Free “It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass by Joanne Hanks, Steve Cuno

she would ask,
“Aaaarrrrrrrre youuuuuuuu therrrrrrre?”
    The dead knew our time was valuable, so they usually kept us
waiting no longer than for a suitable dramatic pause. “Yes, I am here,” a
vaguely Elaine-like voice coming from Elaine’s mouth would reply. I suppose if
you wanted to be skeptical about it, you could say it sounded like Elaine doing
a poor job of disguising her voice. Not wanting to be skeptical about it, we
chose to be amazed.
    “Thank you for talking with me today,” the deceased’s voice
would continue. The famous dead were always polite like that. I guess it’s
tough to be full of yourself when you’re dead. We were moved to tears as we
heard history’s greats compliment us on our faithfulness and thank us for
seeking them out and saving their souls.
    Sooner or later someone in the group would get around to
asking the famous dead person if he or she would like us to perform a baptism
on his or her behalf. No dead person ever turned us down. Nor did any dead
person ever say, “Where the heck is Manti, and how did I get here?”
    Don’t think for a minute that any deceased could get a
vicarious baptism out of us, just like that, just for the asking. Abraham
Lincoln, for instance, had some explaining to do. We were still a little torked
at him for having signed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act into law in 1862. We were
also peeved that he chose to ignore the Mormons instead of using his
presidential powers to protect them. He had famously compared the Mormons to a
fallen log that was “… too hard to split, too wet to burn, and too heavy to
move, so we ploughed around it.” What a jerk. Still, it’s hard to stay angry
with such a nice guy. Speaking through Elaine, Lincoln offered a deep and
sincere apology. His abject humility softened our hearts and won us over. By
the time he worked his way around to sweetly requesting that we perform his
vicarious baptism, there was no refusing him. Maybe he wasn’t such a jerk after
all.
    Elaine once humbly boasted that, across the veil, she had
met with a greater number of important people than anyone who had ever lived.
No one could one-up her on that one.

Re-Probates
    There was no place in mainstream Mormonism or in the TLC for
reincarnation. We practiced polygamy, held conversations with dead people, and
believed that God was going to come to Manti, strike the nonbelievers dead, and
sit down with us for sandwiches and cookies, but come on. Reincarnation was
just plain silly.
    But then, competing polygamist prophets started claiming to
be the reincarnation of Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Harmston, seeing that the
idea played well with their followers, soon announced that he was the real
reincarnated Smith— and that Smith
himself had been the Holy Ghost incarnate . Yes, you connected the dots
correctly. Our humble servant James Dee Harmston was none other than the Holy
Ghost.
    Suddenly there was a rush to have God reveal that you were
the reincarnation of somebody cool. Even better, that you were the
reincarnation of somebody cool who was the reincarnation of somebody else cool.
Better still, that you were the reincarnation of somebody cool who was the
reincarnation of somebody else cool who was the reincarnation of yet somebody
else cool. You get the idea.
    There was no limit. You could be the reincarnation of as
many cool, dead people as you wanted, provided you took care not to be two
people whose lives overlapped. We joked that you really could be your own
grandparent. What made the joke really funny was the fact that, well, we weren’t
joking.
    Actually, there was one limit. You couldn’t be Adam. According to Joseph Smith’s immediate successor
Brigham Young, that fellow running around the Garden of Eden wearing a fig leaf
calling himself Adam was actually God the Father incarnate. In less honest
moments, the Mormon Church says that’s not what Young meant. In more honest
ones, it admits that Young meant exactly that but was wrong. Like most