Just_A_Guy

I think most anger has some measure of pain underlying it. Or fear, at least; and fear and pain are pretty closely tied together.

They can’t afford any delay. Give it a couple of days, and enough details are likely to leak out that it will become apparent that a) the specific security safeguards being discussed either already exist or else wouldn’t have prevented this particular tragedy; b) the shooter had a long-standing pattern of dangerous behavior but slipped through the system because progressive “juvenile justice reform” and progressive bureaucrats colluded to make sure that this troubled youth wouldn’t be punished in a way that would leave him with a criminal record; and/or c) the shooter’s personal dysfunction is a direct product of social trends that progressives have been blatantly cheering on for the last fifty years. When you’re planning a social revolution, you gotta keep people hurting and angry. Folks who are happy and grateful for the things they enjoy, or are even just quietly resigned to the things they think can’t be changed, tend to make for poor cannon fodder.

My understanding is that the witness protection program isn’t nearly as glamorous or cloak-and-dagger as it’s often made out to be—basically you get new passport; driver’s license, and social security number, transport to some other part of the country, and you’re strongly advised to cut all past social contacts; and from there you’re pretty much on your own to try to build a new life around that new identity. There is no ongoing security or threat tracking, no ongoing pension or stipend, and you don’t have a “handler”. So in practical terms, it’s not really a “program” you can “leave” (or be kicked out of), because there is no continuous membership benefit being offered—just the ID docs, which you use or quit using at your own discretion. I imagine that a program participant would be free to tell the membership clerk “here’s my old membership number, and please change the name associated with my membership record”.

I love that poem. I believe Nibley’s inspiration was St. Anthony of Padua, no?

OK, groomer. (I mean, like, “personal grooming”. Like, combing your hair and brushing your teeth and stuff. You do brush your teeth, don’t you? ) In all seriousness: I’m not sufficiently familiar with the whole of Christendom to say to what degree @JohnsonJones’s students’ complaints are well-founded or not within other Christian denominations. But it does seem like there are undercurrents of poor historical/scriptural understanding and a general lack of familiarity with human nature generally and self-knowledge in particular, that may be underlying several of them; and of course our own church is by no means immune from those phenomena.

In rereading this thread to remind myself where @MrShorty got the “required reading” verbiage, I just now realized I misspelled “reading”. Quelle horreur!!! And yeah, the Psychology Today article raises some interesting points. Shrier herself would definitely agree that there are some people who are “legitimately trans”; and I think the extract that the article cites in context is less about whether a natal female can undergo gender dysphoria than about whether the solutions offered by the therapeutic community are truly a “quick fix” that will allow her to cavalierly disregard the overwhelmingly feminine parts of her nature indefinitely and with impunity. Shrier also does address the reaction and attempted rebuttals of the Littman study. And although she doesn’t get into detailed discussion of the hypothalamus, it appears from my own research (eg, here) that the studies suggesting “gender identity” resides there date from 1985, 2011, 2013, and 2017 and emphasize transgenderism that initially appeared in early childhood; whereas Shrier alleges that the first scientific treatment of gender dysphoria occurring in girls aged 11-21 wasn’t even published until 2012. Generally speaking, it seems the girls Shrier is talking about simply could not have been part of the subject population for the studies on which the conventional wisdom is based. At this point, from what I understand, we don’t even know if the causes of gender dysphoria are the same in natal males versus natal females—lack of testosterone exposure in utero may explain the former, but probably not the latter, which now dwarfs the former category by sheer number of people diagnosed. Again, Shrier’s thrust is that a lot of girls who are do not have classically-defined “gender dysphoria”, are basically being socialized into an ephemeral belief that they do have it and then making irreversible physiological changes to themselves that they are likely to later regret. (As a bonus, here’s an article just published today that cites to some new studies and points out some things we can extrapolate from them, and some things we cannot.)

