More ironic than anything, I caught this odd story on rabble rousing in a Mormon Church parking lot in Reno. The crazy thing is that the story implies the kids doing the partying, drinking, and even shooting are Mormons. I’m not sure what they are teaching those kids in church in Reno, but my Sunday School lessons didn’t include target practice 😉
Those damn Mormon drunks?!?
You know, growing up in Provo, I heard rumors of local Mormon teens driving off to Vegas to do heaven-knows-what. Knowing a few of the kids I knew in high-school, I don’t imagine it was for root-beer floats.
I also know that in Evanston, Wyoming, right over the Utah Wyoming border, there’s a little collection of the following businesses: a liquor store, a porn shop, and a few fireworks sellers. Kind of a refuge from the Utah restrictions I guess. Once the Utah Highway Patrol set up a sting-type operation where they had a plainclothes officer camped out in the parking lot of the fireworks sellers taking license numbers. Then when the Utah vehicles passed over into Utah, the Utah cops would nab them and bust them for having a trunk full of m-80 bombs or whatever. When the Wyoming cops found out about it, they were pretty ticked.
I even heard some wild rumor about upstanding Relief Society sisters taking off to Reno for weekends to work as prostitutes.
Although, what I know of prostitution, outside the glamorized portrayals, makes me kind of doubt this story. It’s not really and easy gig actually.
Are these the same people that are skewing Utah’s rates of mental depression?
Repression only lasts a limited amount of time; after that, people do as they please. Often, resentment develops in the meantime.
Students in Washington had a similar temptation to go a few miles into (Moscow) Id to drink until they unified the minimum age; that cut down on highway wrecks/injuries/deaths as well.
I’m sure similar stuff played out when I was growing up, but I was such a Peter Priesthood I never saw it. One of my best friends told me after my mission that he had had sex with several girls in high school; in fact, he was having sex with them all the time. All of them were Mormon. I really was oblivious.
That’s the problem growing up in Utah. You still have drug abuse, sex, and other shenanigans. But the difference is that those doing it are now Mormons too.
If proximity to Vegas is directly related to level of sin, then who knows what my fellow Las Vegans were up to. Some days, I feel like a chump for missing out on all the fun my Mormon friends seem to have had when I was a teenager.
I honestly never heard any wild stories about drinking among the Mormon youth in the small farming town in central California where I used to live.
However, it was an open secret that a couple of times a year or so the priesthood (fathers and sons) would go out and cruise the country roads at night and whack mail boxes with baseball bats as they drove by. None of them could understand why they shouldn’t do it. It was, I was told, just the boys getting together for some good, clean fun.