There have been some complaints in the Bloggernacle recently about this infographic.

As someone who certainly hasn’t shied away from criticizing how the LDS church treats women, I just wanted to say: I don’t think it’s all that bad.

I agree that the graphic has strategically tweaked a few things to make LDS lay leadership appear more egalitarian than it is. Namely, it has:

• Entirely omitted the (usually) all-male Priesthood Executive Committee.
• Depicted the Ward Council as having equal numbers of men and women, when it almost always has quite a few more men than women (something like 9:3 or 10:3).
• Combined the Elders Quorum Presidency with the High Priests group leaders into a bizarrely-labeled “Lay Priesthood Presidency” to make it seem like there’s parity between the number of men’s quorum leaders and the Relief Society Presidency. It may also be incorrect in lumping the adult men’s quorums in with “ward auxiliaries.” (Elder’s Quorum is considered an “auxiliary”? Can anyone fill me in on this and I’ll update this post accordingly?)

But other than that? I actually think it’s a decent graphic. Even with what’s presented, it’s pretty clear that there are far more male leadership positions on a local level than there are female leadership positions, and that women ultimately serve under the direction of men. It’s even clear that women are limited to primarily ministering to other women and children. I don’t take any issue with the size of the bishopric and stake presidency boxes or their positions.

It’s much more accurate than the last infographic that the LDS church put out, which played pretty fast and loose with statistics.

I finally caught up with Errol Morris’ Tabloid (2010), a documentary about Joyce Bernann McKinney and the 1977 “Manacled Mormon” case in the United Kingdom. The topic is a fond one for me since it provided the fodder for some of my earliest posts as a blogger and earned me my first angry comment. (I have no way to prove it, but I now believe “eb” was McKinney herself.) Morris decided to make Tabloid after McKinney resurfaced in 2008 with news stories about her cloned dog.

The story goes that McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming with Christian roots, met Kirk Anderson in Utah in the mid-1970s, where they had some kind of a romance. Anderson left the United States (and ostensibly, McKinney) to serve a Mormon mission in the United Kingdom. McKinney and a male acquaintance, Keith May (d. 2004), hired a pilot to fly a private airplane to follow Anderson to England and track him down. They found him on the doorstep of an LDS meetinghouse where May, posing as a potential convert, approached Anderson.

At this point the accounts diverge dramatically. According to McKinney, Anderson willingly got into a car with her and May, drove 200 miles away to a cottage in the English countryside, and had consensual sex with her for three days. They returned to London to get married only to find that Anderson had been reported as a missing person. After departing from McKinney and May, Anderson claimed to his ecclesiastical leaders and the police that he had been abducted, taken to the cottage, tied to a bed, and forced to have sex with McKinney. Between the Wyoming beauty queen with the eccentric personality, the Mormon missionary, the bondage, and the curious claim of male rape, it was the stuff of British tabloid dreams.

Continue reading Review: Errol Morris’ Tabloid

Post at LDS & Evangelical Conversations. Comment there if you please.

It seems that popular BYU professor Randy Bott has created a stir in this recent article from The Washington Post. Rather than recap events myself, I’m going to link to some posts by other people who have discussed it:

BYU Professor Randy Bott’s Allegedly Racist Statements; Students Plan Protest by Joseph Trevor Antley
Racist Remarks by Popular BYU Professor Spark Controversy by Joanna Brooks
An Unfortunate Attempt to Explain the Pre-1978 Priesthood Ban by Daniel C. Peterson

My thoughts are that these BYU students who want to protest Dr. Bott are looking to nail their theses to the wrong door. What Dr. Bott said was certainly infantilizing and racist. However, it wasn’t any more racist than what multiple Mormon General Authorities said and taught prior to 1978—in fact, it was quite a bit less—and it wasn’t any more infantilizing than the arguments that still circulate among Mormons today about how women should not want the priesthood because holding the priesthood means so much terrible responsibility.

