Jane_Doe

An important refinement on this to make (speaking as an LDS Christian lady)
Free will is foundational to what it is to be.  It is intrinsic to whom person is.  The Father acknowledges this.  Christ (whom was always the chosen to be the Savior) choose to follow in His Father's wisdom in this regard.  It was Lucifer whom then said (in essence) "Time out-- no no, that's a horrible idea.  I'll force everyone to behave.  I'll be the Savior I"ll be the most High!".  The Father already had the Plan, Lucifer's rebellion was never a valid option.  But Lucifer did always have the option to obey or rebel, and he choose rebellion.
 
You can't get a more anti-Calvinist view point than LDS Christians.  The "sovereignty of God" is... not a concern.  Just zero.  We have all have choices- you, me, the Father, etc.  They are intrinsic.  Obviously some things aren't possible and consequences comes with choices.  Even the Father acknowledges this and works within that framework.  

An important refinement on this to make (speaking as an LDS Christian lady)
Free will is foundational to what it is to be.  It is intrinsic to whom person is.  The Father acknowledges this.  Christ (whom was always the chosen to be the Savior) choose to follow in His Father's wisdom in this regard.  It was Lucifer whom then said (in essence) "Time out-- no no, that's a horrible idea.  I'll force everyone to behave.  I'll be the Savior I"ll be the most High!".  The Father already had the Plan, Lucifer's rebellion was never a valid option.  But Lucifer did always have the option to obey or rebel, and he choose rebellion.
 
You can't get a more anti-Calvinist view point than LDS Christians.  The "sovereignty of God" is... not a concern.  Just zero.  We have all have choices- you, me, the Father, etc.  They are intrinsic.  Obviously some things aren't possible and consequences comes with choices.  Even the Father acknowledges this and works within that framework.  

FWIW @Fether I’m pro-covid safety measures (masks, vaccine, distance, etc).  I just don’t vocalize things to much online or IRL. 

3 kids, both parents have previously worked but currently aren't, both receiving unemployment. I didn't take the call, but I was asked for input on what I had seen. From my understanding, they say they are having trouble finding food for the kids' breakfast and lunch. 
We may be going the route JaG suggested.
 

Backroads, not sure how much information you would like to share but.. how many kids we are talking about? Both parents are receiving unemployment? Did they explicitly state they can't feed their kids?  Is anyone from school assisting in any way?

Backroads, there is zero reason this should be happening; and if the kids really are hungry for extended portions of the day and you’re in Utah, you should probably give DCFS Intake a call.  Even if it’s not a case of abuse/neglect (and frankly, though I’m admittedly jaded, I sort of suspect either parental drug use or parental mental health issues if everything is as you describe it) DCFS can still work with the family on a voluntary basis to review what benefits they are receiving versus what’s available, and help them come up with strategies to make their benefits go further.  
 

I've heard good things about the provident living classes the churh was offering. Probably would do me some good. I know it has been discussed elsewhere on this forum  recently how many poor people just struggle to live within their means. Seems like a wise thing to learn.

It would be kinda hard to use one's religion as a reason to not be vaccinated when the leader, the president of the Church, is vaccinated. One can't really say, "It goes against my religion," like a Jehovah Witness could say, "It's against my religion to have a blood transfusion."
I think @clwnuke provided a good example with a mandate for drinking coffee. In that scenario we would have a leg to stand on as it pertains to being a member of good standing.

Just wanted to share a bit of job success.
I teach for one of the virtual schools.
Last week, I got a nastygram from a parent. Like, insulting my intelligence and skill. After letting myself imagine lots of delightfully  nasty and unprofessional responses in my head, I responded with nothing but empathy and sorrow and offers of help. I did this to about half a dozen more nastygrams. 
Turned out that while the parent and I were talking over how to solve problems A, B, and C, it turned out the real problem was in an entirely different universe. Coworker in charge of separate universe helped and matter was resolved.
Parent has been nothing but supportive and polite and friendly since. Like, freakishly polite and kind. 
I think, though, we may become good partners over the year. 

