Just_A_Guy

I don’t see this as a problem, actually. 1) The ban was always temporary in nature and if delaying its implementation meant that a couple of specific people who God wanted to wield the priesthood were able to wield it—for however limited a time—then I don’t see that as a problem. 2) Even if Abel’s and Lewis’s ordinations were mistakes from the get-go: the restoration was by its nature incremental; and (as JS told BY when discussing the endowment) some of the things Joseph Smith “set up” were not yet complete/correct in all their particulars. Smith was certainly a “prophet’s prophet”, but that didn’t make him infallible or make his teachings or practices immune to further development after his death.

I don’t mean to be rude in doing a sort of “FIFY” post; I’m just limited in time and feel like the above may be the most efficient way of expressing qualified agreement.

I would respectfully come at it from a somewhat different—perhaps even opposite—perspective. To me, the fact that it was a church policy created a (concededly, rebuttable) presumption that the policy was divinely inspired. The presumption strengthens, as I have argued elsewhere, when one considers that President McKay claimed that of himself he would prefer to remove the ban but that God had expressly denied him permission to do so. Since one naturally can’t prove that a church leader *didn't* receive a particular revelation, the default critique of the ban becomes “well, the God I worship just wouldn’t do something like that!” Modern ban-defenders then reply “not only would He; but He has—repeatedly—here’s the scriptural evidence.” The progressive argument against the authenticity of the ban is, fundamentally, that the progressives understand God and His essential character (not just theology or sacred history, but God’s very nature) better than did any of the LDS prophets between Presidents Young and Lee. The value of the scriptural citations that often come up in these sorts of discussions isn’t “this is how this particular ban against this particular group got started and why the Church continued to enforce it for so long”; it’s “God is way, way bigger than the cage you’re trying to shove Him into.”

The thing is—when it comes to Joseph Smith and LDS doctrine, we do that quite a lot. The endowment as administered when the St George Temple was completed (or the one today) looked very different then the one Joseph Smith administered in 1842; but we (rightly, I think) tell ourselves that many of those later changes were simply syntheses of concepts JS had begun to visualize but perhaps not fully articulated or developed. Ditto for temple marriage as we know it today. Ditto for parent-child sealings, a ritual that we have no evidence Joseph Smith ever did. Ditto for much of what we understand about proxy temple work and the need to work out our genealogies. Many of our modern conceptions about “spirit birth” and what happens to children who are resurrected, don’t perfectly square with what we know Joseph at times taught. And on, and on, and on. We’ve implemented far more radical changes in the Church, for reasons whose linkage to Joseph Smith’s teachings are far more tenuous; and we generally have no trouble accepting that if Joseph Smith had been alive today he would have welcomed these developments as the further light and knowledge God has always promised to unveil for the faithful. So why then, on this *one* theological development, do we have a driving need to insist that JS absolutely, positively, no siree, would not have been OK with it and is not responsible even for laying the theological groundwork for such a policy? Even among professional historians and anthropologists: “Drawing conclusions from loose possibilities and likelihoods“, is a hallmark of their trades; because the surviving evidence is often so sparse and fragmentary. Whether we’re talking about the identity and use of stone-age tools, or Joseph Smith’s marital trends, or the 1619 Project—professional historians extrapolate and yes, even speculate, to startling degrees; and much of that is a fairly transparent attempt to overly their own political values or notions of social justice onto past events and trends.

You should read Chernow’s biography of Grant. He is very underrated as a president. Drove the KKK into near-extinction, among other things. And, Grant died of throat cancer (after a heroic struggle to produce his memoirs so that his wife would have income to survive on after his death). His inveterate cigar-smoking almost certainly played a huge role in his getting cancer; his drinking, not so much.

