My page that includes the full text of LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson's 1987 talk "To the Mothers in Zion" has undergone a significant spike in traffic in the last couple of days. I can guess why. General Relief Society president Camille Johnson spoke on Friday, and she talked about balancing her education and career with raising a family, without mentioning that she was in direct defiance of the prophet at the time by having a career at all. Countless other Mormon women sacrificed their career ambitions because the prophet told them to. He didn't say, "Make your own decisions based on your individual circumstances." He didn't say, "Motherhood should be your highest priority, but you can do other things too." He said, "Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother’s calling is in the home, not in the marketplace." He was not ambiguous. He was not open to interpretation. This was only six years before I was born, and when I grew up in the 2000s, I was still being taught at church that married women shouldn't work outside the home if they had a choice. My YSA bishop was also very adamant about that as recently as 2021.
And now, as anyone familiar with its usual lack of transparency and accountability would expect, the LDS Church is quietly pretending that didn't happen and celebrating a woman who disobeyed the prophet. But of course many people are seeing through that and calling it out. And apparently some of them are using my copy of the talk as a source. Glad I could be of help. On the flip side, several Mormons are lying that the church's vendetta against working mothers was just "culture" or the "interpretation" of a few zealots in your ward, and that's also infuriating but not unexpected. I understand all too well the cognitive dissonance that comes from facing the reality that the men you've been taught to revere as mouthpieces for God were as misogynistic as they were racist. Anyway, I formally joined the Unitarian Universalist church today because it's been a good spiritual community that shares my values. It's been at the forefront of social justice movements in the United States instead of getting dragged kicking and screaming behind them like some churches I could mention. I first became aware of it over a decade ago when I had a friend who'd converted to it from the LDS Church, and then I visited it for a religious studies class. I thought the building was weird. It's literally a house. And I understood the appeal of the whole "Love everyone and believe whatever you want" shtick, but I didn't like it. That's exactly the sort of liberal claptrap that I'd been taught to dismiss. Love isn't enough, I thought. You can't just believe whatever you want, I thought. There's objective truth and it matters. At some point, a random woman stopped me on the sidewalk, and I don't remember what she said exactly, but basically she sensed a lot of stress or anxiety in me and suggested I check out Unitarian Universalism, which I didn't. In hindsight, maybe she was led by the Spirit. Or maybe she said that to everybody. Long story short, my perspective has changed. A lot of what I thought was objective truth was actually bullshit, and I have a lot more humility about how much I don't know and probably never will. I still value truth and I still intend to seek after it for the rest of my life, but I no longer think it's the most important thing. I think love is the most important thing after all. Why should God be more concerned about what we believe than how we treat each other? I've increasingly noticed that people who think that way are insufferable if not horrible people. After I lost my faith, I shopped around a little for a new one because I desperately needed the community. And I ended up sticking around with the Unitarian Univeralists, and after a year or so they asked me if I wanted to formally join, and I saw no reason not to. I don't believe it's the "one true religion," and it doesn't claim to be. It's just a community that works for me and a tool for doing good in the world. My imminent departure from Logan puts a bit of a damper on things, but I'll love this congregation while I'm here and then maybe I'll find another in Salt Lake. Things don't have to last forever to be worthwhile.
