Just_A_Guy

But… But… I thought everything the church did was to guarantee the financial viability of the City Creek Mall?

Frankly, I’ve been trying to have as little face time with my bishop as possible lately; because we are returning to in-person 2nd hour meetings and I’ve just assumed he’s swamped putting out fires, starting callings that have gone vacant, and handling priesthood ordinations or things like that. My TR isn’t expiring anytime soon—but if it were, I’d probably put it off a couple of months (with the temples being closed anyways and all) unless or until my bishop announced “no, guys, really, I do have time for this—please come get your recommend renewed”.

Also, it cuts down on the media photo-ops for gender based agitators trying to draw attention to their cause by storming into (or visibly being denied entry to) priesthood meetings—Ordain Women, transgender folk, that kind of thing.

This is interesting to me because I imagine that in Mosaic times, the thrust of “honor your father and mother” had to do with caring for them in their old age (“that thy days may be long upon the land” = “take care of your parents in your old age and set the example so that your kids will take care of you in your own old age”?). One wonders how ancient Israelites cursed with truly toxic parents, managed that obligation in the days before long-term care facilities.

To be even more literal:. A smith smites. Not necessarily. I have my dad’s first name, but I’m the second (and youngest) son. My dad is a “Jr”, named for his father—but he was his parents’ third son.

That could well be a factor. I think a lot of guys a) don’t want to talk *at all*, b) don’t want to seem weak or whiney in front of their wives, and/or (as in my case) c) are ethically/professionally/legally prohibited from telling outsiders much of what happens during the course of an average workday.

Just_A_Girl is a stay-at-home mom but has a set of symptoms that roughly matches fibromyalgia (though she insists it must be something else, frankly because fibromyalgia has no known cure and she hasn’t given up on recovering yet). She keeps the calendar and shuttles the kids around, and makes up the kids’ chores list and maintains our vegetable garden and one flower bed. Health permitting she’ll take on a room redecoration project every now and then, and once every 6 months or so she rotates our kids’ clothes and helps them deep-clean their rooms. Otherwise—I (or increasingly, our kids) do most of the grocery shopping, most of the dinners, almost all of the dishes, all of the laundry and bathroom cleaning and vacuuming and garbage-emptying and lawn maintenance and pruning and sprinkler repair, as well as miscellaneous stuff like car maintenance and keeping our family’s 8 bicycles in working order. Certain chores that were done routinely in my house as a kid (daily bed-making, weekly surface-dusting, biweekly oiling the wood furniture and cabinetry) just don’t get done, because no one has the energy to do them. @Fether jokes about it; but there really is a little bit of a dynamic in my house (and I suspect, perhaps in other LDS male-as-breadwinner households) that “earning the money is your problem [and probably not that hard anyways]; but modern housekeeping is our problem”.

Amateur historian Meg Stout has suggested — and although I disagree with her on some things, I think she’s onto something here — that what was actually being offered to Jane was a polygamous sealing; though between the loose terminology Joseph and Emma used and Jane’s own ignorance of the concept at the time, she may well have not fully understood. IIRC, Stout points out that the Smiths weren’t offering adoptive sealings to anyone else—male or female—at this point in time; Jane was unmarried and likely a victim of previous sexual exploitation (as Stout alleges some of his other plural wives were, thus setting up a sort of protective relationship between Smith and these wives in the future); and a polygamous sealing between Joseph and Jane would have established a pattern of racial egalitarianism much more than an adoptive sealing would have.

Random thoughts: 1). Even if they do immediately accept—getting someone to actually do the work is another matter. Having declined the opportunity for a temple sealing with Joseph Smith during his lifetime, Jane Manning James waited the rest of her life—over sixty years—for another shot at a temple sealing; and much ink has been spilt amongst the LDS intelligentsia about how agonizing the experience must have been for her. 2). An intriguing idea I saw floated a couple years ago—and I wish I could remember who posited it—was roughly thus: what if the dissolution of non-temple marriages isn’t the result of a proactive cursing from God, but simply a result of the fact that the natural state of human relationships is to evolve and, over time, deteriorate into tolerance, apathy, and then disdain? What if un-sealed couples, rather than being separated by some external force, simply lose interest in each other over time? What if the primary power of the sealing ritual lies, not in some mystical and mysterious “preservative” applied to the union by God; but in the perspective and power that come simply from knowing that marriage is supposed to be eternal and then from making God a full partner in the quest to make that goal a reality?

I imagine that if I were a youngish widower with small children, and were marrying another widow for time only – I think I would want my children to know that I had (re)married in the temple, if only for the sake of setting a good example for them to aspire to. But of course, I trust that there are good and sufficient reasons for the Church to make the change that it has made.

