The most urgent assault on our liberty and the most dangerous attack on human health in decades has taken place in the last year, and it is incumbent on latter-day Saints to speak out against this human-caused disaster. Billions of people have lost freedom — perhaps forever — and hundreds of millions more have suffered depression, anxiety and massive losses in income, all because a few power-hungry politicians imposed ruthless lockdowns throughout the world.

One of the saddest things about the tragedy of the lockdowns is that they simply don’t work. The most respected scientists have known this for decades, which is why there were no lockdowns during past pandemics that were even more deadly than what we are living through today.

But yet, our media today is so dishonest that the public perception remains: lockdowns good, no lockdowns bad.

This post will deal specifically with a comparison between two states, Florida and California. In Florida, the schools are open and people go to the beach and concerts and restaurants. There is no mask mandate in Florida, while two masks are apparently de rigueur in the People’s Republic of California. The heroic Florida Gov. Ron Desantis has actually followed the science, as opposed to his counterpart in California, the authoritarian fool Gavin Newsom, who has sought to take away every possible freedom while refusing to follow his own bizarre rules. The good news is that Newsom is facing a likely recall election, and DeSantis has a 54 percent approval rating.

It turns out that Florida (no lockdown) and California (full lockdown) have had about the same results. Yes, I know most of the media (with some exceptions) has not been reporting this, but it is true, as I will show in this post.

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As we study Church history this year, I wanted to make sure readers had seen this post from Book of Mormon Central that describes the history of five women who were witnesses of the golden plates that were translated to bring us the Book of Mormon. Did you know that Lucy Harris, usually seen as a villain in the story of the translation of the Book of Mormon, was also a witness of the physical plates? I did not know that. Worth reading.

This web site is really quite well done. It is dedicated to the Church’s Proclamation on the family.

Did you know that Pres. Hinckley said this before introducing the Proclamation on Sept. 23, 1995?

With so much of sophistry that is passed off as truth, with so much of deception concerning standards and values, with so much of allurement and enticement to take on the slow stain of the world, we have felt to warn and forewarn. In furtherance of this, we of the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles now issue a proclamation to the Church and to the world as a declaration and reaffirmation of standards, doctrines, and practices relative to the family which the prophets, seers, and revelators of this Church have repeatedly stated throughout its history (Hinckley, 1995).

This statement helps me understand the importance of the Proclamation and why it is so crucial to our times, when sophistry, deception and the stains of the world appear to be increasing every month.

The new web site breaks down the Proclamation paragraph by paragraph, and line by line, with every sentence annotated with hundreds of ancient and modern scriptures, social science research and stories that support the principles of the Proclamation.     The web site also includes: 

• “Relatable” articles.        
• The “Raising Family” podcast.      
• “Ask the Y” street team interviews.       
• A free scripture insert.     
• History, lesson ideas and study aids.    
• “People of the Proclamation” featuring original stories of people who live and love the principles of the proclamation.

Check out the new web site at thefamilyproclamation.org

This study by Stanford researchers questions the effectiveness of locks and stay-at-home orders in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers write:

“In summary, we fail to find strong evidence supporting a role for more restrictive NPIs (lockdowns) in the control of COVID in early 2020. We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures. The data cannot fully exclude the possibility of some benefits. However, even if they exist, these benefits may not match the numerous harms of these aggressive measures. More targeted public health interventions that more effectively reduce transmissions may be important for future epidemic control without the harms of highly restrictive measures.”

The study was co-authored by Dr. Eran Bendavid, Professor John P.A. Ioannidis, Christopher Oh, and Jay Bhattacharya. The lead author, Dr. Bendavid, is an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford. The other authors collectively work in departments including the Department of Epidemiology and the Department of Biomedical Data Science.

The group studied the effects of lockdowns in 10 countries: England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the United States, which had more restrictive measures, were compared to Sweden and South Korea, where measures were less restrictive. After they accounted for the less restrictive lockdowns in South Korea and Sweden, they found “no clear, significant beneficial effect of more restrictive (lockdowns) on case growth in any country.”