As a theological principle you’re no doubt correct—representative democracy is a means, not an end unto itself. But as a civic/human behavioral principle: in a democracy, once one side adopts a “but it’s OK when WE do it” attitude, the whole ball of wax inevitably starts to unravel. So I think as a practical matter it’s generally the best policy to keep playing by the rules as long as possible, even if in our heart of hearts we feel like the rules shouldn’t quite apply to us. If we are going to engage in a course of action that we know will pull our democracy apart, then we’d better be sure we know what comes immediately afterwards—and the truth is, we just don’t.

1. I don't think your reference to Jim Crow is really apposite here. The 14th Amendment did not seek to define traditional American notions of well-ordered liberty or to invent any new fundamental American rights. Rather, it took the bundle of existing rights enjoyed by American citizens (many/most of which traced their origin back through the centuries to the Magna Carta, if not earlier; and many of which in practice had been extended only to white Americans) and clarified that those rights must be extended to all Americans. Jim Crow, then, was a reaction by state governments who were deliberately trying to undermine the intent of the 14th Amendment and restore the old "traditional rights for me, but not for thee" regimen. The Dobbs draft doesn't seek to restore that kind of discriminatory regimen. Rather, it simply says "Abortion was never included in the bundle of rights that went with the founders' notion of well-ordered liberty; and it certainly wasn't seen as such at the time the 14th Amendment was passed; so you can't honestly say that it was contemplated by the 14th Amendment. Like any new right, you can certainly add it into the Constitution by amendment or write it into federal statute; but until you do, it's just not in the Constitution and we're done playing the Roe court's shell game of pretending otherwise." [My paraphrasing, obviously!] 2. I don't think it's fair to say that Alito's draft decision ignores stare decisis. Indeed, that's the focus of the entire second half of the opinion (pp 35-65): It sets up a set of criteria for determining when a ruling is so bad that it ought to be overturned in spite of stare decisis. (Factors to be decided including the nature of the original error, the quality of the reasoning justifying the error, whether the erroneous decision is still workable in practice, how the bad precedent has affected other fields of law, and "reliance interests". And--going off memory here--" I think the court did at some point acknowledge some of the parties' arguments about possible real-world consequences of changing abortion policy; but ultimately decided that that sort of policy analysis is more appropriately left to legislatures rather than courts.) Really, the more I think about it--it's a long opinion, to be sure; but structurally it's startlingly simple. It breaks down into the simple propositions that A) The constitution doesn't grant a right to undergo an elective abortion, and our previous holding to the contrary was a mistake, and B) Here are the conditions under which stare decisis doesn't prevent us from fixing a past mistake. 3. Well, you've piqued my interest; and if you wont' go into them in this thread I certainly hope you'll go into them somewhere!

Heck, most of us didn't even use the I-word when an entire group of leftist occupied a city downtown and directly declared that neither federal nor state law applied within the jurisdiction they occupied. And that's, like, the textbook definition of an insurrection.

I agree with much of what you say, but let me push back a smidge on this part: Why? Have we not just seen the entire church suspend its meetings for something like a year due to a highly infectious physical disease whose childhood mortality rate was nevertheless lower than .01%? And even now, on the back side of the pandemic underlying that decision, do we not sympathize with and even applaud the hyper-careful folk who proclaim that their peculiar circumstances mean that they still must stay away? A big part of the gay rights argument used to be “it’s not the flu; you can’t catch it from others” But with what Shrier calls “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”—apparently, you can catch it. Or at least, teenagers (especially girls) can. Over 65% of teens who announced rapid-onset transgenderism had increased their social media use and online time in the immediate run-up to coming out. Almost 70% belonged to a peer group in which at least one friend had already come out. In 60% of cases coming out resulted in a popularity boost for the child. Nearly 70% of children who experience childhood gender dysphoria, and do not receive affirmation therapy or socially transition, eventually grow out of it. If what Shrier says is true, and many kids that actually don’t have clinical gender dysphoria are nevertheless being pressured to declare themselves “transgender” and engage in life-changing hormone treatments and surgeries, and if (as some participants here have suggested) it turns out that a significant part of this pressure has been happening at church— —What then?