Flattery, m’lady, will get you anywhere!

@Suzie, thanks so much for being willing to share what must have been such a gut-wrenching experience. I’m so sorry you have to go through that. For what it’s worth: the post I cited in italics in my previous post was written within a couple of days of a client committing suicide. So I won’t claim to know perfectly what you’ve gone through, but I would venture to guess there were some superficial similarities in our experiences. The client was an impoverished mother who was financially getting by (barely) as an online cam girl; her child was severely autistic (early teens and non-mobile, non-verbal, not toilet trained, etc) and went into DCFS custody because she could no longer afford to give him the services he needed. It was supposed to be a quickie case where the child would be released back to her once perpetual state funding for the child’s maintenance had been secured; but an old meth habit came back with a vengeance around that time and she could never get her act together. It went to a trial to have her parental rights terminated, and the night before trial she and I had a long talk where I made it clear that I’d fight for her at trial—but that based on the facts and law, we were going to lose. On the day of the scheduled trial we walked into court and she chose to relinquish her parental rights rather than face a trial and a judicial finding of parental unfitness. Two weeks later she was dead by suicide. I am not aware that she left any kind of accusatory note towards me—but under such circumstances one can’t help but do a lot of soul-searching and Monday-morning quarterbacking, wondering what one could or should have done differently. So I’m certainly not saying that dismissing accusations of being an accessory to suicide is easy, or done lightly. But at the same time, I’ve done some a lot of thinking and some research about the role and accountability of the decedent in choosing to end his own life; and the warped, tortured, desperate, and/or vindictive thought processes that lead to that kind of decision. And because I have some inkling of what folks facing these kinds of accusations go through—I have very little patience for people who throw those accusations around lightly or for reasons that boil down to politics or lust or self-justification or virtue-signaling. Going back to my experience with my client, and using it as a sort of microcosm for the experiences of LGBTQ Church members—I believe, and hope, that I was kind and sympathetic and understanding and supportive and ready to provide a helping hand to her. But I also told her some stark truths about her legal situation. I’m sure they were stressful—even traumatic. In their way, they probably did significantly contribute to her suicide. But I am also convinced that I would not have done her any favors by hiding the truth; and that had I told her pleasant falsehoods she would (very soon, in this case) have been put in an untenable situation that ultimately would have created even more trauma. My calling and responsibility was to speak the truth, and I did it as kindly as I could. What she did with that truth is ultimately on her, not me. As to the present policy discussion, lest I have given the wrong impression at any point: I have no problem with any of the CHI’s recommendations as to LGBTQ members. I am sort of scratching my head over the Relief Society’s recent antics at the BYU Women’s Conference vis a vis the “queer” sister they lionized, just because it’s so weird in comparison to the way we as a Church have historically treated people who are predisposed to pretty much any other type of sin. (Imagine a middle-aged married guy walking up to the lectern on Fast Sunday and announcing: “Brothers and sisters, it’s great to be with you at this Fast and Testimony meeting. I just wanted to let you know that I have a very strong desire to take a couple of the laurels in this ward as polygamous wives. Now, rest assured I would never actually ACT on that desire. But you need to know that it exists, and I’ve made peace with it because that’s the way the Lord made me, and I don’t think it needs to change and I don’t think it will change either now or in the eternities. But I wanted you to know this and I hereby remind you that YOU MUST LOVE ME because it’s part of who I am!!!! In the name of Harvey Milk, Amen.”) So one way or the other, the Church may have (in President Oaks’s words) “more teaching to do on that matter” if it wants us to have a clear idea of what in sam hill we’re supposed to make of all of this.