I dunno. US Grant did okay (I believe Lincoln rather famously told his staff to find out what Grant was drinking and distribute it to the rest of his generals). I’m more worried about Hegseth’s apparent history of exploiting/cheating on women, even if it didn’t rise to the level of legally-defined sexual assault. Call me old school; but I still think there’s a connection between one’s ability to stay loyal to one’s closest connections/ability to demonstrate sacrificial love at the most personal level, and one’s ability to effectively serve one’s country. A colleague of mine—retired colonel—feels like a retired major probably just isn’t going to have the scope of knowledge or depth of administrative knowledge to be able to implement the degree of change Trump wants in the Pentagon. I think one of Trump’s major failings in 2016-2017 was failing to understand the nature of the bureaucratic/procedural apparatus he was trying to subdue or the ways it would fight back. I’m afraid Hegseth (and some these others—particularly the DOGE dudes and Gabbard) might be setting themselves up to run into that same brick wall; and I’m not sure being relatively young and vigorous is in and of itself enough to overcome all of that. I wish Hegseth luck. In this climate, there’s probably not a politically viable basis to really strongly oppose his confirmation . . . but I’m not anticipating much success from him, either. And while I’m not very knowledgeable about military matters . . . My sense is that our capacity has been slipping for a long time; that our diminished military capacity is about to get exposed in a very painful way within the next 2-3 years; and that Trump and his SECDEF are going to get the blame for that, whether they deserve it or not.

Well, the reason why subways are not safe for her core constituency, maybe . . .

