Just_A_Guy

Many of them, in my experience, wind up being the result of children who were taken by a parent who wasn’t supposed to have them—either a parent with joint custody who failed to return a child to an ex-spouse at the appointed time, or a child in DCFS custody whose parent somehow managed to finagle the child into their care and then took off with the child. For professional reasons, I’m glad the Amber Alert tools are available. But as a citizen/former layperson . . . I dunno. I grew up sort of envisioning Amber Alerts as being intended to retrieve children who were kidnapped for the express purpose of maiming, violating, and/or killing them and where such harm was imminent if the child were not recovered immediately. I’m not sure how I feel about the system being used for less-immediate threats—especially when the core issue is basically a custody spitting match between divorced parents.

1. I’m not a woman (obviously!), but I would respectfully push back against the ideas that a) a universal policy is inherently wrong just because it hits a particular subset of people in a particularly visceral way, or b) that people who are not directly effected by a policy are unable to weigh in on the objective pros, cons, real-world effects, and theoretical rationales behind said policy. 2. I’d be fine knowing my wife were still administratively sealed to a prior spouse, if I were confident that from both an emotional and theological standpoint, the bond between my wife and her ex was well and truly “over”.

At the trial court level, it’s fairly common (at least by government attorneys and solo practitioners). Appellate filings, and filings from big firms generally, are edited much more closely.

I've tried not to weigh in too much on this, because I have mixed feelings about Ballard specifically and about the way awareness of human trafficking is being raised more generally. But I will at least say this . . . From what I understand, at least within the United States, the sorts of scenarios we envision with The Sound of Freedom and Ballard's work generally, are statistically a relatively small proportion of the total "human trafficking" that occurs here. By and large, human trafficking victims aren't abducted by sinister men driving nondescript windowless vans; they aren't kept chained up in squalid motel rooms or storage sheds with half a dozen other victims; they aren't even necessarily homeless or runaways. The far more common scenario is for children to be trafficked by their own parents--most frequently by a single mom trading access to her daughter to a dealer in exchange for drugs; or to a landlord in exchange for a month of free rent; or to a boyfriend and/or his friends in exchange for what passes (in the mother's tortured, addled mind) for affection or emotional support. In a large proportion (probably a majority, as I understand it) of human trafficking cases, bringing the children home is darned near the worst thing you can do. I wish well for Ballard, his organization, and his movie. It's desperately important that we have a cultural renaissance regarding the importance of childhood innocence. There are theories being bandied about, and becoming increasingly mainstream, that tend to justify the exploitation of children and erode the institutions that have traditionally stood between children and the adults who wish to sexualize them. Those theories need to be exposed for what they are, and Ballard is one of the leaders of the charge on that issue--which I think is why he generates a lot of the pushback that he gets (though certainly not all--he does strike me as a bit of a poser; and I have methodological issues with some of the historical theories he has published). I do worry, though, that he sort of sucks all the air out of the room in any discussions regarding the allocation of anti-trafficking resources. Even if Ballard were 100% successful and effective against the specific subsets of trafficking he targets--we would still have a major child trafficking problem in this country.

This discussion reminds me that nine years ago, I wrote this: [quote]Let's be blunt: One in three Americans (not American adults, but Americans) currently has an STD. Due to overuse of antibiotics, we're losing our ability to control/manage the symptoms of a couple of the biggies (Gonorrhea, for example). Combine that with the fact that we have a culture--and even, arguably, a political party--that takes it for granted that people have a right to consequence-free sex. What do you do when you want (and have been told you have a natural right to) disease-free sex, but all your prospective partners have diseases that can't be medically controlled? Simple--you find the people who aren't having sex right now and are relatively disease-free, and try to get them onto the sexual market. It may take a while to attain legal droit de signeur over adult abstainers/monogamists (I'm being a bit facetious here) (I think); but opening up the teenaged market can be done--is being done--with relative ease. Few of the movers and shakers in our society will realize that that's what the end game is--and even fewer will admit it--but watch and see. That will be the net effect of the legal, scientific, and social "advancements" over the next few decades. You'll see it with the publication of medical studies showing that sexual intercourse by children is a part of healthy physical development. You'll see it with a general social and legal softening of social standards regarding sexual relationships between adults and minors (have you noticed the recent prevalence of news stories involving affairs between young and improbably beautiful female teachers and sixteen- or seventeen-year-old male students?). You'll see it with a marginalization of individuals and institutions that continue to publicly encourage abstinence. And--yes--you'll see it with a deliberate attempt to limit or undermine conservative parents' abilities to influence their children's sexual mores. [/Quote]

If we didn’t watch movies because we disapproved of the ideologies of some of the principal actors, directors, or producers, we’d never watch anything. I note that a number of Harvey Weinstein films are still enjoying some degree of popularity . . .

