Clint Martin's Blog

I scanned through the email. My sister was changing doctors and asked my mom for our family’s medical history. My mom forwarded the message to all of us. In a list that only went back a couple of generations, heart disease appeared three times. Cancer made the list five times. Only two of my recent ancestors had died of “old age”. If I had to die from something on the list, I found myself wondering, which would I choose? It was like I had received some sort of morbid menu.

I didn’t really bother me, getting a glimpse of my unhealthy future. I’m not really scared of death (unless that death comes by drowning in a undersea science lab whose structure has collapsed in on itself – omgosh that’d be terrifying). It did, however give me a final push to do start doing something I’d always wanted to do: completely live the Mormon code of health, the Word of Wisdom.

“Paris Visite, três jour, s’il vous plait,” I said to the man behind the plexiglas of the subway station ticket counter.  Crap.  It was my first non “merci”-only phrase I had uttered since arriving in Paris and as soon as I finished I realized that it was a mixture of bad French and mediocre Portuguese precariously held together by a strong American and Brazilian accent.  The man’s expression shifted from disinterested to less than interested.

“Quoi?” he said.  I knew what the word meant, but even if I didn’t, the meaning was clear: “what the crap did you just say?”.  I sighed and resorted to my old standby; I held three fingers up to the glass.

I have a confession to make.

When I got the first chain email expressing outrage over the portrayal of LDS temple ceremonies in the HBO series “Big Love”, my first reaction was, “well, Mormons, karma sure is a b****, ain’t it?”  After having endured almost half a year of LDS people being (far) less than respectful of gays and their family relationships, I actually felt we were getting what we deserved.

Our goal may have been to stand up for what we knew to be true when we backed Prop 8, but whether we meant to or not, as a people, our actions and words were often laced with arrogance, ignorance, and (even though we constantly denied it) sometimes our speech revealed true hatred.   For a time I thought, with the episode of “Big Love”, we were finally getting a taste of our own medicine.

But then I remembered what that medicine tastes like.

I pushed the emu up to the barbed-wire fence and thought about how to get it to the other side.  Over was out of the question.  The animal weighed almost eighty pounds and, while I wanted nothing more than to toss the stubborn thing over, I didn’t want it to hit the other side running.  Through the fence wouldn’t work either as threading a large flightless bird through the barbed wire strands would cause more damage than I was willing to inflict even after I had spent almost half an hour chasing it.

Nope.  We were going under.