Now that the CoJCoL-dS has stopped working against it, marriage equality is gaining ground (three states and a country in the last week or so). J G-W wants to understand those who don’t share in his joy, and perhaps encourage them to think differently:

It has been the frequent inarticulateness of the opposition that has most frustrated me in the past. Part of me has always really wanted to understand. Occasionally during the Amendment 1 campaign last year, I would ask an opponent of marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples to explain why they felt the way they did. Sometimes, just before loudly slamming the receiver down on the phone, they would explode, “I don’t want to talk about it!”

Here’s a really good analysis of what’s wrong with the CoJCoL-dS:

We claim a pedigree of priesthood, traceable in its authority to the very source, but our rules and edicts and practices seem to rise from the murk of a passive-voice nightmare of untraceability and a mutt-and-mumble lineage of plausible deniability. [...] We deify our ignorance, of our own history and the evolution of practice especially. We don’t know why we do things just this way, we don’t know exactly how things evolved to be this strict, this fear-based, this rule-based, this law-hedgingly Pharisaical, and if we don’t know, then it must be from God. Things are a particular way, God didn’t stop it from turning out this way, so it must be from Him. We seem so able to justify our past and our present by invoking God that we give no thought to learning from the mistakes they contain.

It boils down to lack of real leadership — so people are stuck doing Kremlinology to try to figure out what the church is teaching. Oxymormon girl has written a great discussion of what she believes in now.

Other discussions about church issues include teaching modesty to toddlers, the dignity of the missionary program, separation of church and state, and an image so controversial that they had to add a little disclaimer explaining it was staged!

In Mormon life experiences, Molly and Dick shared the story of how Mormon teachings on sex affected their marriage. Just Jill enjoys the companionship of the holy roast. MyrtleJoy has learned that it’s often better to plan to be surprised than to plan ahead. Alex is exhausted by keeping up appearances. The Mormon Child Bride has apostatized from the idea that we can be “too tolerant” and fall into “tolerance traps.” Leia described how atheism has affected her mothering, and duckiethemonkey shared some difficult experiences with motherhood under duress:

My in-laws would always remind me how a mother at home is the best thing for my child and how the prophets have suggested that to have a healthy home. They always encouraged me to talk to my father-in-law (bishop) about how I was feeling and letting him help me work through my feelings. But in reality they just wanted me to stop trying to work toward things the church doesn’t stand for. It’s amazing how much control the church really has over a person. I was willing to give up all my hopes and dreams when I was pregnant. But 9 months later I was in a living hell, and the only church related response I got was it’s best for my child.

Well I’m here to tell any mother going through a situation even remotely close to this that’s not true. Being a homemaker because your told to is like telling you child to dream big but never plan on letting that happen. Don’t stay home and be there for your child if you’re unsure if you really even want to be alive. It’s not healthier. Your child will not benefit from this at all. You may be physically there for your child but mentally and emotionally your dead, and they will sense that.

Now let’s see those handicrafts I promised in the title!! (If this imagur embed works…)

Other fun hobbies include gardening and collecting movie music.

In case you’re wondering why Sunday in Outer Blogness was saved for Monday this week. It turns out that today is a holiday! Yes, it is Pfingstmontag!

So, since I knew I had an extra day this weekend, I decided to spend Sunday (a) organizing my basement, and (b) playing with my kids. In retrospect, I could have done those things on Monday and kept SiOB on Sunday. But that’s the magic of procrastination for you. At first I have all day, and then when evening arrives, making some popcorn and watching a pirate movie with the kids seems so inviting. I hope you had a nice Sunday as well, and thanks for your patience!

Hopefully the in-depth fact checking of some of the more influential leaders, conference talks, Ensign articles, and so forth will help illustrate that even the very influential statements aren’t inspired, but should be counted about as worthy as any other old man’s advice.

General Authority Bullshit

MBB, so far as I understand the group, is not for equality.  They correlated their signage around the message of “love,” banning messages of equality (i.e., messages “against Church teachings”) — not only in the parades but in ensuing conversations on Facebook and elsewhere.  Their logic is that they want to bring in the most Mormons into a needed conversation about same-sex attraction, and advocating equality hurts that goal.  One might argue that this piecemeal strategy is okay — realistic even — so long as their end goal is equality.  But it’s not. Their end goal is to “extend the message of Jesus Christ” to better include gay Mormons, which means, “Don’t be scared of or mean to gay people, but same-sex intimacy is still a sin.”  Basically, it’s the same message the Church has been peddling for decades, but it’s “new” because it’s in a Pride parade. And now, it’s a church-wide “thing” (See Mormonsandgays.org).

For the reason of letting the Church “get away” with this — using Pride to its ends — I’ve also been critical of the LGBT community. The LGBT community puts too much focus on rights-based strategies, not realizing how they’re empowering privately-owned heteropatriarchal institutions like the Church in the process. Long after there is national gay marriage, there will still be heteropatriarchal institutions like the Church.

