where it is your entire life/existence, you believe the rhetoric that if you pray hard enough you can stop being gay. That you just need to meet the right girl, etc, etc. I considered suicide constantly but never went through with it ‘cos it was an unforgivable sin. Leaving would mean I’d be ‘disfellowshiped’, my friends would no longer be able to contact me and would shun me if they saw me on the street. Family is encouraged not to contact you in order for you to learn your lesson, knowing that if you don’t come back you won’t be resurrected with them (read afterlife). Remember too that since any outside social interaction is discouraged you don’t have other friends or support structures outside. On reflection, maybe I was too chicken but the pressure was unbelievable. These were always good reasons to ‘renew my faith’, pray more and to try again to get rid of my gay thoughts.
In any case, praying didn’t help and it took one particularly suicidal evening and nine months of concerted effort to finally break free from them… I ended up leaving the area so that they couldn’t find me or run into me.
My point is that it was far from easy to finally leave such a life and whilst I did, I could have also easily found myself in this poor guys shoes. RIP Bryan.
I grew up in a Mormon town. The level of control they had over their members was awesome to behold, and not in a good way. They all make a decision at about 14-15 (when seminary starts) and it was always apparent who had decided to swim in the church waters and who thought that everything was a joke/didn’t take it too seriously. There were a lot of not-pretty euphanisms for the change us non-Mormon kids saw in our Mormon friends.
I can’t say absolutely, because I knew NO gay Mormon kids (did know of, more on that in a second) — either they were expertly closeted or they were shipped out of town. (I’m not really sure. I’ve heard about the ‘camps’.) But, being gay was definitely a big problem, and it’s no stretch of my imagination that the church’s operating methods could drive someone to believe that suicide, a mortal sin itself, would be more easily forgiven than homosexuality. I understood, living there, that so long as you could wear the mask, you were accepted, supported and given what you needed from the community. There was a sincerely lack of genuine destitution in my town. I didn’t see extreme poverty until I left (and I was definitely horrified). There are so many POSITIVE reinforcements as well as the negative reinforcements that being gay was just….not an option.
I do have a friend I think was bi, and his older brother was gay. The family, fortunately, was fractured, and the older brother had a non-Mormon home to escape to. But it took me a long time to find out about this mysterious older brother — only my friend spoke of him, and only then when no one else was around. I think there was ONE picture of the guy in a house FULL of family phots. My suspected bi-friend mostly hangs out with non-Mormon friends. But I bring this up to illustrate a point — these folks have a non-Mormon safety net. It sounds like the guy in the article had NOTHING but the church in his life.
If you were hanging off a cliff, by your neck, and knew you would either suffocate, or you could choose to drop to your death — which would you choose? Because that’s exactly what sort of choice this man seemed to have.
Let’s not let the LDS debate distract us from the fact that stuff like this happens all the time in non-religious custody and access cases: the wife took the kids and hightailed it out of state, where she will be supported by her friends, family, church and social organizations in doing so. Further, those same people supporting her would be telling his kids that they were better off without him.
What’d he have left? A whole lot of nothing. No wonder he ate a gun. A lot of men do that, or their souls just die. Somebody else made the arbitrary decision that because he was Wrong he was no longer even a father, and that was that. Sad, sad, sad.
@60: Secular families rarely “disconnect” a person from their children without actual abuse involved.
This is an issue of Fundamentalism, to the link is justified. It’s not as much of a cut & dry fathers’ rights case.
If you’d gone to school with Joanna Brooks and known her, as I did, then Dan you might have realized that the source for your post wasn’t the most reliable. And her sources are even less-so. But perhaps it’s not important for you to get the facts straight. It’s just enough to attack the Mormon church because of their position on prop 8 and belief that gay sex is a sin.