In regards to the racism issue: church leaders articulated all kinds of rationales for the priesthood ban prior to 1978, most of them thoroughly racist. Since 1978, “We just don’t know” has been the most common sentiment heard on the lips of General Authorities. Unfortunately, this is a deeply unengaging and unsatisfying response to the problem. Most non-members know it and a good number of members seem to recognize it as well, so I can hardly fault someone like Randy Bott for trying to devise his own rationale on the matter. Furthermore, those pre-1978 rationales for the priesthood ban were never recanted by the church, and Randy Bott is hardly out of line for continuing to believe in things that former prophets and apostles taught.

I suppose students can be upset at Dr. Bott for daring to talk to the media when he should have allowed such matters to be handled by GAs. Again though, what GAs are saying on the matter is deeply unengaging and unsatisfying. It’s natural for the media to want to turn to studied scholars of Mormonism who will at least speculate on the “why” of the matter.

In conclusion, dear BYU students: if you really want stuff like this to not happen, if you really want to protest someone or something, the place to nail your theses is not Randy Bott’s office door. It’s 50 N Main St., Salt Lake City. Tell your leaders that it’s time for answers, and if they don’t have answers, then perhaps it’s time to admit that the church’s past policies concerning blacks were sinful and wrong, and apologize. Other religions have repented of their past racism. You can, too.

And if you can’t—or won’t—do that, don’t make Randy Bott the scapegoat for your inability to take a stand. He doesn’t deserve it.

————

BTW, in the interest of disclosure, I never had Randy Bott as a professor in my time at BYU. I recall that he was always highly recommended by my roommates and friends, but I never took a class from him.

Joanna Brooks recently asked the question, why don’t LDS-owned health insurance companies provide coverage for birth control? I was on DMBA via BYU for my final two years of college (after I got married and had to get off Daddy’s insurance), and I found it pretty darned annoying that my birth control pills weren’t covered because they were “cosmetic” medicine. My pills had been prescribed by a dermatologist to deal with acne before I was ever sexually active, and I would make the case that combating out-of-control adult acne is more than just “cosmetic,” but DMBA disagreed with me.

I don’t buy that this is a cost-saving measure. I don’t know what they run for now, but in 2003, cheap birth control pills cost $240 – $360 a year. Installation of an IUD cost $300-$500 plus doctor’s visit to put it in and then you’re set for five years. Prenatal care plus a baby’s delivery could easily cost $20,000-$30,000—and that’s if everything goes smoothly.

I think that the policy is theological. No, it is not against current LDS policy to use non-permanent birth control—but it has always been LDS teaching that couples should have children, and that they should have as many children as they can manage. The take-home point that I got from DMBA’s policy was, “Sure, you can put off having children if you want, but don’t expect the church to help you with that.”

It wasn’t so long ago that LDS leaders were teaching against birth control. In fact, some of it is still in official LDS student manuals. I think the generation that looks down on couples who use birth control is still alive and well and having some influence on the church.

That’s my opinion. What’s yours?

To say that I wasn’t into blogging in 2011 would be something of an understatement. Last year, I published 18 new posts here at ClobberBlog and 2 new posts at Προστάτις—an average of 1.7 posts per month. I didn’t do any blogging at any other blogs: LDS & Evangelical Conversations, Burning at the Stake, or The CBE Scroll. I don’t know how often I commented on the blog posts of others, but I’m sure that number was small, too.

I have been active at one Mormon-themed message board largely populated by critics of the LDS church, and created a thread there in May that turned into an exhausting, sixty-three page affair. I somehow managed to get banned from another Mormon-themed message board largely populated by apologists for the LDS church in spite of the fact that I hadn’t posted there in months at the time of my banning. But most of my blog readers are participants at neither forum.

Throughout the year, I’ve gotten comments and e-mails and pokes on Facebook from friends and readers asking how I am or wondering where I’ve gone. It’s been a long time, but I probably owe you some kind of an explanation. Here goes.