Last summer, I was pretty frustrated with the media coverage of MBB because everywhere it seemed that MBB was linked with the idea of Mormons as pro-gay; and in an election year with a Mormon presidential candidate, this was a highly problematic mis-message.

That was 2012.  Now, the situation is somewhat different.  The more MBB is associated with Mormons working against their own Church, the more the Church seems unstable.  However, I also believe that the Church doesn’t mind the perceived instability, as it can turn it into “multicultural, diversity of thought” (think the strategy of the “I’m a Mormon” campaign), knowing that, on the ground, Mormons are still behaving in a correlated fashion, which they certainly are in MBB.  I’m pretty sure that if MBB marches again this year (if Pride organizers allow them), there will be no change in their signage policies from last year.

Hopefully the media will focus on Mormons who really are for equality, whose messages demonstrate actual instability in the Church on the issue. I think I got my hopes too high last summer, lol.

It’s rather timely, considering that it’s Mothers Day:

A few years back, an enthusiastic Mother’s Day speaker shared with my ward the story of how his mother had always gotten up to cook breakfast from scratch for the family, even when she was sick. With tears in his eyes, he then thanked his wife for being just like his mom.

It is nice to set aside time to celebrate our mothers — the angst seems more a result of treating motherhood as the be-all-end-all of womanhood. So when I read this list of people who have reason not to love Mothers Day:

• Married women who suffer from infertility
• Single women
• Single mothers
• Women who birthed babies who were then adopted by others
• Women whose mothers have died
• Women whose mothers were abusive
• Mothers who never feel they will ever add up to what has been dubbed as the perfect mother in many a Sacrament Meeting talk
• Fathers who suffer from infertility and hate to see their wives feel pain
• Single fathers
• Men whose mothers have died
• Men whose mothers were abusive
• Fathers who see their wives suffering when they feel they will never add up to what has been dubbed as the perfect mother in many a Sacrament Meeting talk.

… I felt like it should even include women who are happy to be mothers but don’t like being treated as though motherhood is the sum total of their value as humans. But I immediately dismissed this idea as a foolish exaggeration. Then I saw this little Facebook turd:

And I agree with Heather’s response:

I am LOVING watching y’all grow up. You are ambitious and hard-working and kind and smart and funny (oh, so funny) and quick-witted and curious. And you are also needy and demanding and sometimes I feel beleaguered by trying to fill all of your needs. And I tell you as much, which I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be doing, but maybe I’m doing you a favor: if you become a parent, you’ll go in eyes wide open–thanks to me!

Quite simply, I am your mom. Imagining my life otherwise is just crazy talk.

However, motherhood is not the essence of who I am. It does not define my identity.

And there were a bunch of interesting related topics: Mothers in the Bible, the next natural step in the current gun-rights discussion, Heavenly Mother as the unique doctrine Mormons won’t stand up for, women are the root of all evil (or is it helicopter parenting), the Mormon murder trial is ever creepy, and if you’re still married to your dead spouse why is it OK to marry again?

In other topics, good work for a worthy cause, here‘s the first time I’ve seen Canada compared to a cult, the US Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation is seriously considering treating religions like any other non-profit, poverty and judgement, the BoM chapter that is so bad it’s funny, and hatin’ on fat people as a marketing strategy. Oh, and I really enjoyed Daniel Midgley’s podcast about the Navajo language.

It is also teacher appreciation week! Time to think twice about the policy of teaching to the test. In other education issues: teaching is hard and some helpful advice for those who stop believing while attending BYUI. And I’d like to wrap up with a hilarious overview of Mormon-style sex-ed:

My mother’s advise when I first got married (she still hadn’t figured out that I was two months pregnant) was, “Well, Sister (she always calls us “Sister” so she doesn’t have to remember which one of us she’s talking to), just think about IT as if you’re canning peaches. By the time you’ve scalded the skins and peeled them it’s over and you can just go clean up the sticky mess and go back to sleep. It’s your duty and a chore, but usually over very quickly. I’m so sorry for you, Sister.” She once admitted that she wasn’t sure if she’d ever had an orgasm. That’s a guarantee you haven’t. If the back of your head doesn’t explode, lightning shoot out the tips of your toes and fingertips, and stars rotate around the ceiling, leaving you spent and trembling, it’s a good sign that you haven’t yet experienced a good orgasm.

Go read the whole thing and see how much you can relate to!! And good luck to you on surviving this joyous holiday!!