Yeah, a big part of Dobbs goes towards arguing that Roe’s summation of the history of attitudes on the fetus were inaccurate. It’s definitely worth reading. I would agree with you that I don’t think, as a moral/theological matter, that life begins at conception. But as a matter of policy, I don’t know where else we can draw it without creating grave logical consequences for other groups of vulnerable people (later-term pregnancies, newborns, people with varying degrees of cognitive dysfunction, people in vegetative states who may not recover (and those who may yet recover), etc). There’s been a lot of talk about “viability”, but the fact is that all life is non-viable when taken outside of its natural environment (“Your Honor, I didn’t kill my wife; I just submerged her in water/ deprived her of oxygen/ put her in a place that happened to be very cold/ put her in a place that happened to be very hot/ put her in a place that lacked access to food or water/ opened her body and let her bleed out/ introduced her to a substance that happened to stop her heart. If she’s been truly viable, her body would have continued to function and she would still be with us today. So I haven’t really done anything wrong here.”) If pregnancy were something that “just happens” to people on a statistically large scale, I’d probably be more worried that a regimen that bans elective abortion as early as conception was overbroad. But pregnancy doesn’t “just happen”; and in the small minority of cases where pregnancy results from involuntary action I believe that the better approach is to let abortion be legally justified on involuntary servitude/self-defense grounds if indeed the victim feels unable to carry the child to term.

I have read it. The reasoning is persuasive to me, though of course I’m hardly unbiased. There were parts that did feel a little polemic in tone, and it also left me with a nagging feeling that some things that should have been said were not said—though I can’t quite put my finger on what, precisely, that ought to have been. The opinion also, I thought, gave more credit to the rest of the Grizwold line of cases than I thought it deserved; maybe that’s what’s bugging me. I don’t disagree with the policy results of most of the Grizwold-line cases (Obergefell being the obvious exception), but I don’t like how SCOTUS has constitutionalized everything and I guess I’d rather see a more sweeping defense of judicial restraint and a broader willingness to return political issues to the political decision-making process for resolution.

It was certainly a tragic feat of verbal jiujitsu, taking an amendment that ended the practice of constitutionally dehumanizing one group of powerless people, and using it to constitutionally dehumanize an entirely other group of powerless people. The 14th Amendment talks about the privileges and immunities of US citizenship being extended to all citizens, enunciates a right to equal protection, and reiterates that life, liberty and property may only be abridged through due process of law. It certainly doesn’t enunciate abortion as a privilege or immunity of citizenship; and Dobbs points out that “liberty” is not an absolute and that courts have traditionally pointed to “well ordered liberty”, which necessarily entails some degree of constraint on human behavior. Roe purported to be extending a right-to-privacy as elucidated in (if memory serves) the Grizwold line of cases which included things like interracial marriage, contraception, etc. But as Dobbs pointed out, none of these behaviors butted up against a third-party’s interests in (potential) life itself.

Of course, Roe magnificently ignored the fact that the vast majority of abortions are the result of a woman (together with a male partner, to be sure) exercising her autonomy through voluntary sexual intercourse. And as the proposed Dobbs opinion points out, there is no constitutional right to unfettered bodily autonomy. My right to bodily autonomy doesn’t mean I have a right to rape; and the Supreme Court has no duty (or even prerogative) to honor and “balance” my right to bodily autonomy by arbitrarily imposing a regimen in which I can “only” rape a female during the first trimester of her anticipated existence. Roe basically created a right out of whole cloth, and breezily justified it by resurrecting the Dred Scott explanation that the third-parties who were harmed by exercise of this novel “right” were, constitutionally speaking, not really people at all.

As is suggesting that members of a mainstream political movement are responsible for the activities of their moonbat fringe. But as-written, I don’t think my point was that far off. The fact is, the pro-choice position is rooted in the notion that humans (particularly, women) have an inalienable right to consequence-free sex, which by virtue of their positions of power over wholly dependent third-parties supersedes those third parties’ rights to life itself. It is a conjunction of “sex uber alles” and “might makes right”; neither of which in and of themselves are recipes for well-ordered liberty or a non-violent, law-abiding society. And . . . There’s always a “but”, as Antifa/BLM apologists made clear when they offered excuses for the chuckleheads who were running around terrorizing other civilians and setting up insurrectionist “autonomous zones” through threat of brute force. I haven’t looked up the numbers to confirm, but I’d feel reasonably safe in suggesting that more black children were killed by abortion in the last fifty years of this country’s history, than were enslaved in the first eighty years of this country’s history.

