Will Big Love Cause White Flight from Heaven?

Sonja Eddings Brown
Media Specialist
Southern California Public Affairs Council

Dear Mrs. Brown,

Thank you for the warning us about HBO's Big Love. I, too, am incensed that they would show one of the actors wearing temple garments.

That said, I don't think you considered your audience while writing your email. The sacredness angle is for gentiles*. It distracts them from the implications of requiring women to don beehive state burqas, men to dress up like "clean room" workers at a bio-warfare facility, and the silliness of putting little green fig-leaf aprons on both genders.

But gentiles aren't your mail list's audience. We're Mormons, and as such, we're more motivated by embarrassment than sacredness. You should have crafted your message around that.

You know after the show is aired, smirking coworkers and acquaintances are going to ask us about the garments (that is if they can get the words out between suppressed laughs). How do we respond to that? Do we tell them God wants us to dress up in 19th century masonic garb?

And what if Big Love shows more than the garments? What if it shows the endowments? We're going to be inundated with requests from people wanting us to teach them the secret handshakes that'll get them into the Celestial Kingdom. I can hear them now, "Come on JC, show us that "Sure Sign of the Nail, please. I want to see Jesus' face when I give him the ol' celestial fistbump and get in on a technicality."

Worse yet, what if they show the endowments close up, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry, or worse yet, Obama, learns the mechanics of the handshake. Consider the ramifications of that. We're just a handshake away from having a black family moving onto a planet next to ours in the Celestial Kingdom. Now that's the kind of thing that'd motivate your audience.

Oh, and oh my heck**, what if they bring up celestial marriage? We've done a fairly good job of distancing ourselves from polygamy on Earth, but what if everyone learns that we have no problems with plural marriage in the afterlife? We could catch so much heat that God would become uncomfortable enough to give the prophet a revelation saying that polygamy is banned there too. You know how God hates bad press. That's why he ended polygamy on Earth and gave the priesthood to blacks (not to mention the time he drowned every child in that great flood of his).

Darn it. I had dibs on Sophia Loren, Gong Li, Phyllis Schlafly, and most of the alto section of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Now, Big Love is going to screw that up.

Flippin' bodaggets.***

Heterosexually yours in a chaste and certainly not a 2 Nephi kind of way,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot


*Urim and Thummim translation of Mormon-speak: "Non-mormons (includes Jews.)"
**Urim and Thummim translation of Mormon-speak: "OMG!"
***Urim and Thummim translation of Mormon-speak: [Readers, please forgive me, but I have to provide an accurate translation] "Fucking balls of shit that cling to a sheep's ass-wool."