I am absolutely convinced that the only thing that stands between the successful prosecution of the leadership of the Mormon Church for fraud and their exposure for blasphemy, is the simple collective united grass roots will of a relatively modest representative number the American people and, particularly of the ex-Mormon community, to support this cause and demand that their public officials attend to this matter. It is highly unlikely that this representative critical mass of support will be accomplished until after such time as a smaller group demonstrates their intent and resolve through a civil action against the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I support such a civil action, as a starting point and invite ex-Mormons everywhere to join me in speaking up in support of Mormon accountability and the prosecution of religious fraud.

Can we unite to form a civil lawsuit?  How many laywers are exmos and would be willing to help?  Can we get the ACLU in on it?

Original post found here

“My mom will sometimes say, ‘I can’t believe I brought you to that show. None of this would have happened.’[...] While the musical has been called irreverent and crude, some of the lyrics still have special, sentimental value to Morong. The words, “If you believe, the Lord will reveal it. And you’ll know it’s all true — you’ll just feel it,” from the show’s song “I Believe,” still resonate with Morong because she feels that’s what happened for her.

Well, considering that the song is a paraphrase of Mormon beliefs and scriptures; considering that the portrait of Mormons is sympathetic; considering that the musical delivers tons of free publicity that gets people interested in looking more closely at the CoJCoL-dS — I’d say the most surprising part is that a conversion story is rare enough to make the news when it happens. I can’t wait to see the show myself!!

In other fun and funny, check out the apps for Mormons! This graphic made me laugh. What if women made the modesty rules? More proof that government regulation is the root of all evil. A timely new merit badge! Steve Wells won a scripture chase and Andrew S described the “John Dehlin Drama Life Cycle”. And we have two new posts this week about the connection between Mormonism and Judaism!

Speaking of the church, it seems the GA’s have only so many things to tell you. Here’s an interesting discussion of how denying women the priesthood denies them agency. Mormon Expression discussed the connection between Mormon culture and passive-aggressive behavior, and Bookus discussed the connection between religion and abuse. And, in case that’s not heavy enough, what about modern genocide?

In personal stories, Ren replaced her prejudice about Muslims with curiosity. A polygamist refused to give up his family when ordered by Warren Jeffs to leave. And here’s a poignant story that many can relate to:

And my life is good, mostly. But, there is still that ‘but’. That very big ‘but’.

Who could I have been had I known that I had choices? That I could be anything, and anyone, that I wanted to be? That I could have had dreams beyond marriage and motherhood? That my life was mine to mold into whatever form fit me? How far could I have gone? This is the ‘what if’ that haunts my dreams, and exposes the hole in my center. I didn’t fill that hole as a young adult because I wasn’t aware of its existence. Some would say that I have no one to blame but myself, that I wasn’t attentive and mindful of the options available. And they would be right. To a certain extent. But, the culture in which I was raised, with its Mormon ideals and notions of what it is to be female, this informed my life choices as well.

Plenty to think about… Please visit these posts and join in the discussion!!

There is something for every doubter and dissident:

• MormonThink for the facts
• Postmormon for rational discussion,
• Mormon Expression for podcasts,
• Exmormon.org for self-defeating vitriol,
• Mormon Infographics for Images,
• True Believing Mormons and Ward Gossip for humor,
• Life After Mormonism for social connection,
• And Main Street Plaza/Outer Blogness, of course, to tie it all together.

I posted an interview recently with Mithryn, the moderator of the Exmormon sub-reddit, about reaching the milestone of 8,000 members, up from 2,000 just a year or two ago:

VERY exciting to see this growth, and according to John Dehlin’s presentation somewhere sometime he projected that active Mormon membership can only decrease over time, which means MORE exmormons to join the discussion and MORE awesome comments and material to help you find support and move on to a more authentic life.

What else would you like to see happen within our community?

What needs are still not being met?

What did you wish were available when you left the church that is not here currently, or could be done better?

I’m interested in getting your thoughts, as there is much more work to be done. Let’s brainstorm some ideas in the comments below.

“Since my religious disaffection from the Mormon Church, I have had to come to terms with the fact that I am going to die.”

That’s Steve Bloor facing his mortality — read the rest here. So Says Me told the tale of getting over the self-hatred of an eating disorder, while the Cotton Floozy offers some fatspiration. Maybe not quite as serious, but still poignant was Leia’s story of a beautiful gown (from her Mormon grandma!) that wasn’t quite modest enough — next time call Randy! Calling people back to the CoJCoL-dS from one side and the other. Smart vs. righteous. One of our friends has started a new business and another is helping gay teens with their young dating experiences. Yet another experienced a wild night of creation:

My freedom came in one night of wild midnight poetry. Words cascaded like melting wax upon the page, drawing out my anger and my pain, and I saw the church clearly for the first time – as a mother who raises a child but never really loves her; abusive, manipulative, selfish… cruel. The epiphany was heartbreaking. Breath-taking. I lost track of time. For hours, I could barely breathe. I could not see my own words through my tears, but still they kept coming; each hard, dark line cutting deep, working away at the chains that had bound my inspiration and stifled my voice. Then, as daylight was just blooming over the mountains on the eastern horizon, I looked up. I looked up.