Continue reading ClobberBlog: Where I’ve been, Where I’m going

Harley at the 2010 DeerGrove Christmas Eve service

When I was growing up, my parents were into the whole “faking Santa” thing, and they were really, really into it. We were constantly reminded that we needed to be good if we wanted Santa to bring us presents. We were fed all of the songs and television specials about Rudolph and Santa and the north pole and the magical helper elves. We were dutiful in leaving an offering for Santa on Christmas Eve in the form of milk and cookies. On one occasion, a few days before Christmas, my father went to the window and exclaimed that he had just seen a sleigh land and slide down the street from our cul de sac. He ventured out into the snowy Anchorage night while my mother frantically told us to stay the away from the windows; I was too naive and trusting to regard this injunction as suspicious. A few minutes later, my father returned with Santa himself. Santa had a big bag of presents and wanted to give each of us an early Christmas gift. It wasn’t until years later that I would realize that “Santa” had been our neighbor two houses over, dressed up in a Santa suit, and that my mother had been insistent on keeping us away from the windows so that we would not see “Santa” exiting his real home.

Continue reading Faking Santa

A while ago, an LDS friend of mine asked me a very good question: how do evangelicals determine spiritual truth? With apologies to my friend for neglecting his question for so long, I thought I would take the opportunity to answer here.

The Mormon Way

For the purposes of contrast, I thought I would begin by touching briefly on how Mormons determine spiritual truth. The most common method preached in Latter-day Saint circles might be best summarized as, “confirmation by the Spirit through personal revelation.” [1] Moroni 10:3-5 states:

Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts. And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.

And by what method is “the Holy Ghost” expected to reveal the truth? What does a confirmation from the Holy Ghost look like? Continue reading How do evangelicals know the truth?

My daughter Harley is five years old now. She’s in kindergarten and she’s in her first year of Daisy Girl Scouts, and she loves it.

There is a special award that Daisy Girl Scouts can work on, the “My Promise, My Faith” pin. They can do this once a year in both kindergarten and first grade. These are the requirements for the award as outlined on page 20 of the Girl Scout Daisy Handbook:

My Promise, My Faith

Girl Scouting and your faith have a lot in common! You can earn
this pin once a year. Here’s how:

1. Choose one line from the Girl Scout Law. Find a story, song, or poem from your faith with the same ideas. Talk with your family or friends about what the Law and the story, song, or poem have in common.
2. Find a woman in your own or another faith community. Ask her how she tries to use that line of the Law in her life.
3. Gather three inspirational quotes by women that fit with that line of the Girl Scout Law. Put them where you can see them every day!
4. Make something to remind you of what you’ve learned. It might be a drawing, painting, or poster. You could also make up a story or a skit.
5. Keep the connection strong. Talk with your friends, family, or a group in your faith community about what you’ve learned about your faith and Girl Scouting. Ask them to help you live the Law and your faith. Maybe you can show them what you just made or perform your skit!

Harley’s troop is working on its Daisy Petals badges this year, teaching the Daisies the Girl Scout Law by awarding them a colored petal for every line of the law that they learn. My thoughts were that I would have her work on this year’s “My Promise, My Faith” pin immediately after she earns the petal that corresponds to the line of the law that we choose.

Continue reading Girl Scouts: “My Promise, My Faith”

(with guest graphs by Ziff of Zelophehad’s Daughters)

Introduction

The status of women in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a subject that has often weighed heavily on my heart. My feelings on the matter have been laid out in many other places so that it would be redundant to repeat them at length here. [1] In short, I am dismayed by the limitations that the LDS church places on the callings women can hold, their participation in ritual, and the ways in which they can express their spiritual gifts. I am concerned about the messages such restrictions send to my young daughter, who is a member of record with the church and attends at least twice a month with her father. I am also troubled by official teachings subordinating wives to husbands within the family unit as studies have shown that patriarchal marriages enjoy much lower success and satisfaction rates and much higher incidences of spousal abuse than egalitarian marriages. [2]

Continue reading Review: Daughters in My Kingdom, Part 1