@Phoenix_person, I'm sort of cutting up and splicing together elements of several of your recent posts in hopes that I can craft a more thematically-cohesive response. I hope you don't mind. When you talk about abolishing for-profit health insurance companies, I think it's helpful to pin down: What would you do about private non-profit health insurance companies (like IHC/Select Health, here in Utah)? If private non-profit health insurance companies are permitted to remain in business, then I really don't see the urgency in going after the for-profit ones. What's the harm in allowing for-profit insurers to compete with the nonprofits, if they can? If nothing else, it keep the non-profit players honest (their providers and administrators, after all, are still working for a salary and still have incentive to gouge their customers; and the fact that they don't have shareholders to placate doesn't make them saints). If the for-profits can provide a better product for cheaper--good for them. If they can't--then, assuming we can establish a truly free marketplace, in time they'll peter out of their own accord. But I continue to maintain that nationalized health care is a terrible alternative overall. You may get some advantages of scale using that method; and you certainly have the advantage of being able to use the contributions of the healthy--all of the healthy--to subsidize the costs of the sick. But there are a few things to bear in mind: So long as the medical professions continue to provide an improving product utilizing the services of more and more people and requiring more advanced equipment--to some degree, costs are inevitably going to go up. And as you point out, the medical professions already require an advanced degree of training. You want these people to be very good at their jobs, and they will expect to be compensated accordingly. Artificial price ceilings cause supply shortages. That's just basic economics. American surgeries are expensive, but--assuming you can fund them--you can usually get them within a month or two of when you need them. I still remember, by contrast, a special about a guy in the UK who had renovated his apartment to look like a Star Trek crew cabin (I watch weird stuff. Don't judge me) and he mentioned in passing that he hadn't bothered to create a bed because he had sciatica and his (presumably NHS) doctor had told him he needed to be sleeping on the floor to alleviate the symptoms. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law got diagnosed with sciatica around the same time and was cured by a surgery that took place three weeks after the diagnosis. One of the primary complaints about private-sector health insurance companies is that most clients pay far more into the system than they get out of it. The thing is--that's how health insurance (whether public or private) is supposed to work. The whole idea is that to be sustainable, you've got to keep exploiting 60-70-80% of your clients in order to subsidize the other 20-30-40%. That fundamental dynamic doesn't change just because you nationalize the system; all you're doing is making sure that the people getting exploited can't choose to remove themselves from the system. Government bureaucrats are going to tend to be less responsive generally to consumer preference and market shifts. At the same time, government bureaucrats do get, and respond to, pressure to lower costs/improve the financial health of their programs; just as the private sector does. Any sustainable health insurance cost-sharing system is going to have to disincentivize frivolous/unnecessary uses of medical services--there's got to be a bean counter, at some point, saying "no, we won't pay for that." But those bean counters are sometimes wrong, and there's got to be a way to get some form of care independently of the bean counters. Government agencies sometimes manage costs in brutal ways; particularly when they have some degree of legal immunity and/or they don't have to worry about some private-sector competitor that may be offering a better (or more humane or ethical) alternative that would highlight the bureaucrat's own incompetence. Witness, for example, the experiences of Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard in the UK; the not-insignificant amount of assisted suicides in the Netherlands by twenty-somethings whose ailments were primarily mental, not physical, in nature; and the mad rush for nationalized health services in much of the Anglosphere to approve euthanasia. It's kind of ironic that Sarah Palin was so roundly mocked by the left for raising the spectre of critical-care-denying "death panels" that, the left now concedes, do exist in the private sector but somehow magically won't exist in the public sector (at least, not the American public sector. Talk about American exceptionalism!). One of the perennial flaws of progressives is that they tend to assume that the "progressivism" stops with them. (Or maybe they realize that it won't, but they don't dare say it aloud.) Once we've embraced the fundamentals of collectivism--one individual can go hang for the sake of the "greater good"--why should we stop at being Denmark or the UK or France or Canada? Why shouldn't we go on to embrace the Venezuelan, Cuban, and/or Russo/Soviet models? As I note above: Many of these western systems you laud are already denying life-saving care (probably at least in part for financial reasons), already blocking people from getting it elsewhere, already nudging people into euthanasia. (Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah is an interesting meditation on this--he argues that two fundamental, paradoxical values baked into the founding of the US are "radical egalitarianism" and "radical individualism"; and that the logical implications of those values cannot help but lead to collectivist tyranny and social destabilization, which then become cyclical--the tyranny increases to control the behaviors through which the moral rot manifests itself.) Another of the perennial flaws of progressives is that they seem to assume that their enemies will never obtain control of the state apparatus they themselves have built. Do you really want Donald Trump's administration making end-of-life care decisions for Latinos, or Marine LePen deciding which Algerian immigrants do or don't get treated at French emergency rooms? Are you sure national health care systems won't devolve into the sorts of regimens where these kinds of decisions are routinely nakedly politicized? Do you really want to make the State the only game in town when it comes to health care? The state, and the state alone, decides who is and isn't eligible to have their pains alleviated or their lives saved? Especially when there are still people living in those European countries you laud who once lived under--or were within a hair's breadth of living under--the regimens of Hitler, Stalin, or both? Do we really trust in our ability to recognize the monsters who would abuse this sort of power? Look at Assad--ten years ago, he and his wife were the darlings of the progressive media establishment. And now it turns out that one of his preferred methods for dealing with his enemies was sticking them underneath a hydraulically-powered slab, and crushing them to death. We spend fifty years freaking out about how every Republican presidential candidate is Literally Hitler--and then we get an honest-to-gosh Hitler in Syria, and we put his wife on the cover of Vogue. Liquidating the billionaire class and re-distributing the proceeds into a nationalized health care system might make us feel righteous and indulge our more sadistic aspects of our natures; but isn't going to sustainably improve the lot of any American health care consumer. As I noted recently in another thread, the federal government spent $1.8 trillion on PPACA last year alone (source). The US has approximately 800 billionaires with a collective net worth of about $6 trillion. Assuming you got the full value of their holdings when you confiscated them (which you won't, because liquidating their holdings turns them into penny stocks that will flood the market just as investors, wondering what fresh communist Hades might be coming for them next, would be fleeing both the market and the country): you can subsidize PPACA through 2029 at the latest; and then we're back to square one--but with no more golden geese left to kill. I don't see anything in the Hippocratic Oath that requires medical professionals to render services involuntarily or for a lower rate than they would prefer to charge. If a critical mass of doctors truly read the oath as you suggest they should/do, then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. (Leaving aside for the notion that while [most] doctors take the oath, the folks who develop your vaccines and design and build your MRI machines and spin out your blood samples take no such oath.) Certainly there's an implicit generalized awareness that the profession is intended to provide a crucial, even sacred benefit to others--but then, my oath as an attorney (see p. 2) has a similar awareness; and we certainly don't expect lawyers to render services for free. Frankly, PPACA was a poison pill to begin with. The only way they were able to make the federal numbers look "revenue neutral" back in 2009-2010 was by comparing ten years of revenues against five or six years of outlays. The cost was always going to be net-negative in the long haul.* Forcing the HMOs to take clients who they knew were going to cost them money, was always going to force those HMOs to either inflate premiums (stoking the sort of Moral Panic we're now witnessing) or go bankrupt in the end. We all knew even then that Obama and his supporters wanted single-payer, and that PPACA was seen by them as a stepping-stone to get us there. Their hope was that the HMOs would mute their opposition if they got enormous payoffs in the very short term. *That said, conservatives should also acknowledge that Trump sort of accelerated things by unilaterally exempting Americans from the individual-mandate portion of PPACA and thus pulling a lot of potential revenue out of the system. And this sort of hints at another issue with the health care business. We've undergone something of a cultural shift in the last sixty years where we believe that we each have the right to the very best medical care that's out there, we have a right to be pain-free, and we have a right to have every potentially-relevant test from a smorgasboard of available serum panels run on us any time we feel "off" becuse "you can never be too careful". And money is no object when it comes to keeping us in tip-top physical condition; particularly when the money involved is other people's money. This creates a lot of tension in the American system, and needs to be checked in some ways. But it also has its merits. I don't know your full story--just snippets from posts you've made elsewhere. But--if I may tread softly--my understanding is that at some point you got into a really dark place, and you tried to end your own life; resulting in the injuries you mention above. I'm genuinely, sincerely glad that your attempted suicide was unsuccessful. I don't even mind that the American health care system likely poured fabulous amounts of resources into your treatment and recovery. I hope things never get that dark for you ever again. It sounds like you've put a lot of effort into being a contributing member of your own community, I personally value your thought-provoking contributions to this forum, and--while I know it's not really your thing--I strongly believe that you are a beloved child of God whom He views as having infinite worth and potential; and I hope the way I communicate with you consistently reflects that belief. But for the purposes of this discussion, I will say: I rather suspect the American system is probably one of very few systems in the US that would have put so much time and effort into preserving your life at a time when you yourself were thinking that it would be best ended. I hope you don't relocate to Germany; because if (heaven forbid) you have a relapse--I'm not convinced they'll do for you what America would do for you. And if you do relocate, and some NHS bureaucrat suggests euthanasia at some point--I hope you punch 'em square in the nose, and catch the first flight back to 'Murca. I would refer you to my point about billionaires above, and also suggest you watch this video--it's very dated now, but still does a very good job of showing that a) the amount of money our government spends is quite unrelated to how much tax revenue it actually raises or could raise; and b) while we may resent the existence of billionaires and even millionaires, eradicating all of them and redistributing their assets won't really improve the quality of our lives all that much. I defend the rights of billionaires to be billionaires because I understand that fundamentally, the folks who criticize billionaires most harshly aren't going to effect meaningful change and aren't really mad just at the uber-wealthy. They're mad at anyone who's doing better than they themselves are--and as a relatively solid, state-employed member of the middle class who owns a house and a sailboat that its manufacturer classifies as a "yacht", that probably includes me. This could be a really interesting collateral discussion; but suffice it to say: I absolutely endorse the right of employees to unionize; so long as they aren't infringing on a) the rights of would-be employees to work for cheaper or b) the rights of their employers to higher those would-be employees. I don't understand why efforts to unionize Amazon and Wal-Mart haven't borne more fruit. (Maybe they have and I haven't been paying attention; I don't know.) At any rate--this is a significant reason why I also support limiting the numbers of economic immigrants that we accept each year from the third world. I'm skeptical of the notion that all employers should be legally required to pay a "living wage"; simply because a lot of teenagers and part-time workers don't need a living wage and they should be able to sell their labor for whatever price they are willing to accept from their employers. In closing--because it's late and I'm tired, and because you said "Scandinavia", I will close with this joke: Did you hear that Norway has started putting bar codes on the side of all their warships? That way, when the ships get back to port, they can scan the Navy in.