Vibrant hues of pink and orange and violet painted the sky. I breathed in the light, and it felt as though I had been gone for a very long time and was just returning to my own body.

So many life experiences! In images, here’s visiting the Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork Utah on a cloudy day and visiting a new-born neighbor.

The discussion of women and the priesthood is still going strong — we saw a bit of it here. Note that our cousin church has embraced gay marriage and has offered some helpful advice for those making the transition from the CoJCoL-dS to the CoC. I’m pretty sure this is a joke about it, but I’m not sure which side(s) he’s making fun of — if someone can give me a one-paragraph explanation, I’d appreciate it.

In theology: lack of baggage helps kids make the obvious connections. Rethinking the Word of Wisdom as early Mormon commandment and identity marker. What’s up with overreaction in the Bible? The straight dope on skin color and questions about evil spirits.

In LDS policies: Why not re-create some jobs? And stop unfair policies against LDS students? Not to mention questionable political activism, questionable missionary tactics, and avoiding tolerance. R-rated films: yea or nay? Is plagiarism a sin? Check the YM manuals…

And in good clean fun: How is an Exmormon like a Buffyverse Vampire?

As a TBM, we can easily view the loss of a testimony and the transition of a person from a believing member of the Church to a self-identified post-Mormon along the same lines as Whedon’s vampires. It can, and does, happen to anyone.

There is no calling that will prevent someone from losing their faith within it. There is no location you can live that will better shore up the defenses of your testimony. Men and women, both old and young, can find themselves leaving their faith. Bishops, Stake Presidents, Mission Presidents, Temple Sealers, Stake Relief Society presidents, ward librarians, 2nd Quorum of the Seventy, Quorum of the Twelve, Provo, Los Angeles, Santiago, it doesn’t matter. Converts and multi-generational members born in the covenant can leave. As with Whedon’s vampires, it can happen to anyone. And once it does, it changes people in a way that they’ll never be able to return to that faith again. Even if they do recover enough of their beliefs to attend again, their beliefs are now tempered by a flexibility that most average members would find heretical.

In conclusion: What are you doing here reading the Internet with me? Get out there and live!

J/K, socializing via the Internet is a real part of life, too.

Of note, the words “gay” and “homosexual” don’t appear in the statement.

A lot has been made about this statement as it seems laudatory of the change.  But the statement never clearly comes out and says, “Yep, we are fully on board with gay scouts.”  Instead it says things like, “[we] are satisfied that BSA has made a thoughtful, good-faith effort to address issues that, as they have said, remain ‘among the most complex and challenging issues facing the BSA and society today.’” And, “We are grateful to BSA for their careful consideration of these issues.”  In other words, the statement says that the Church is happy with the BSA’s efforts to consider these issues.  That’s all the statement clearly states.

However, it insinuates that the Church is in favor of the change, and that is how most media outlets have interpreted the statement, despite the fact that the statement never explicitly says that it is in support of allowing gay scouts.

So, what’s going on here?  It seems like at least two things were influential in the wording of this statement.

First, the LDS Church can’t openly say that it welcomes gay scouts because it would offend the many homophobic members, like Boyd Packer.  By welcoming gay scouts, that would be tantamount to endorsing gay scouts, and they can’t do that without pissing off potentially thousands of their conservative, bigoted members.  So, the statement insinuates support without stating support.

Second, the BSA policy change reflects an interesting perspective on homosexuality that I think LDS Inc. supports.  Gay scouts are okay, because they are young and, hopefully, can be taught that being gay is wrong.  They’ll grow out of it, so they can tolerate gay scouts.  Plus, they are unlikely to be having gay sex, which is what homophobe Packer seems to really have an issue with.  But gay scoutmasters – well, they can’t be tolerated.  Why?  Because that would suggest that the religion endorses homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle rather than a sinful desire that needs to be overcome.  Thus, the BSA policy change actually already aligns with LDS Inc.’s views towards homosexuals: identifying as having “same-sex attraction” is fine; it’s the same as saying I’m addicted to alcohol or porn.  But actually embracing your homosexual orientation and living as a homosexual is wrong, because that undermines the idea that homosexuality is sinful (just like saying “I occasionally watch porn and feel no guilt over it” or “I drink alcohol socially and am a responsible adult” both illustrate that sin is socially constructed).

So, young gays are okay.  But old gays are a threat to the Mormon sacred canopy under which acting gay is sinful.  This isn’t change on the part of the Church; this is insinuating being progressive without actually being progressive.

Anyway.  Just turn off all other media, turn the sound up on your computer, enlarge this video to full screen, and take the 78 seconds required to watch it.  You’ll be glad you did, even if it doesn’t help you understand God.