Welcome aboard! A few thoughts: 2. Wife #1 is only able to control Husband and Wife #2 because Wife #2 is willing to be controlled. 3-5: Two thoughts here that tie into all of these: a) The sealing covenant establishes/ enhances three specialized relationships, not just one. There is the relationship between husband and wife; but there is also the relationship between the husband and God; and the relationship between the wife and God. While the vicissitudes of human relationships may cause the husband-wife bond to decay or evaporate over time (both in terms of the shared emotional attachment, and the sealing ratification of the Holy Spirit of Promise), the relationships between each covenant-keeping party and God Himself can remain intact and the covenant-keeping party has the assurance that, at an appropriate time, they can receive all the temporal and eternal blessings of the New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage with a worthy partner. The Church’s policies decree that generally speaking, while a divorced man can get a “clearance” to move on and be sealed to a new wife, he simply does not get to unilaterally shut his ex-wife out of that covenant with her Heavenly Father by going to the First Presidency and accusing her of covenant-breaking in order to subject her to a full “cancellation”. (Women, by contrast, generally *do* get to do this to their ex-husbands if or when they wish to be sealed again; probably a vestige of plural marriage and a recognition that eternal polyandry is not a thing in our doctrine.) b) Why do women get a privilege that men don’t? I surmise that the following considerations play a role: —Men hold priesthood. Where much is given, much is expected. —Due to western economic and social norms, single men are i) typically expected to take the lead in courtship and ii) often, and unlike women, are considered *more* desirable marriage partners as they enter midlife and become more established in their careers and general living situation. —LDS prophets and apostles from at least Brigham Young onwards have recognized the terrible risk a young woman takes when she hitches her fortunes to a young man who is, at that stage of his life, something of an unknown quantity. From Turner’s biography of Brigham Young, p 242: “[Young informed a man requesting a divorce] ‘that when a man married a wife he took her for better or for worse, and had no right to ill use her, and if she [pooped] in bed and laid in it until noon, he must bare it.’ . . . Similarly, Young told another man that ‘if you have drawn a red hot iron between your legs and scorched yourself bear it without grunting.’” Under the circumstances, we elders (and the women foolish enough to love us) should probably just be grateful that the Church permits men to divorce and remarry at all.

A worker at a local temple claims that President Nelson had said something to the effect of “they’re not really dead”—I think trying to emphasize that they are still conscious and that they and the living share common interests. I did baptisms and confirmations last Saturday morning. I caught myself a few times, but the confirmation recorder told me that they had been told that either way is acceptable.

One other possibility, with the caveat that I haven’t read the new opinion and it’s been 15 years since I read the old affirmative action cases: The old precedents allowed for affirmative action in the name of diversity, but not for the sake of righting past discrimination. Rather, the schools were arguing that they needed affirmative action to build an intellectually diverse class of students, in order to provide a more meaningful educational experience by fostering cross-cultural or cross-racial interactions for all of their students. SCOTUS basically said “fine, if you can make a straight-faced argument that this serves an honest-to-gosh educational purpose, we aren’t going to tell you how you can or can’t provide your students with the kind of educational experience you, the university, think they need.” It *might* be that Roberts is thinking “okay, educational/racial diversity might be important to turn out humanities scholars and I’ll defer to private/state-run entities to weigh that principal on their own, but the object of the federal military service academies is to win wars and we reserve the right to look at the academy’s educational methods to see if ‘diversity’ actually serves that purpose.”

In Utah, everyone is a mandatory reporter. (There are exceptions for clergy, but under the common definition that wouldn’t really cover a teacher, youth leader or ministering brother/sister).

I figured that for the immortality to work, you had to stay in the cave. For me, one “Indy got old” movie was a novelty—Crystal Skull could have been done better, but IMHO it wasn’t terrible. Two “Indy got old” movies just feels like a worn-out gimmick.

Whether as a “new member” or a “restored member” . . . come on back. It’s not easy (as you well know); but it’s even better than you remember it. 🙂

I have to admit, this was not on my 2023 Bingo card.

This is interesting. When California legalizes prostitution, will it also require prostitutes to offer their services to clients irrespective of gender?

On what basis do you reconcile these two statements? When every other previously-universal “moral” value is up for negotiation, why not that one? I don’t want to fall into the trap/cliché of arguing that anyone who advocates for LGBTQ rights is a closet pedophile (although recent-ish events in Virginia do lend themselves to the concern that a significant and powerful minority of LGBTQ advocates may indeed believe that self-proclaimed transgender youth should be granted droit du signeur over cisgender minor girls). But, I do think it’s fair to ask: having thoroughly eviscerated the framework on which the former set of sexual norms were based, what new framework are LGBTQ advocates proposing we follow? And if they aren’t proposing a new framework, then why shouldn’t the pedophiles get their way?