Your brother seems like he's carrying some major hurt.  I doubt any answer here will truly help him- rather specifically resolve that decade+ of old hurt.  I just don't see that happening.  
But to answer the question nonetheless: vast majority of the time, things are indeed focused on Christ & the concepts of loving each other-- as they should be, those are the most important.  Sometimes there are specific situations where loving your neighbor does come to a specific call of action: such as the need for us all to fight this pandemic and take care of each other.  It's not a "I can do whatever I want and I'm not going to affect anyone else" situation.   Yes, there is that strong urging for covid cautious in scheduled programs (closing down Sacrament meetings, temples, etc) and individuals day to day (asking people to vaccinate, mask, social distance, etc).  
As to people struggling with this urging: yes some people do indeed struggle.  We're all human: some readily follow, some rationalize blatant blowing it off, some kind of in the middle, etc.  I'm not going to pretend that's not the case.  We're each supposed to study things out: think for yourself, look at leaders words, consult with the Lord, etc.  It never should be about just blindly following.  I personally do find that the covid-cautious route is wise and agree full heartedly here.  I also acknowledge that others have more internal conflict on this topic.  And my heart goes out to those people: I myself have struggled with other topics.  My heart is sympathetic and moved, though I still urge what I believe to be best (the covid-cautious route).  And I totally acknowledge whatever path you've taken on this and other issues.  

The Church seems to disagree, but, at least in the conservative/orthodox circles, the exceptions are barely mentioned. They are never discussed with any seriousness, which, I sometimes think, leads to some who believe that the exceptions don't really exist.

Men are children of God and therefore have great and unlimited potential for good.
Women are children of God and therefore have great and unlimited potential for good.
Men are fallen and therefore have great potential for evil.
Women are fallen and therefore have great potential for evil.
All four statements are 100% correct.  Focusing on just one or just a few will mean we are not seeing the big picture.

Having the option to stay home is very different than the default assumption being that a working woman is working because she didn't have the option and has a lesser quality husband.
Also, there are legitimate reasons a man could not work / unable to make enough to solo provide.  A medical disability being an obvious example.  
I went, created, and account, downloaded the book, and read through the first 30 pages and it's ... very chauvinistic... I'll go for a very simple quote to illustrate my feelings here:
"Lack of chivalry is apparent on every hand.  Women, of necessity, must take care of themselves.  They must change their own tires, wash the automobiles, mow the lawn, repair the furnace, paint the house, and life heavy objects.  Where are the men waiting to offer masculine assistance to the gentler sex?" --pg 12
The assumption here is that a woman doing any of these things is because of a man's failings.  That's not honoring her choice whether or not to do them, a couple's right to divide work as equal partners, or her need to learn these skills as a agent in her own right.  It's not empowering to women.  OR to men as the tone is very negative rather than encouraging men to develop themselves and their individual talents.  
Going for a simple example: a lady is driving on the super busy highway on the way to a Relief Society activity.  She gets a flat and has to make an emergency pull off to the shoulder.  She knows how to change the tire, and quickly does so, thus getting safely off the busy highway shoulder asap.  This is a GOOD thing.  Her having this skill to quickly enable her to get to safety it's a failure on anyone's part (hers or any man's).  
Likewise it's ok if as a couple they decide that the wife's going to spend the afternoon working on the car while the husband is taking care of another thing.  That's ok: they both have options and made a joint decision to do things.   That's working as help-mates, as God intended.  

I don’t care about the sexual preference of a missionary.
But, I feel strongly that an LDS mission is NOT the time to express your sexuality, no matter what it is. 
 
LGBTQ+ or not, if you can’t control yourself you really should not go on a mission. 

Well, ok.   I suppose many marriages that end in divorce could be considered a train wreck by spectators - sometimes before the marriage even happens.  But I think I'm still sort of missing your point.  Maybe this might help - here's a list of Josh Weed's milestones.  You're indicating things never should have happened - which ones?  I've titled the list "gay people shouldn't".  I'm assuming there will be things on this list with which you disagree, perhaps you could tell me which ones?  
Gay people shouldn't:
- come out to their parents at 13
- be supported and loved by their parents 
- reveal your SSA to your teenage friend, and fall in love with her
- get married to the opposite sex and try their best to make the marriage work
- get sealed in the temple to the opposite sex and try their best to make the marriage work
- talk about their personal lives and marriages in public
- become a licensed marriage/family therapist
- mutually agree to an amicable divorce after deciding platonic love just wasn't good enough to hold a marriage together
- be LDS in the first place
- be born in the first place
- exist

His story is just more sad than anything else. 

We had a Deaf member in our ward for a time. I enjoyed a number of conversations with him on this topic while reading his dissertation (about improving education of Deaf individuals) and helping him prepare statistical methods and analyses. It was very much an empathy developing experience for me.
Some of the things I learned from him
Deaf culture is very much a thing. This is because language and culture are intertwined. Their culture affects their language and their language affects their culture. For many living in Deaf culture, receiving cochlear implants is akin to rejecting a part of the culture (I'm not interested in debating if this is rational or fair, especially among adults. I insist, however, in recognizing that it is how many in the Deaf community feel).
Receiving cochlear implants would be somewhat similar to a person in a very strict and orthodox Mennonite community opting to join a less restrictive community that permits the use of light bulbs. It may seem to us outsiders that not much has changed, and that life should now be easier with light bulbs instead of candles--but the original community feels a sense of rejection and loss.
 