It seems worth noting that the question of whether the priesthood/temple ban originated with Joseph Smith, is quite distinct from the question of whether the ban reflected what God wanted the Church to be doing during the time that the ban was in force. A response of "no" to the first question (which seems to be the primary topic of this thread), does not preclude an answer of "yes" to the second. As to the first question: I tend to be an "institutionalist". I think that generally speaking, professional Church historians (and by this I mean, primarily, those employed by the Church) are acting in good faith. If they say there's no good evidence that JS originated the ban--I'm inclined to believe them. At the same time: I think @Maverick has raised some points that, frankly, I don't recall either Church historians or some of the acknowledged "experts" like Paul Reeve, et al, bring up. And frankly, whatever policies re ordination Joseph Smith did or didn't implement: He left us with a heck of a lot of scriptural evidence that God does sometimes consider certain lineal groups "cursed"--both in a general sense, and in a Gospel/sacerdotal-privileges context. And while we're generally quick to impute "racism" in Brigham Young while denying/excusing it in Joseph Smith: Smith seems to have genuinely thought that African Americans of his day were "cursed", at least in a very general sense. It doesn't take a dyed-in-the-wool racist to look at the breadcrumbs Joseph Smith left, and "connect the dots" in the way that Pratt, Young, Taylor, Smith, et al. subsequently did. I think historians, and even professional Church historians, do tend to lean a little bit leftwards. I don't think most of them are mentally/emotionally prepared to grapple with a God who would deliberately do something that most of them openly describe as "racist". (And a subset of them, frankly, see this as "battlespace prep" in trying to erode the credibility of the current crop of apostles on LGBTQ issues). And I think these professional historians' work on this particular issue can't help but reflect these biases. It's rather like secular historians who try to explain the origin of the Book of Mormon but start with the proposition that it just couldn't have been what Joseph Smith said it was--props to them for being true to themselves, I guess . . . but the simple fact is that they aren't truly willing to fearlessly go wherever the evidence takes them, and so the result of their work is somewhat compromised.