We liberated the concentration camps in WW2, got high on the “Yankee savior” rush, and have spent the last 80 years roaming all over the world jonesing for our next fix—the next oppressed people to whom we could bring Truth, Justice, and the American Way. It’s not the worst thing in the world to be addicted to, to be honest—so long as a) you really think through the second-order effects, b) you’re willing to pay the price, and c) you don’t hurt a lot of innocent people in the process. But American politicians aren’t very good at a), our citizens aren’t very good at b), and our military (and frankly, every military) isn’t very good at c).

My dad got C. Diff a few years back when hospitalized for another surgery. Not fun.

I would say 99.5% like them. Vigilanteism is wrong—maybe not quite all the time, but pretty darned close to it. And it’s certainly not justified in cases like this. But . . . The guys who killed the abortionists, generally acted as a result of the notions that a) abortion is killing, and b) citizens are justified in killing killers. A leftist assassin would be acting as a result of the notion that citizens are justified in killing people who pose an inconvenience to their personal sex lives.

This may be a distinction without a difference, but . . . It seems to me that the left’s shibboleths are primarily ideological, whereas the right’s are based around cults of common heroes (or villains).

The fact that this is reiterated in the initiatory ordinance for men, but not for women, suggests to me that being cleansed from the blood and sins of one’s generation is an obligation tied to priesthood service. I don’t think it’s something we can check off as being “done” once we come back from our missions. We can, through our faithfulness, eventually become clean of the blood and sins of our generation without serving a mission as a young man; just as we can be saved/exalted after having committed all manner of sin. But it requires a change of attitude.

You know what? It would be the end of a federal government mandating a nationwide Molochian holocaust. (Yes, some big states will still permit abortion-on-demand; but a lot of states won’t). The Republican Party’s ballot-box woes pale by comparison. The fact that winning WW2 made FDR and Truman look good, doesn’t mean we [Republicans] shouldn’t have done our part to make it happen.

Possible prediction: Roe will be overruled this June.

1. The inherent legalism in such a statement creates its own set of theological issues. I fear that in our haste to establish what the definition of “is” is, we may have left weightier matters (such as the Plan of Salvation, the nature of God, whether or not there is an absolute need for a Heavenly Mother, the nature of exaltation and eternal increase, the long-term malleability/immutability of sexual orientation, and the role of sexual pleasure in both temporal and eternal love) by the wayside. 2. If the relationships include sexual intercourse, then yes; we know that they are forbidden. Or at least, we “know” it as well as we can know anything about God, the Gospel, sin, and God’s ultimate plan for us.

Maybe. Might be worth a different thread to explore; but I don’t want to hijack the discussion here.

I think there may be isolated instances where this may be true. Thomas Kane could not have done what he did for the church if he were a baptized member. I suspect Mother Theresa could not have accomplished what she did for humanity, as an LDS housewife. But the Church fundamentally exists to teach people the way, not just to Christian goodness, but to exaltation. LGBTQ Mormons who leave the Church aren’t just doing an “I-can’t-do-this-right-now” or a “good/better/best” analysis; they are openly rejecting exaltation. Our Father is merciful, and I trust such people will attain eternal rest and “happiness”, after a fashion. And maybe there really is progression between the kingdoms; and maybe they’ll eventually find not only repentance but even an opportunity to make the requisite covenants to reach exaltation. But it’s a heckuva* risk to take, because there is nothing in our doctrine that explicitly promises anything better than a Telestial glory to those who died impenitent about having made their libido the foundation of their lives. If those of us who have been taught the fullness want exaltation, then we need to fall in line—now. * Literally!