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A week ago, the LDS Church had its Relief Society (women's auxiliary) anniversary broadcast. The announcement was cringe. The women's meeting being led by a man is old news, but this time I also noticed that none of the female leaders have names. Sarcasm aside, I guarantee that most Mormons don't know what they are. I can't believe that the church's PR department or correlation or whomever is still so tonedeaf that it didn't bother to suggest this token of basic respect that could be extended without having to change any of the sexist teachings or policies. I said something less inflammatory to that effect in a nuanced Mormon Facebook group, where dozens of women agreed with me while a man accused me of "white-knighting" and silencing any hypothetical women who may have disagreed with me. And women kept telling him he was wrong, but he just would not shut the hell up. He suggested that I should have let "someone with skin in the game," a woman, post about it instead. I want to go on public record stating that I do have skin in the game because women are people and I'm also a people. If you need something more specific, though, I have nieces being raised in this church, and I don't want them to settle for as little as their mother does. (I'm talking only about church stuff. That wasn't a jab at my brother-in-law.) That was nothing to the controversy that would follow, though, because of course the sexist teachings and policies are still the real problem. The church received one of the biggest social media backlashes I've ever seen after it posted a quote from J. Annette Dennis, one of the female leaders whose name wasn't on the announcement. There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of, that has so broadly given power and authority to women. There are religions that ordain some women to positions such as priests and pastors, but very few relative to the number of women in their congregations receive that authority that their church gives them. By contrast, all women 18 years and older in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who choose a covenant relationship with God in the house of the Lord are endowed with priesthood power directly from God. And as we serve in whatever calling or assignment, including ministering assignments, we are given priesthood authority to carry out those responsibilities. My dear sisters, you belong to a Church which offers all its women priesthood power and authority from God! First off, she conveniently says "that I know of" so you can't accuse her of being disingenuous if she just doesn't know much about other religions. Even without that caveat, her assertion is unfalsifiable because of circular logic. I'm pretty confident that Mormon priesthood power and authority are imaginary, but to believers, they're the only valid power and authority, so they automatically trump whatever other religions let women do. But even from that perspective, they're largely meaningless in this context. Women objectively don't need priesthood power or authority to do ministering assignments or anything else that they do in the LDS Church outside of the temple. When men perform priesthood ordinances, the belief is that those ordinances aren't valid in God's eyes without the priesthood, and that's reasonable enough on its own. But women don't perform ordinances outside of the temple. They only do things that they and any woman or man in any religion could do without the "priesthood." The women in my little Unitarian Universalist congregation do everything that the men do without any "priesthood." The LDS Church gives its women nothing and tells them that the nothing is something and the something is the most special thing ever. It shouldn't be much of a surprise, then, that this claim that Mormon women have priesthood power and authority is only a decade old. It was a total retcon by Dallin Oaks in response to the Ordain Women movement. "We are not accustomed to speaking of women having the authority of the priesthood in their Church callings," he said in the April 2014 General Conference, "but what other authority can it be?" Hmm, I wonder why they weren't accustomed to speaking of it. Maybe because he just made it up to pacify feminists and dissuade them from demanding actual equality for a few more years. I wonder if he exchanged any tense words behind the scenes with Boyd Packer after his doctrinal innovation almost humorously contradicted what the latter taught in General Conference a few months before I was born: Some members of the Church are now teaching that priesthood is some kind of a free-floating authority which can be assumed by anyone who has had the endowment. They claim this automatically gives one authority to perform priesthood ordinances. They take verses of scripture out of context and misinterpret statements of early leaders—for instance, the Prophet Joseph Smith—to sustain their claims. Well, if this retcon ever worked, it isn't working anymore. The backlash to this quote on Instagram was so big that the church's social media team acknowledged it and promised to share the comments with unnamed church leaders. Then most of the comments disappeared, and the backlash exploded further because people thought the church was deleting them, but the church said it was an Instagram glitch, but the corporation that owns Instagram denied that there was a glitch. I don't know whom to believe. The church has a long history of lying and a long history of squelching dissent, at least as far back as the time its founding prophet ordered the destruction of a printing press because it told the truth about him, but it's not like social media companies are good guys either. Anyway, I have nothing personal against Sister Dennis, who probably believed what she was saying, but the backlash was very satisfying to watch. A lot of my resentment toward the LDS Church is because it indoctrinated me into its "Men and women have different but equal roles" bullshit and intentionally conditioned me not to see obvious sexism right in front of my face. I'm glad I woke up, and I'm glad other people are waking up in increasing numbers, and I'm glad the church is getting held accountable for its bigotry. Mormon women deserve better.