I’m not Mormon, but friends and family are. One of these friends is an active, gay Mormon. He is not closeted. And he lives in Utah. Other homosexuals who are active Mormons have received positions of authority in the LDS church. You could have looked at Joanna’s own blog to find examples, like this:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispat…
There are many views by individual Mormons on homosexuality. The policy of the church itself is NOT to excommunicate gays. The story as given rings entirely false. It’s a very involved process to excommunicate someone. According to friends who are in leadership positions, an excommunication in two weeks, as the post states, is near impossible. The real story, according to friends of the family, is much more tragic and complex involving someone who had already come out to his wife years before and who was cheating on his wife and abusing drugs.
Liberal Mormon friends and gay Mormon friends are frustrated by people like yourself who just want to be provocative. They believe there are many aspects of their church that need to be reformed, but when circumstances get mis-represented, it does more harm than good for the cause. As more facts become public in this case, conservative Mormons and those opposed to liberalizing the Mormon church’s policy on homosexuality and gay marriage, will point to this as an example of how the media, liberal activists, and gay activists can’t be trusted.
I would guess his wife leaving him and taking the kids had more to do with his killing himself than the excommunication, and I wouldn’t consider his wife leaving him to be “bullying”. She was lied to and had a right to leave. This story is extremely sad, but I wouldn’t attribute his death to bullying.
I think this used to be so common that, even outside of religion, this is one of the main ways gay men died in the old days, until AIDS came along to replace it. Now, social ostracism (leading to suicide) is returning to become one of the ways gay men and boys are dying again. It may prove impossible to scrub every subculture (ethnic, religious, institutional) of this death-urge.
@15 I don’t know that Dan wants to dictate how other people’s religion operates, but I do. When they cause death, they should lose their right to operate as previously operating. Believe what you want, until you cause someone to die.
Let’s see-
Pit Bulls, Christians, Mormons, anyone slightly to the right of Karl Marx in politics…
Little Danny Boy the Savage is working up quite an impressive list of things to be ignorant but verbose about. I guess he’s an eclectic bigot.
As for this gentleman, one can feel sorry for his family and for his death without linking it to his church or his chosen homosexuality.
And who the hell calls a family member to make sure that person sees their body lying in the yard after s self inflicted gunshot? Talk about supreme selfishness. I’d say that apart from being gay and depressed this gentleman just may have had other mental health problems.
@66: Who severs a man’s contact with his children just because his sexual orientation offends someone’s delicate sensibilities? Talk about supreme selfishness.
Seattleblues, and do you really have to imitate the model you describe, while not imitating the man you criticize?
To say nothing of your disregard for the pain of a 40-year-old man who saw no alternative to suicide. I wonder if your personal savior would also have lavished snark on him?
Ah, SB. You should pray that your religion is wrong; because, if it is right, you are going to have a hell of a time in your afterlife…
@66: I thought you only used nick names for your friends Seattleblues.
Why the hell is it either/or?
Yes, a 40 year old is responsible for his own choices. And yes, a vulnerable 5, 10, or 15 year-old who is bombarded with messages that they are damned, doomed, and hateful to God and every person they know and love is being bullied. Horribly bullied.
Does it only count as bullying if you kill yourself? We wouldn’t argue that a 16 year-old Mormon who killed himself was a victim of intolerable institutional bullying. But if the same 16 year-old doesn’t kill himself, but mangles himself into an intolerable life, denying himself every possible happiness in order to fit into the rules because that’s all he knows, and then crumbles under the pressure, oh well, too bad, it’s all his fault?
Seriously, do you people run around telling rape survivors that if it didn’t kill them, it must not have been all that bad?
Or is it that utter rejection of religion in all its forms trumps any compassion for anyone?
While I agree that calling this bullying is a stretch, having been involved in the Unification Church, or the Moonies as they were commonly called, in the late ’70, losing your community – no matter what kind of community – is a difficult thing. My story is very, very different from this (it involves extrication via sting operation and de-programming), but my heart goes out to this man and his family. Andrew, http://www.badmoonie.com.