Deadly force was certainly justified as long as he posed an immediate threat. But if you neutralize the threat *without* deadly force, and he remains neutralized . . . You don’t get to (for example) wait 5 minutes and then say “you know what? I want a Mulligan. He might wake up, so I’m just gonna shoot him now.” I want to tread softly, because I don’t know whether (or how many times) Neely regained consciousness after first being knocked out and I’ve never been in an altercation like that and I’m sure the decision-making process starts looking very different when the adrenaline is flowing. But if it’s true that someone was saying “I’ve got his arms, you can let go”, and if it’s true that they made it to the next station and had every opportunity to evacuate the train car . . . It’s just hard for me to justify a continued chokehold after that point.

Just an unfortunate situation all around. Penny’s act in initially subduing Neely was heroic. We need more people willing to do this. But I confess I don’t understand why it’s tactically necessary to keep someone in a chokehold (as opposed to switching to some other hold) once the opponent has drifted into unconsciousness. Then again, considering the caliber of other goons that the New York prosecutor has let skate through—it’s hard to avoid concluding that either Penny was prosecuted for his race, or other lethal menaces are being released because of theirs.

Lockean philosophy?

My wife made that same point once. I replied by telling her that she was being irrational and that she needed to calm down.

1. I agree Coltrin was a good man; though IIRC his testimony (quite understandably) evolved somewhat as the decades passed. 2. You’re right, I was misremembering. I believe it was Meg Stout who hypothesized that this was actually an offer of plural marriage, since Joseph is not known to have undergone an adoption ordinance with anyone in his lifetime and James was remembering the story fifty years later. But this is speculative. (And even if true, there was quite a bit of drama going on between Joseph and Emma and this offer may have been Emma advancing a sort of campaign of anti-polygamy-brinksmanship rather than a sincere desire that Jane become a plural wife. {“Joseph said I could pick his next wife, but he surely won’t accept this one, and if he doesn’t, then I can tell him that since he wouldn’t accept the wife I found for him then he has no reason to seek any other woman.”}) At any rate, with adoption being a temple ordinance (and precursor to parent-child sealing)—if it *was* truly a proposed adoptive sealing and if Joseph Smith knew Emma was offering it, then it would seem that he was not planning for an *absolute* ban on black people receiving temple ordinances.

