flexghost.Teachers pay taxes.
Nurses pay taxes.
Bus drivers pay taxes.
You pay taxes.
The Mormon church is a real estate holding company with a Political Action Committees as a hobby.
Tax them.
Rory@flexghost You would think that they would be using that money to help those in need... Instead, I'm sure that money is going to right-wing hacks... with the promise that if republicans win, those in dire need lose... Are we sure that this Mormon place is a church, and not a MAGA town hall?
Karl Oscar Weber@customer228 @flexghost Hi friends.
I’m LDS, and I looked into this fund. The articles/whistleblower are kind of disingenuous. The church has a savings fund that they’ve been building for something like 50 years.
The church spends billions a year for basically charity stuff. Plus the church has a really comprehensive private welfare system: Food, Clothes, Furniture, Rent.
It’s just kinda silly.
obscurestar@Kowfm @customer228 @flexghost 'Private Welfare' isn't welfare. I know many former mormons and LGBT who have experienced the 'kindness' of the LDS.
My friend got out of a Mormon conversion therapy camp by rubbing rotted food in a wound she kept hidden until it was so infected she had to be helicoptered out to a hospital. She now does org work for a network of mormon re-education-camp survivors.
@obscurestar This is the weirdest thing I have ever heard. The LDS church doesn’t operate that sort of shit. But it sounds like a plausible think to have happened.
Private welfare, is not public welfare, for sure. But taken in the context that the LDS church has a shit ton of savings, the welfare program directly and substantially supports those in need.
@Kowfm There are several first-hand accounts of the same:
Saving Alex is a good one.
Here's a paper from a psychologist working with 50 survivors of Mormon conversion therapy https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0011000004267555
etc. They've very good at suing people into silence or you'd have heard more about it.
This is very interesting.
Personally I have never heard of conversion therapy run by LDS folks but there are a lot of weird cultural things that you encounter when interacting with certain communities in the Church.
Most of my interaction with the church and it's members has been with the Spanish Speaking community over the last 15 years. We went to church in Spanish for a long time. But the English speaking wards (congregations) in Utah are a little weird.