Child labor?

OK, Boomer.

My time is limited to give much of a response, but I think there’s a broader malaise in much of the first world beyond the simple aggregation of wealth: speaking generally, people seem to have given up on any hope of a significantly better future (both collectively and individually) and have decided to cash out whatever spiritual, moral, and (yes) material inheritances left for them by their ancestors are available for liquidation in the here-and-now.

But statistically, women use PTO (and sick days) far more than men do. Which means that statistically, @mikbone only benefits from such an arrangement if the staff he hires are overwhelmingly male (because for any woman he hires, he’ll wind up covering for her much more often then she covers for him). But of course, by law he’s not allowed to discriminate in that way. ”Equal pay for equal work” is an important concept. But the asterisk to it is that in most fields, we’ve got to overcome a lot of culture—and a *huge* amount of evolutionary psychology and physiology—before we even get to truly “equal work”. (I suspect that recent talk of the “emotional work” done by women, especially in the domestic sphere, is at least in part a reaction to the dawning realization that generally speaking there is in fact not an equality of material productivity between the sexes—at least, not as “productivity” has been traditionally understood.)

Hmm . . . The program will operate similarly to unemployment insurance. It will be funded by a new 0.7% payroll tax on employers that will take effect in 2026. Employers can deduct half of their premiums from workers' wages. So, half comes from the paying customers, and half comes from the employees themselves? Business groups fought to block the proposal, warning that it would impose heavy costs and regulatory burdens on employers and aggravate their staffing problems. But it was hailed by supporters who said it would bring equality and fairness to the workplace. . . . But John Reynolds, state director for the National Federation of Independent Business in Minnesota, called it a “deeply flawed proposal that will cost much more than expected and make it harder for small businesses to keep their doors open.” Doug Loon, president and CEO of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, said the program could become the largest mandate on employers in state history. “This massive policy will bring fundamental changes to every employer and employee in the state — from $1.5 billion or more in annual payroll taxes, unwarranted shifts in benefits, to state approved leave for employees," Loon said in a statement. Sounds like there wasn’t exactly a consensus of ringing endorsement from the business community. To clarify, I think PTO is great if the employer feels it’s do-able. But it looks like fundamentally, to the extent that this program works out mathematically to be a “benefit” at all to the employees—the cost is indeed being borne by the consumers.

This is certainly important for an employer to keep in mind; although as a basis of policy one should probably also bear in mind that employers aren’t necessarily required to show a heck of a lot of altruism or loyalty to their bosses, either. American politicians’ plan for a better life for the citizenry: 1. Require employers to pay people *not* to work. 2. Wonder why goods and services are suddenly getting so expensive.

I think these are good trends (when done voluntarily by employers). But I’m not sure it necessarily addresses the root causes. Many European countries have been bending over backwards to accommodate working mothers for decades, but I understand their birthdates are still plummeting.

If the LDS leadership feel that the commitment pattern is appropriate for missionary work (or was appropriate at some point in the past, even if it has now outlived its usefulness), then naturally I bow to their inspiration and authority. But in my professional life (which in part involves persuading people to make difficult and drastic lifestyle changes when they are predisposed to strongly dislike me), I never [consciously] use it. I suppose I use what pattern proponents would say are elements of it—kindness, empathy, unflinching honesty and realism, trying to be nonjudgmental, listening and restating/reflecting back to ensure clarity, etc. But I don’t generally go into negotiations thinking “how can I get this person to do x?”; my mindset is more like “what is this person willing to do, and is there a chance I’ve come into the case with any incorrect preconceptions, and can we leave this conversation feeling a little less adversarial than when the conversation began?”

Maybe there are regional differences. But my understanding is that in many areas of the country (including Utah, as I understand it), a supervisor broadcasting his religious beliefs would be understood as “creating a hostile work environment” and would be shut down in fairly short order—and could be subject to regulatory and civil liability if he didn’t. People who disagree with me bringing their “whole selves” to work, wouldn’t be nearly as much of a sore spot if the people who agree with me hadn’t already been warned on pain of firing, public shaming, and/or lawsuit to keep their mouths shut.

I agree with @zil2. The requirement for a legal adoption prior to performing the sealing ordinance is a modern Church administrative policy, but that doesn't nullify the ordinance itself. But there's something more important at play here. God only honors the sealing ordinance (or any other priesthood ordinance) if, in addition to the proper formalities being observed by the proper authority, the Holy Spirit of Promise gives its ratifying seal of approval (D&C 132:7); which is conditional upon the parties' worthiness and their ongoing living in harmony with the covenants that pertain to the ordinance. Do you think the Holy Spirit ratified your sealing to your mother's husband? I don't know anyone in your family, but based on what you say here . . . I'd be inclined to answer "no".