On the *limited* issue of whether the ban originated with Joseph Smith or not, the following strike me as fair observations: 1. Smith believed God had, on multiple occasions, created several racial castes to distinguish the posterity of “blessed” individuals from posterity of “cursed” ones. 2. Roughly-contemporaneous evidence suggests that Smith seemed to believe that African Americans were subject to some kind of unspecified cursing, but that he also was not altogether comfortable with slavery as practiced in the antebellum USA. 3. Smith approved the ordination of Elijah Abel. Whether he knew at the time of Abel’s AA ancestry is unknown. 4. Even after Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham Young didn’t see any basis for a race-based priesthood ban; as evidenced by his exchanged with William McCary in 1846. 5. Recollections of JS stating that whatever “curse” may have applied to AAs specifically banned their priesthood ordination, tend to be very late. That doesn’t make them wrong, necessarily—a staggering amount of our documentation about JS’s life and teachings comes from folks who recorded their recollections many decades after his death. But it does mean that we can take less for granted about this topic than we think we can. If we take Coltrin and Smoot (who was a slaveowner and therefore not exactly impartial) at face value, then we also have to take the very-noticeably-AA Jane Manning at face value; and she recalled that JS was willing to take her as a plural wife in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage—suggesting that JS had no problem with blacks receiving temple ordinances. 6. Even if the ban didn’t explicitly come from JS—or, even if the reasons given for the ban turned out to be incorrect or doctrinally unsound—that doesn’t make the ban itself wrong. A number of doctrines and practices that we hold very dear in the church were implemented and accepted as logical extensions of Joseph Smith’s teachings but were never clearly articulated by him. And other church leaders (especially President Oaks) have spoken about the dangers of assuming the “why” when all revelation has really given us is the “what”. I’ve hinted at this before, but . . . I happen to think (and this is all speculative, of course) that if McCary had been able to plausibly and publicly allege an LDS priesthood ordination, he could have created a Black Mormonism that would have rejected the authority of the 12 and could have created real problems for the Church as it tried to expand into the American South and, decades later, into the African continent. As it was, his movement grew like wildfire in Cincinnati for a couple of months. (I also think that without the priesthood ban the Church would have joined the colonial scramble for Africa of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—distracting from fruitful efforts elsewhere, depleting much-needed resources, and potentially creating a 21st-century legacy of bad feelings in Africa that would be much worse than anything it currently faces there. Church critics often perseverate on the ban because they’re hoping the Church will send them a fat reparations check . . . forgetting that if we had spent our first 150 years propping up a large membership in the economic South, we’d have no resources left from which to allocate those coveted reparations payments.)

Most SA is; and I have no reason to believe the schools are any better. 😞

Marvin Perkins has argued—he thinks, convincingly—that BoM references to “black” or “white” have nothing to do with skin color.

I appreciate your experience and hope I’m not seen as dismissing the experience of the victims or excusing anyone within the church who deliberately put suspected predators into positions where they could predate again. At the same time, based on my understanding of the statistical percentage of predators amongst US Catholic clerics versus that amongst US public schoolteachers: it might be a closer call, but I still think I’d pick the Catholics. If for no other reason than that public schools have sovereign immunity, whereas my local diocese doesn’t.

I generally agree with you here; though I would note that in a LDS context “bishops” are often people we’ve known for 10-20+ years before they became bishops and who we trust, in large part, because of that previous association. I would ask, though: Would you leave your child alone with a teacher or a psychologist or an LCSW? What about (assuming you were a widow or divorced) a romantic partner? I’m all on board with “trust but verify”. What I’m not on board with, is the notion that church leaders (especially LDS ones, who have not actively sought the positions they hold) are particularly suspect compared to other trusted adults in a child’s orbit. A staggering proportion of child sex abuse is perpetrated by a parent’s new flame. My parents are teachers; so other teachers were a big part of our family’s social circle. And as you know, I work with psychologists and counselor/therapists and LCSWs multiple times per week (and MDs several times per month) and have gotten to know quite a few of them reputationally and personally. “Education” and “certification” don’t necessarily translate as “trustworthiness” or even “general decency” or “good intent”. Not-uncommonly, the reverse is actually true. Again, I’ll reiterate my support for “trust, but verify”. But I will also unabashedly say that if we are unable to verify and must resort to comparing the traits of “trustworthiness”, “general decency”, and “good intention” (and heck, I’ll also throw in “sexual restraint”) as between a random professional and a random LDS bishop—I’d pick the random LDS bishop every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