As I wrote in this post:

All Latter-day Saints should speak out against the deadly and authoritarian lockdowns that have been instituted by out of control governments around the world. Not only have these lockdowns affected religious and others freedoms, but they are causing millions of unnecessary deaths, destroying the economy worldwide, bankrupting businesses and causing an increase in suicide, depression, anxiety and a myriad of other health disorders.

Lockdowns should be voluntary. People who feel they are at risk should stay home. Mask wearing… should also be voluntary. Governments that impose lockdowns and mask mandates are acting in an authoritarian manner. The purpose of this post is to increase pressure on society to end mandatory lockdowns and mask mandates so that healthy people can return to normal lives. Note that some protections should be taken for the most vulnerable in society (the elderly and others at risk), but these protections should follow the actual science, not the voodoo that is spouted by most people in the media today.

I would like to remind readers that in times of panic and fear, governments almost always respond by restricting freedom. During World War I, people of German descent were harassed and arrested. During World War II, 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent to American detention camps because of fear and hysteria. The Supreme Court even upheld this clearly unconstitutional act. (I am happy to say that the Supreme Court recently apologized for this decision). We are living through a similar time now, when people allow their terror to justify government attempts to control other innocent people.

I would like to add that the Church has called for members to voluntarily wear masks as a gesture of kindness to others but has not come out in favor of government-mandated mask wearing. Please follow the Church’s guidance on this issue.

It probably is time to re-introduce this article from May 2020 that points out the following:

“The claim sometimes made that there is an established massive suicide phenomenon among LGBT+ Latter-day Saints directly attributable to Latter-day Saint theology—or policies—is not supported by current data and scholarly research.”

As this article points out, it is a widespread myth that LDS theology is responsible for LGBT suicides. I keep on seeing people make the claim without any real evidence. But as the article points out:

Again, as mental health experts in partnership with GLAAD observe: “The underlying causes of most suicide deaths are complex and not always immediately obvious. Making hasty assumptions about those causes, even when based on comments from family or friends or media reports, can result in statements that are later proven to be inaccurate.” 

It’s difficult to rigorously test claims regarding suicide causality to peer-reviewed standards. But people may be surprised how little evidence there is for related side-claims such as, in the words of one celebrity, Utah has experienced a surge in suicide “because of the shame (LGBT+ teenagers) feel from the Mormon Church.” 

Lamentably, these beliefs have sometimes taken on a life of their own, regardless. 

I have spoken to sophisticated, intelligent colleagues in the social sciences who take the theology-suicide correlation as a fact, even when confronted with conflicting information—including objective, official numbers that do not provide any evidence for the claim. 

Such a narrative is extremely dangerous because it begins to normalize the idea that people with same-sex attraction should be inclined toward suicide:

This would normally be benign—people can believe what they want to believe—but the fact is that those pushing a narrative of mass suicidality among LGBT+ youth are themselves risking suicide contagion in order to win rhetorical points (this point, meant for the population in general, has actually been made by Rick Savin-Williams, the father of gay youth health research). Belief in LGBT+ Mormon suicide pandemic in the absence of good social science evidence may actually contribute to the troubling phenomenon of heightened suicidality among the LGBT+ population by normalizing suicide rather than resiliency, hope, and life. 

Is the Church and its practices and theology responsible, or is it the belief in the narrative itself? If you keep pushing the idea that all gay Latter-day Saints are depressed and suicidal, then those who are most vulnerable to that narrative may start to believe you. If you are contributing to the narrative that the only orthodox Latter-day Saint LGBT+ is a dead one, then you may in fact be hurting Latter-day Saint LGBT+ youth. 

So, please stop with the unscientific and false claims of proven links between LDS orthodoxy and LGBT suicide. It is not true.

Note: I have written about this before, once in 2016 and once in 2019. It seems like some clearly false claims simply won’t die.