Sunday in Outer Blogness: Towel girls edition!

Thanks to everyone who has been contributing nominations for X-Mormon of the Year! I am planning to start collecting nominations for the Brodie Awards this weekend, and then the following weekend, I’ll post the polls to vote for X-Mormon of the Year.

So, the Mormon community got some exciting news this past fortnight — teens are now allowed a greater role in performing baptisms for the dead in the temple! Specifically the boys can perform the baptisms (and do other jobs including acting as witnesses and officially greeting temple patrons), and girls can hand people towels! What is wrong with this? I think it was best summed up by April Young Bennet:

Busywork is not equality. Female temple workers do not need Young Women to serve as their “assistants” because women do not have a lot to do in the temple baptistry; they are banned from most of the work. Women are not allowed to baptize, to serve as witnesses, to confirm, to stand in the confirmation circle, to welcome patrons to the temple, to check temple recommends, to keep records, or even to feed names into the projector. With so many bans in place, women often sit to the side watching or receive the kind of assignment that could easily be performed by inanimate objects like towel hooks and laundry baskets. Young Women will not feel needed if their work is literally not needed.

Gina Colvin also nailed it:

I felt the resentment boiling over as from the sidelines I see myself holding towels while my male peers ‘officiate.’ Being baptized by a 16-year-old ‘priest’ who gets to hold me under water, rub up against my body, and see the shape of my body under clinging wet clothing is another horror I imagined. But I feel that familiar sensation of indignity as one by one those boys drop their wet towels behind them in a gush of dripping triumph while I stoop to pick them off the floor. I am pretty confident that I would have been furious at this injustice posturing as gender equality.

There was a lot of good commentary on this issue, including some fun, snarky takes on it, and various people pointed out that they could at least allow women to serve as witnesses. Blaire Ostler offered the counterpoint that we shouldn’t marginalize the value of towel distribution.

In other Mo-topics, Joanne Hanks wrote an article for Free Inquiry, William Kempton discussed some positive changes the CoJCoL-dS has made, Knotty wrote about the Mormon kid masturbation interviews, oh, and the Mormons have been proxy-baptizing holocaust victims again.

In the category of Mo-friends on non-Mo topics, Equality has re-booted his blog as an activism blog, Jana loves letters, On ‘Planet InfoWars,’ People Have Sex With Cars, and Froggie has more lovely photos!

I hope you’re having a fun holiday season! Happy reading!