But that’s just it. They *should be*, because—outliers aside—they were *intended to be*. Churches have traditionally advanced ethical frameworks around, inter alia, marriage and sexuality; which tended to prevent women from being used for transactionalized sex, empowered them to turn down undesireable suitors, disincentivized husbands who might otherwise later be tempted to abandon their wives, reinforced family ties that designated the father as the primary protector of the women in his household against physical and sexual and economic abuse, and stigmatized men who failed to live up to their obligations under this system. The fact that some—perhaps even many—men abused their various roles within these structures, doesn’t make the structure inferior to the calculatedly systematic exploitation of women and children (or the just-plain-anarchy) that prevailed in various earlier societies. (And, let’s be honest here: your average Reddit guy may gloat in feigned horror over the SBC sex scandal—but in his heart of hearts, he’s really just remembering all those church girls who wouldn’t get drunk and sleep with him and other guys whose motivations matched his own. These girls, statistically, are a much larger sample than those who were unfortunately victimized by their own ecclesiastical leaders. Our Reddit guy knows that for all their problems, these churches have actually deterred the exploitation of their female members that he would have committed if he could. That’s why he hates them so much. You’ll note that our Reddit guy doesn’t hate or talk about the mainline liberal churches who also have occasional bad guys in the pastoral ranks but who were already openly telling their youth that sexual promiscuity was part of normal adolescence/ is inoffensive to God/ is not something for which one ought to have any degree of accountability). Schools, too, are theoretically supposed to (among other things) empower kids with knowledge that makes them more resistant to exploitation by charlatans and schemers. Whether they acruelly accomplish that, is certainly a fair question. But then, it’s overwhelmingly not conservatives who are administering and staffing the public schools these days; it’s not conservatives who are forcing kids to attend those schools with the threat of imprisoning their parents if they don’t; and it’s not conservatives offering the schools full legal immunity for any outrages perpetrated by their staffs or on their campuses. If leftists want to pooh-pooh public education as sort of a child grooming operation, I guess I won’t push back too hard so long—so long as I’m allowed to point out that the “groomers” here are overwhelmingly their allies, not mine.

He’s talking about the priesthood ban, not the priesthood.

I haven’t seen the movie you cite and I suspect you and I would notice and tend to perseverate on different applications/manifestations of this principle; but I think it’s a staggeringly true general principle. IMHO a lot of (certainly not all) “patriarchy” was men recognizing other men’s baser natures and implementing structures that would protect physically-weaker women from exploitation by the worst sort of men. And a lot of the deconstruction of “patriarchy” entails making women more available for the same kind of exploitation by the worst sort of men, but also convincing women (at least in the short term) that the exploitation is actually harmless and pleasurable and empowering.

I think a lot of times we miss the point of the Book of Job. I suspect there was a real person named Job; but the story of Job is merely an envelope—a tortilla shell for the meaty taco that is the book’s philosophical meditations and arguments. When you really dig into it—after the first chapter or two, Job is neither patient nor uncomplaining. Ironically, while He doesn’t question God’s righteousness (as he understands the term “righteousness”), Job sort of does suggest that maybe God isn’t quite omniscient—that God must have gotten His facts messed up to be punishing him, Job, for sins that Job is sure he didn’t commit. Basically, Job & Co are coming from the mindset that “God always rewards the innocent and punishes the guilty; and if someone is having a hard time, it’s because they sinned”. Job’s friends jump to the position that “you must have sinned”. Job himself basically maintains that “yes, that’s how it’s supposed to work; but I’m quite sure I didn’t sin and I’m sure God’s motives are righteous; God has just made a factual mistake about my righteousness, and if He would just talk to me we could sort this all out”. God basically comes in and says “Job is right that he hasn’t sinned and is right to stand by My righteousness. But none of you drips know anything about how My punishment or My justice work, and your puny minds wouldn’t understand it if I explained it to you.” Scholars who accept a later date for the current text of Job often see it as a subversive book; pushing back against Deutero-Isaiah’s concept of God’s immediate and unvarying rewards for the righteous and punishment for the sinful.

I suppose I’m open to the possibility that it’s symbolic/allegorical, or at least significantly embellished in some ways. But a lot of better men than me, take it as historical. Moroni seems to take it as historical. I frankly don’t know how to say that Moroni’s account of the Brother of Jared is allegorical or mythologized when it talks about why the BoJ left the old world, but then jerk back and straight-facedly say that it is historical when it describes the BoJ’s interactions with the antemortal Christ. I can understand and to some extent agree with the argument that the BoM doesn’t necessarily prove Genesis narratives about—say—a literal Eden or a global Flood, because the authors’ allusions to those events would have been washed through the filter of how their culture had trained them to read the Torah. But with the Jaredite narrative, Moroni’s primary source isn’t the Torah; it’s the Jaredite record itself. And that record seems to have confirmed that there really was a tower and there really was a confusion of the languages (or, at least, a credible threat thereof).

@mirkwood, if I can entrap @LDSGator into coming into your jurisdiction, can you please arrest him for me?