In addition to that cultural aspect, Deaf culture is also on very high alert. For most of human history, deafness has been considered a burden and limitation. We've typically spent more time trying to correct and/or ignore the problem than we have addressing it. In the not-so-distant past, we sent deaf kids to "special schools." These weren't really schools, though. They were often more like asylums, hiding an inconvenient problem. In many, sign language was banned, and lip reading was required. Abuse was rampant, frequently unchecked. And because Deaf people were easily dismissed as damaged and unintelligent, their complaints often went unaddressed. Deaf culture views attempts to "normalize" them into the hearing world as a step back toward those more abusive days.
 
Another really important aspect of their hesitancy is developmental. Humans develop a sense of language between 18 and 36 months of age. When I say this, I mean that language is more than just words and grammar. It's the entire sense of building meaning through the use of sounds, gestures, and shared representations. For deaf children, pushing for cochlear implants, or lip reading, or other things that make it easier for non-deaf people to communicate with the child stunts their development of language. If my friends research taught me anything, it was that deaf kids who learn ASL first do better in almost all aspects of life, but especially in language and communication. And it is because, in those developmental months, they are able to develop language, instead of just words.
 
Lastly, and I think this is probably the hardest one for the hearing to understand, is that being able to hear offers very little in the way of improving their quality of life. For a deaf individual, being able to hear doesn't make it easier to communicate; it actually makes it somewhat harder. Remember, ASL is not English. So as soon as you put that implant in, they are bombarded in a foreign language and culture. All of a sudden, subtleties in pronunciation and tone convey a very complex array of meanings that we have spent a lifetime developing and interpreting. On to of that, the feedback loop isn't very good, because implants might make hearing possible, but it doesn't make it perfect. My friend said that, on a good day, he could make sense of about half of what anyone was saying to him. He had to rely on context and visual communication to fill in the rest. In short, the implant didn't make it easier for him to communicate to the hearing, it only made it easier for the hearing to communicate with him.
 
I should probably stop here, but some other minor points might be of interest. Given the inefficiency of implants in adults, it is tempting to think that the earlier you can place an implant, the better. But remember, children need to develop a sense of language before they can learn to communicate concepts effectively. And communicating concepts about how well you can hear and distinguish sounds is a pretty abstract concept. How does one with no hearing background perceive the difference between the 'sh' in should and the 'zh' sound in azure? The more time we make a child focus on what they hear, the less time and energy they will spend on language.
And very importantly, written communication is a poor substitute for the deaf. English is not their primary language. When they try to write and/or read English, they are communicating in their second language.  Asking a deaf person to communicate via writing is like providing a Portuguese interpreter to a Spanish speaker. They will get the gist, but they may miss some of the details.
As an exercise, try imagining a language without articles (the, a, an). How do you communicate the difference between "the cat" and "a cat?" Now, there are lots of spoken languages in the world that do this (many Slavic languages lack articles) and native speakers are quite adept at picking up the difference from context. ASL works the same way. 
 
So anyway, there are a number of cultural influences in the Deaf community that make many of them hesitant toward implants. Some may be more valid than others, but I think it is a big mistake to dismiss those influences simply because we don't understand them. And that may be the biggest contributor to their hesitancy: often, it feels like the hearing don't want to understand the Deaf--they just want the Deaf to be more like the hearing

Having the option to stay home is very different than the default assumption being that a working woman is working because she didn't have the option and has a lesser quality husband.
Also, there are legitimate reasons a man could not work / unable to make enough to solo provide.  A medical disability being an obvious example.  
I went, created, and account, downloaded the book, and read through the first 30 pages and it's ... very chauvinistic... I'll go for a very simple quote to illustrate my feelings here:
"Lack of chivalry is apparent on every hand.  Women, of necessity, must take care of themselves.  They must change their own tires, wash the automobiles, mow the lawn, repair the furnace, paint the house, and life heavy objects.  Where are the men waiting to offer masculine assistance to the gentler sex?" --pg 12
The assumption here is that a woman doing any of these things is because of a man's failings.  That's not honoring her choice whether or not to do them, a couple's right to divide work as equal partners, or her need to learn these skills as a agent in her own right.  It's not empowering to women.  OR to men as the tone is very negative rather than encouraging men to develop themselves and their individual talents.  
Going for a simple example: a lady is driving on the super busy highway on the way to a Relief Society activity.  She gets a flat and has to make an emergency pull off to the shoulder.  She knows how to change the tire, and quickly does so, thus getting safely off the busy highway shoulder asap.  This is a GOOD thing.  Her having this skill to quickly enable her to get to safety it's a failure on anyone's part (hers or any man's).  
Likewise it's ok if as a couple they decide that the wife's going to spend the afternoon working on the car while the husband is taking care of another thing.  That's ok: they both have options and made a joint decision to do things.   That's working as help-mates, as God intended.  