Six months ago, I didn't watch the LDS Church's semi-annual General Conference for the first time in my life, and I experienced some anxiety over the disruption of routine and loss of comfort. This time I just enjoyed doing other things with those ten hours and almost forgot it was going on. Progress! A friend who had to watch bits and pieces because she hasn't yet told her parents she's an atheist filled me in on what I missed. Pay your tithing, wear your temple garments, use the full name of the church, stay on the covenant path. You know, fresh new revelation to address the real issues that people are facing. The tithing part really pisses me off. My friend sent me this. I testify that this promise, at least the way the LDS Church takes it out of context, is bogus. I received no blessings for paying tithing and I lost no blessings when I stopped. Notice, however, the caveats that Andersen adds to make it unfalsifiable and set up the church's ever-popular blame reversal game: spiritual, subtle, easy to overlook, Lord's timing. In other words, when I paid tithing and nothing happened, the problem was with me for either failing to notice or being impatient. I was supposed to just keep giving my money to the church indefinitely regardless of whether God ever got around to keeping his end of the bargain. That kind of defeats the purpose of the promise in the first place. "[P]rove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it." What part of that sounds subtle or easy to overlook? How am I supposed to "prove" God if he's too sneaky for me to notice? But as I said, the LDS Church takes this verse out of context anyway. The preceding chapter begins thus: "And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you." Lacking any indications to the contrary, it would seem that the rest of the book of Malachi is addressed to these priests, and that the verses about tithing are actually a rebuke of religious leaders who hoard wealth. Hmmm. The LDS Church has hundreds of billions of dollars, and was fined by the Securities Exchange Commission earlier this year for breaking the law to hide that obscene wealth so its members would keep paying tithing, and of course it hasn't apologized or so much as acknowledged that incident in General Conference. Andersen has a lot of gall to exhort anyone to "be honest in their tithes" when he knows damn well that church leaders up to and including the First Presidency have not. He has a lot of gall to pretend the church still needs any donations when it could fund its operations indefinitely off the interest generated by its obscene wealth. And if tithing was really about personal consecration and putting the Lord first and whatever, it wouldn't be a flat rate for all members. Ten percent of my income was a sacrifice. Ten percent of Jon Huntsman's income is not. This is the other thing I read about that pissed me off. Ex-Mormons on Twitter are not happy about it. I really hope my parents are too smart to buy into this manipulative, emotionally abusive garbage. I left the LDS Church because it's not true and it's not good. I never questioned their faithfulness or their commitment to the principles that it teaches but doesn't live up to. For example, they taught me to be honest. The LDS Church is not honest. I have a problem with that. The problem is not with me or my parents. I don't see eye to eye with them on a lot of things, but they don't deserve to be guilt-tripped over their son making a choice that he has no reason to be sorry for. I won't likely have "a whole chain of descendants," but I kind of want to just so I can not raise them in the LDS Church, especially if they're female and/or LGBTQ. The "covenant path" is hardly worth staying on when the covenants and the supposed authority behind them are based on lies. I'm not interested in perpetuating "a legacy of faith" in a system based on lies. And I'm not interested in living with the monstrous LDS God for five minutes, let alone eternity. I guess my dad's going to be really lonely in the Celestial Kingdom. His dad and his five siblings and another of his kids were already "lost" long before I was. He did everything right to have an eternal family, but as usual, the LDS Church can't and won't keep its end of the bargain.
Saturday was one year since the Islamic Republic murdered Mahsa Amini for not wearing a hijab, sparking protests throughout Iran. After a few months, the Western media largely ignored these protests or straight-up lied that they were basically over, but the truth is that they aren't going to stop until the Islamic Republic is dead. The Islamic Republic has passed the point of no return. It's lost its legitimacy, it's become desperate, and its collapse is a matter of when, not if. The sooner the better, of course. The US and the EU need to hasten that day by growing some spines and treating it like the global pariah that it deserves to be. Down with all dictatorships, down with all theocracies, down with all religious extremism, and down with all misogyny and other forms of bigotry, no matter how much they wrap themselves up in the supposed respectability of faith.