1. Certainly not. But of course, the devil is in the details of what “sensitivity, kindness, compassion, and an abundance of Christlike love” actually means in practice; especially given the LGBTQ lobby’s history of interpreting that phrase as meaning “you must never, ever tell us ‘no’”. I can’t speak as to what specifically has happened in the incident @NeedleinA refers to; but (taking the account at face value) it does seem odd: we don’t have, as far as I know, active and impenitent prostitutes or tax cheats or drug users being invited up to Salt Lake to advise the Church on how it can modify its rhetoric/practice to help these sorts of people feel more comfortable in church. 2. I would say that any deep-seated desire to depart from community standards creates stress and therefore “is a very serious condition that can lead to isolation, depression and suicide.” Am I obliged to give @Vort the nonsensical title of “breaker of chains and mother of dragons” just his mental illness renders him vulnerable to suicide? And in what other set of circumstances do mental health professionals even accept the proposition that Person A’s suicide is really the fault of person B? If I committed suicide tomorrow and left a note saying, “That @Suzie’s posts to ThirdHour rocked my world, and I don’t know what’s true anymore, and food has no taste and life has no meaning so I may as well end it all”—you wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) take that seriously; you’d dismiss it as the rantings of an unhinged madman. And you’d be right. Even if we do ascribe third-party liability for the suicide of people in general, and LGBTQ folk in particular—what about the accountability of the “allies” who have legitimized suicide as an option for sexually-frustrated LGBTQ folk by continually nattering on about suicide while insisting that institutions like the Church that insist on traditional notions of chastity are somehow stunting these people’s chances for happiness and reducing them to a sort of second-class half-life as long as they can’t experience the glories of sexual fulfillment? Isn’t there literature suggesting that the more suicide is normalized and discussed, the more likely it becomes? As I wrote on these forums a couple of years ago, to an LGBTQ advocate (who, I hasten to add, was far less thoughtful, less careful, and less well-intentioned than you—hence the more accusatory tone I used in that discussion): The rash of gay suicides has not increased due to the Church suddenly telling gays that they have value independently of their sense of sexual fulfillment—we’ve been doing that for almost two centuries, and if anything our rhetoric has softened of late. It’s you guys who have started telling gays in the last 30 years that the unsexed life is not worth living; and then when they start believing your bullcrap and end their lives—either out of a sincere belief they can never be happy in abstinence, or out of despair when they reject the values of their youth and experiment with new sexual practices, only to find them a hollow foundation on which to build a life—you turn around and blame us; even though you created the tension and you’re the one trying to leverage their deaths to muzzle the Church and get more formerly-abstinent young Mormons into the sexual meat market for use and abuse by your allies. We mourn these youth and plan the funerals and dress the dead and pay for the undertaker and the coffin and the burial plot; while other filthy sex-crazed ghouls trot out their victims’ names at $500-a-plate fundraiser galas. The absolute lack of introspection and unwillingness by “allies” to acknowledge the effects their own antics have had on the problem, lead me to believe that most of them don’t give a flying flip about the LGBTQ youth suicide issue. Those kids are just cannon fodder in the left’s greater struggle for supremacy over the Church and the trappings of power that the left thinks it controls. I find that situation both outrageous and tragic—but the solution isn’t to treat a dude as a dame just because he asks me to. The other wrinkle to the Church’s policy here is that while it is willing to put the new name on its records—a transsexual who changed their name is likely to be in the midst of a social transition to a different gender. So what the Church is really saying here is, “we’ll do you the courtesy of calling you by the name you prefer—but we’ll be doing it at your membership council”; and we’ll be doing it in large part so that when Jane Brown applies for baptism in 2028, we can see that we’re dealing with the same individual as plain old John Smith whose membership was withdrawn for adultery in 2021. 3. Oh, undoubtedly the Church is getting pressure; and one of the joys (!) of being in a church with living prophets is that we really can’t quite ever say “never”; whether we’re talking about hypothetical developments like modifications to the law of chastity, or gay sealings, or the restoration of polygamy, or announcing that there actually is no Heavenly mother, or decreeing that only Asians with Klinefelter Syndrome can be called to the Q12, or teaching that Adam and Eve were actually purple Oompa Loompas who lived in Antarctica. The issue, of course, comes when advocates say “go ahead and perpetrate this excommunicable offense now, and just trust that the prophets will catch up with you eventually.”

When I was a kid in the 1980s (around the same time as you, I believe), the Church hadn’t yet centralized ward budgets through Salt Lake and ward Scout troops had to do their own fundraising. My older brother’s troop made and sold bake-at-home pizzas for a couple of years. It seemed like a good activity all around. Papa Murphy’s has a five-meat stuffed pizza that’s quite good. Too bad I’m counting calories these days . . .

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1976/09/i-have-a-question/how-can-i-explain-nephis-killing-laban-to-my-nonmember-friends?lang=eng https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/knowhy/was-nephis-slaying-of-laban-legal

I think calling someone by the Christian name they prefer, is just common courtesy. I have a family member who growing up was called by his initials, “T.J.” As he got older he asked to be called by his first name, “Tom”. I am used to calling him “T.J.”, and it’s a hard habit to break—but I try, out of simple respect for him as an individual. (I do think pronouns are a bridge too far, because that would entail labeling someone as something they definitionally aren’t. It doesn’t matter how sincere and psychologically deep-seated @Vort’s desire to be entitled “Breaker of chains and mother of dragons” is—he doesn’t break chains, has never birthed a dragon, and has an XY chromosomal makeup; so I ain’t gonna give him that title. And if he continues to insist that I refer to him in that way, I may begin to either suspect he’s engaging in some bizarre power play/mind game [“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” “Four.” “And if the Party says that there is not four but five – then how many?”], or else begin to question his mental health.) The ex-bishop has presumably done all he can to repent. @NeedleinA’s example hasn’t—she’s still in a homosexual relationship that is inherently sinful. The Church is a hospital for penitent sinners. People who won’t admit that they are sick but insist on going to the hospital anyways (and ordering us patients around while demanding we recognize them as the true experts in healing), are always going to feel uncomfortable in this Church; and if that tension leads to accusations of ecclesiastical apartheid—I guess we’ll just have to live with that.