Having the option to stay home is very different than the default assumption being that a working woman is working because she didn't have the option and has a lesser quality husband.
Also, there are legitimate reasons a man could not work / unable to make enough to solo provide.  A medical disability being an obvious example.  
I went, created, and account, downloaded the book, and read through the first 30 pages and it's ... very chauvinistic... I'll go for a very simple quote to illustrate my feelings here:
"Lack of chivalry is apparent on every hand.  Women, of necessity, must take care of themselves.  They must change their own tires, wash the automobiles, mow the lawn, repair the furnace, paint the house, and life heavy objects.  Where are the men waiting to offer masculine assistance to the gentler sex?" --pg 12
The assumption here is that a woman doing any of these things is because of a man's failings.  That's not honoring her choice whether or not to do them, a couple's right to divide work as equal partners, or her need to learn these skills as a agent in her own right.  It's not empowering to women.  OR to men as the tone is very negative rather than encouraging men to develop themselves and their individual talents.  
Going for a simple example: a lady is driving on the super busy highway on the way to a Relief Society activity.  She gets a flat and has to make an emergency pull off to the shoulder.  She knows how to change the tire, and quickly does so, thus getting safely off the busy highway shoulder asap.  This is a GOOD thing.  Her having this skill to quickly enable her to get to safety it's a failure on anyone's part (hers or any man's).  
Likewise it's ok if as a couple they decide that the wife's going to spend the afternoon working on the car while the husband is taking care of another thing.  That's ok: they both have options and made a joint decision to do things.   That's working as help-mates, as God intended.  

Myself: all of the above.  I enjoy my job: it gives me puzzles, new things to learn & solve, etc.  That doesn't mean I don't also prize my family extremely.  But I also do enjoy my work.  Which isn't to say that there aren't headaches involved with it that I regularly gripe about.
Running through other ladies I know:
- She works at a school because she enjoys being able to learn how better educate her children, and to help other kids & families learn.  It's a "because I have been given much" attitude.  Plus, she enjoys having the extra money in the family budget to save for children's college and rainy-day fund.
- She works because she wants to & enjoys the connection with other adults.  She goes stir crazy and clinically depressed when she's been a a stay-at-home mom.  
- She works because she loves her husband and doesn't want him gone 100+ hours a week working multiple jobs.  She'd rather have him work one job, and then come home to be with her & the kids both emotionally/physically.  She choose to work some herself rather than have a MIA husband.
- She works because her husband has health issues and it's uncertain how long he'll be able to work at all.  Her working means they have savings now and if he needs to stop working she already has an established career.  
- She works to better learn & challenge herself.  She's loves the new skills she's acquired and wants to keep growing mentally.
 
 
None of these ladies are working because their husband is lazy or a dog.  In fact, I know each of the husbands and they are all good hard working men at the job & at home as husbands & fathers.  It's HORRIBLY inaccurate and offense to both the ladies and men to assume "oh she's working, he must be low quality".

Yes, agree again. Phantom has always been more style than substance, though Masquerade has always been great. 

If you do find it “sinful” or a “problem” I would love to see someone launch a public crusade against women being educated.
 
I mean that seriously, start a movement, this would be fun to watch.  

I am a member of society, former attendee of BYU-I and have many loved ones whom are graduates of BYU Provo, and family members currently attending BYU. 
I find being able to articulate one’s concerns at be an important skill. I can’t help find a solution to a problem that’s not expressed. And no, I don’t find educating women to be a problem or sinful.  Same with women being able to choose to work. Same for folks attracted to members of the same sex. 
I have encountered folks ( both at BYU’s, in the church, and in general) whom have very harmful ideas of “ masculinity “, which frequently involve curtailing the agency of others and limiting thier own growth. 

So, a man can’t have backbone unless he’s a SEAL? Is a man “showing backbone” if he refuses to compromise on an issue that you disagree with? Or is it only “showing backbone” if you agree with him? Curious. 

No thanks.
Oh, thank Goodness.
All this talk about what it takes to “be a man” has always been silly to me. A “real man” wouldn’t let someone else's definition of masculinity effect him. But to each their own.