Today I went for a hike in Tony's Grove with members of the local Unitarian Universalist congregation and three dogs. I was the youngest human there by a wide margin. The next youngest human was a mother of adults and teenagers, and everyone else had white hair, or in one case would have had white hair if she hadn't dyed it purplish red. I didn't remember where Tony's Grove was and I didn't realize the drive and the hike combined would total four and a half hours, but I'm not mad. Just tired. The temperature was perfect and the views were gorgeous. Susanne Janecke, a geologist from USU, told us about the caves and the rocks. Supposedly some of the latter were shaped by the ocean before life existed on land. I'll take her word for it. I felt, as I often do these days, insignificant against the scope of this planet's history, and since we'd just had a presentation on climate change by USU hydrologist Patrick Belmont earlier that day, I thought about the possibility that my entire species might not be here much longer, and I wondered why we evolved to be so stupid and whether there's any real purpose to the suffering we've inflicted on ourselves and our home. But mostly I just appreciated the views. Because I have two sisters and a non-binary sibling who functioned as a sister, I've seen the OG Barbie movies. I must have seen Barbie in the Nutcracker and Barbie as Rapunzel twenty times each. I unironically enjoyed them and I don't care who knows it. One night in 2019, long after the last time I saw Barbie as Rapunzel, I dreamed about its musical motif and woke up in chills from how beautiful it is. I also saw Dance! Workout With Barbie a few times. When I revisited it as an adult, I stopped watching after a few minutes because watching preteen girls in leotards made me uncomfortable, but I left it playing because it has a killer soundtrack by twelve-year-old Jennifer Love Hewitt, which is what I was really after anyway. Also it features the little mermaid as the voice of Barbie. When I saw the trailer for a live-action Barbie movie, I just thought the concept was bizarre, maybe even desperate. I wasn't super interested. But my interest shot through the roof after conservative man-babies like Ben Shapiro threw temper tantrums about its wokity wokeness. I will say that even though I fully agree with the movie's feminist message, I found it a little off-putting because it's delivered with all the subtlety of an exploding freight train full of fireworks and neon paint. (And the multiple references to Barbieland's all-female Supreme Court were kind of weird because they implied that the US in real life has an all-male Supreme Court, which it doesn't and hasn't for a long time. The US Supreme Court profoundly sucks, but not for that reason.) But I do agree with it, and oh, the movie was so, so funny. I kept thinking that it was a well-deserved giant middle finger to the church I grew up in. I swear I could hear Ezra Taft Benson screaming from beyond the grave within the first five minutes. The opening scene where little girls smash their baby dolls on rocks made me a little uncomfortable, but then I realized it was an allusion to Psalms 137:9, which celebrates smashing real babies on rocks, so that was fine. I just worried that the message might be anti-motherhood instead of anti-not-letting-women-have-identities-or-aspirations-outside-of-motherhood, which would make the filmmakers the very evil that anti-feminists think they are. I was glad they clarified that by the end. A week later, I went with Steve and Sierra to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. It was action-packed and funny. I don't really have anything specific to say about it, and I'm not a diehard turtle fan or anything, but I enjoyed it. Before that, we went to the thrift store and picked out a DVD that we knew would be really bad. It was a mockbuster, aptly described by Strong Bad as "The kind they put right next to the check-out line, so Grandma might accidentally mistake it for the real thing." The Secret of Anastasia is actually a knockoff of two movies - the real animated Anastasia movie released the same year, and Beauty and the Beast. In this version, she's friends with four talking instruments that are actually her parents and siblings, which she doesn't realize because she has amnesia for reasons that are never explained. It was just the right amount of badness. It had a lot of unintentionally funny moments and plot holes that we augmented with inappropriate jokes (like I asked if the horn blows himself, and a few minutes later when he did blow himself, we couldn't hold it together). I did legitimately appreciate that the Communist secret police's comic relief guy was named Goofinov, at least until his boss insulted our intelligence by saying "I hope Goofinov isn't goofing off again." And we all agreed that Anastasia's emo sister was funny. And the pronunciation of Anastasia was more authentic than in the real movie. And the portrayal of Russia's military as childishly incompetent and pathetic was very accurate. The bonus movie on the DVD, Snow White and the Magic Mirror, was legitimately good. The songs are better and it's funny on purpose. The Magic Mirror is a Robin Williams genie knockoff who imitated a bunch of nineties celebrities. The seven dwarves are all based on comedians that today's kids won't recognize. It's surprisingly dark in a couple places. Instead of ordering a hunter to kill Snow White, the queen orders a butcher to kill everyone in the kingdom (including her executioner, because even he's prettier than her). Fortunately, the butcher is a pacifist who doesn't even kill real animals. Then when Snow White runs away, her first stop is at an inn where a creepy guy with an off-screen mother offers her a private shower. In case you fail to notice the name of the inn, the camera zooms in on the words "The Bates Inn" after she leaves. I certainly hope no child understands that joke. My intelligence should have been insulted, but I was just shocked (in a good way) that they went there. My friends seemed a little confused that this movie follows traditional versions of the Snow White story more closely than the Disney version. She gets poisoned first by a magic comb and then by having a piece of apple stuck in her throat, and she revives when it pops out. She and the prince she just met sing a song about how they're going to get married, but at least he doesn't kiss her corpse. (He did see her at the dwarves' house earlier, but he didn't introduce himself because she was baking bread and it smelled awful and he was afraid he'd offer her some. Told you this movie is funny.) |
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- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
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