*Shrug* It seemed like no skin off my nose, honestly. But there are folks who take this stuff a Lot More Seriously than I do.

I still think that BYU is doing this the hard way. Non-Mormons and jack-Mormons primarily come to BYU because tuition is dirt cheap—about $5-6K/year, compared to $40K+ any comparable private university. So—fine. Eliminate the Honor Code Office and raise tuition to $40K for everyone; and then the Church can directly administer $35K scholarships to temple-recommend-holders through the PEF. Students devoted to the Gospel will still be attracted to BYU for the superabundance of fellow believers there; and the rabble-rousers will go back to state universities where they can play beer pong and engage in weekend orgies to their foul little hearts’ content. And if the Church felt so inclined, at some point it could even expand the scholarship program for students who attend schools that aren’t part of the CES and essentially offer a college education to every worthy youth.

FWIW—HIPAA stuff is hard. Even my employer (government attorney’s office) initially wanted each of us to take our temperatures each day we came into the office and record that in a visitor log at the front door. It took a week or two for someone to point out that this was a big HIPAA no-no.

One could argue that *any* law or policy is discriminatory. Laws against theft discriminate against kleptomaniacs. Laws against child molestation discriminate against pedophiles. Laws appropriating funds for the military discriminate against pacifists. The child tax credit discriminates against the sterile. The Homestead Act discriminated against farmers who were disinclined to pull up stakes and head west. And so on, and so on. The general state of the law is that unless government is discriminating in a way that adversely affects a “protected class”, the courts will not second-guess legislative actions so long as the legislature can be said to have had a “rational basis” for its action (and except in the Obergefell case, there’s an enormous difference between “no rational basis” and “I disagree with your conclusion”). Politically, I think we’d be far better off of government did a lot less social engineering. But constitutionally—as for the sort of lawsuit you describe: I don’t think it would go anywhere.

I agree with everything you’ve written. I suppose that, as a Utahn, it just sticks in my craw a little bit to be hectored about how I have a moral duty to let my lawn go dormant so that someone else can make a little more money growing alfalfa in the middle of a desert. :shrug:

No, but in Utah a few years back I saw a specialty license plate with the BSA logo and bearing the numbers “RU12”.

@Carborendum will probably need to correct some of this, but . . . My understanding is that acre-for-acre, suburban development uses far less water than agriculture does. Assuming that population growth/sprawl coincides with pulling an equivalent amount of land out of agriculture, development should actually be a good thing for water usage. I believe that in Utah, residential water use (including gardening/landscaping) is less than 20% of the state’s total water usage. I like to think of myself as pro-farmer; but I’m evolving to the position that there are places and climates where large-scale agriculture in this day and age makes absolutely no sense.

I’m going off the footnotes from the NET translation of the Bible (app can be downloaded for free). As far as “flow of the passage” goes—as @Suzie states, the entire pericope adulterae doesn’t seem to be original to the gospel of John anyways. (I’m not saying it’s not true; just that it doesn’t seem to have been in the earliest drafts of the written book.)

There are variant manuscripts that insert the phrase “the sins of each one of them” at the end of verse 6. Someone who could do that to my accusers, would be worth hearing from. —Also - it’s very early in the morning, and the woman was brought to him immediately after being caught “in the very act” of adultery. She’s probably not wearing very much (if anything), and she’s been hauled against her will into he most crowded place in Jerusalem. Even once freed—the prospect of venturing out onto the streets of Jerusalem in that state would have been daunting, and I imagine Jesus having one of His disciples fetch her a robe or something as he dismisses her. —Considering that this happened during the Feast of Tabernacles, when thousands of out-of-towners would have been in the city and sleeping in tents or makeshift booths set up on the streets—our woman may well have either been an out-of-towner with no immediate place to go, or a prostitute. —The likelihood of this woman being stoned was approximately zero. The Jews couldn’t put someone to death without Roman sanction (hence, the nature of the trap they were laying for Jesus—to put him at odds with either the Torah or the Romans). There was a giant fortress full of Roman soldiers immediately adjacent to and looking down on the entire temple complex, watching the drama unfold. The woman’s situation was no doubt humiliating, but she was not in mortal peril.