The Sexualizing of Savannah

On Sunday, May 7, 2017, Savannah Ward, age 12, read a prepared speech at a Utah Valley LDS church meeting where once a month any and all congregants are invited to extemporaneously share their brief testimonies of Jesus Christ. Instead of her testimony about God's eternal plan for His children, righteousness, sin, and humble repentance through Christ's atoning sacrifice, she came out as a lesbian, a 12-year-old lesbian, mind you, and spouted gay activist talking points straight out of the gay pride handbook. Much too late, she was asked to take her seat. Savannah's coached sophistries went uncorrected. A video, secretly taken of the event, and her speech in its entirety, was posted on facebook and has gone viral.

There is so much wrong with this picture we hardly know where to begin. These are my observations from a Mormon/woman/mother's point of view.

We know from news reports on the internet how Savannah's mother feels. She is all for her daughter beginning a life of sterile and perverse lesbianism. Sex without mating, marriage without a husband, children without a father don't seem to be any sort of problem for her. But how should a mother with natural affections for her child feel when her prepubescent child is caught up in ideas about adult sexuality of a high-risk and unnatural and dead-end kind?


I am a mother whose child was exposed to homosexuality in his teens. After the initial shock, I was hit with the heartbreak of his compromised safety and innocence. His developing sexuality had obviously been messed with. I felt it was my job as a responsible parent to find out the full extent of the damage. Where and how had he gotten these wrong and dangerous ideas? Next I felt I must help my child unlearn those wrong ideas and reinforce correct attitudes about human sexuality and proper, healthy male and female roles. Nowhere do I see any of this happening in Savannah's case. How tragic! I learned that homosexuality may only be a symptom of deeper misconceptions and problems that need to be addressed as soon as possible, or worse things could happen.

Every step on my child's road to repentance and recovery was difficult and heart-wrenching. That was about 18 years ago. How our culture and environment have changed since then! It is easy to see how many parents, like Savannah's, are taking the easy road these days, especially in light of the attention, popularity, and "compassion" people get for coming out as gay or gay-affirming --- for any age! I see such parents as cruel and exploitive. Note the 2 1/2 million views this video has received so far and the overwhelming supportive and gushingly flattering comments. If that's not attention I don't know what is! (Note 6/25 Savannah's story made the New York Times, trashing the church and congratulating the girl.) How sick and how tragic.

Here are some more specific observations relative to Savannah's pronouncements. 

First, that wasn't a testimony. It was a statement from an adolescent about alternative sexuality, which sexuality happens to be highly politicized and popular in our world today. People get lots of attention and promotion of their cause for these sorts of announcements.

Second, nobody writes down their testimony to give in Fast and Testimony meeting. She says her parents helped her through multiple rough drafts. So here we have a coached, prepared, written  speech, a carefully thought-out exploitation of a sacred religious meeting for selfish reasons in order to persuade the unwitting captive audience (they didn't come to church to hear about somebody's sexuality, a child's no less) toward an opposing worldview, all about something that everyone else keeps very private, all with the encouragement of her parents. 

Third, we're not supposed to electronically record what happens in the chapel. But somebody did that and obviously planned to do it from beginning to end in order to publicize it, no matter what happened. It's as if these parents weaponized their daughter to promote homosexualism on a grand scale. At church!

Fourth, there is so much more to this story nobody is asking about or telling. Does this young girl even know what lesbian means? She says she doesn't like boys and wants to hold hands with and kiss girls. Here, a very normal innocent feeling has been wrongly sexualized. At this early stage of puberty/sexual development there is often increased affinity between same sexes (read The Diary of Anne Frank), and along with this intense feeling of closeness with one's own sex there is often great trepidation toward the opposite sex. Has everyone forgotten this? 

In my adolescence I had a best best best friend of my same sex. We were inseparable. As for boys, in sixth grade when a boy slipped me his boy scout ring in a napkin with a note asking me to go steady, I panicked, running home from school and begging my mother to help me get out of it. I was Savannah's age when I was so scared to go to a party where a boy I knew was going to ask me to dance that I stepped on a bee on purpose because I knew my foot would swell up like a balloon. Which it did. And to my even worse embarrassment the perceptive boy guessed just what I had done and why. Today much less than what is described in this paragraph supposedly makes a young girl a lesbian. What nonsense.

How have Savannah's normal relationships and sexual development been interrupted? Child abuse? Peer abuse? Pornography? Internet indoctrination? Associations? Initiated by someone older? Some TV show, book, or movie? Something at school? Gay role models? Homosexualist family members? A combination of one or more of the above? In other words, how was she introduced to lesbianism/sexualizing herself and others of her sex? Where did she get the idea?

Much to my amazement, when we were helping our son, I found out that attitudes toward sexuality are learned; sexuality is developed, in healthy or unhealthy ways. That development depends on what is modeled and taught and encouraged at critical times. According to 12-year-old Savannah, Ellen Degeneres is her hero. Is there any doubt that Savannah is being taught lesbianism in today's oversexed, gay-worshiping, youth-targeting culture? And with her parents' and all the world's help, a taste for homosexuality is being cemented in her young, yikes-boys-are-diffferent, just-being-shaped mind.

Fifth, does this young, physically undeveloped girl know anything about human sexuality or the sex act and what it is for? Does she know anything about being a wife and mother? What gender roles and attitudes toward marriage and motherhood have been modeled? She is obviously a precocious,  curious adolescent. Why are her mother and father, and why is everyone else, so eager to sexualize and exploit this vulnerable young girl in this destructive way? Why do they want to ruin her future?

By the way, notice how gay narrative has abandoned the "born-that-way" excuse? That was a phony means to a nefarious end. Nowadays it's all about authenticity, personal stories, how you feel at any particular time, and the "courage" to blab to the world all about your personal romantic/sexual feelings, whatever they happen to be at the time. Any sex, any age, any body. (Notice that straight people don't necessarily do this, but gays do.) It's incredible how adults with plenty of life experience, even church-goers, have swallowed this Godless, humanistic, new "morality" hook, line, and sinker, even to the point of sacrificing their own children on its sleazy altar.

The only time human beings should concentrate on their sexuality is in regards to relations with one's opposite sex spouse. As a wife of 43 years, mother of 7, and grandmother of 25, and simply as a female, I see any exposure to or encouragement of sexualization/lesbianism toward this tender, immature girl as a despicable form of child sexual abuse and a cruel miscarriage of  normal development into healthy and fulfilling womanhood, proper marriage, and motherhood, not to mention true Christianity. The gay lifestyle, besides being naturally sterile, oversexed, and basely pornographic, is fraught with greatly increased physical, emotional, and spiritual dangers. Shame on parents, shame on our culture, shame on everybody who has any part in encouraging it. Everyone involved in the perverse sexualization of Savannah is guilty of child sexual abuse. I guess they don't have a problem with that.

-Janice Graham