In Defense of the Church's Actual Teaching on Sexuality, Not the Stupid Ways We Teach It

I believe in my church and all its teachings. However, I stand with Elder Holland in his recent conference talk when he said "Except in the case of His only perfect Begotten Son, imperfect people are all God has ever had to work with. That must be terribly frustrating to Him, but He deals with it. So should we."

I am dismayed when we Mormons are unfairly demonized, misrepresented, and jumped on. However, sometimes we, like all humans, deserve to be constructively criticized. An opportunity to constructively criticize has recently arisen. I had to roll my eyes at how some of it went down. Nobody's responses, even from the Mormons, actually defended the actual teachings of the church, they just myopically focused on our failings.

Elizabeth Smart recently spoke at Johns Hopkins about human trafficking. I'd encourage you to follow that link and to listen to her 12 minute presentation. It's important to hear the entirety of her words.

She started a bit of a flap when she discussed the metaphor that she had been taught in school (but clearly was from Mormon cultural teachings on chastity) on being a piece of chewed gum because she was the victim of rape. Since she was taught that virtue (read: virginity, though that's a really stupid way to use that word in this case) was a binary concept, she had lost it, and was now worthless.

ThinkProgress jumped on that immediately, condemning "abstinence education." But they weren't the only ones. Elle joined in. So did the Washington Post. And I completely think they missed the point of her remarks and read into it what they wanted to.

This was about the same time I got added to another group on Facebook, ostensibly to have nice discussions about Mormonism. The first question asked in a poll? (I'm paraphrasing, as don't recall it exactly.) "Would you rather have had sexual experience before you got married?" Over 50% of the respondents (and there were a lot of them; this wasn't just a random statistical anomaly because only 5 people had voted) said "yes."

So I left the group. This isn't the first time this has happened to me. It appears to be difficult for me to find Mormon groups on Facebook that both intelligently discuss Mormonism and, you know, are actually Mormon.

You see, I don't think Elizabeth Smart was condemning abstinence education qua abstinence education.  She certainly wasn't going after the doctrine of the LDS church, which has been implied in some of the commentary on her remarks. After all, she is a practicing Mormon, served a mission, and was married in the temple. That means she believes (and practices) only having sex with your spouse. Period. That's the LDS church's law of chastity. That's abstinence. Yes, I know that abstinence education is usually woefully incomplete in other areas like technical information about STDs and birth control methods, but that's a different subject. I'd like to focus on the ideal of abstinence or chastity itself. You can teach abstinence in public schools or the law of chastity in church without resorting to dumb metaphors that make victims of sexual assault feel worthless. We shouldn't stop teaching abstinence and in the church we especially should not stop teaching the law of chastity; we should stop teaching it poorly.

Somehow I never picked up on these poor teachings. Even if I was taught it poorly, I saw through the double standard and instantly wrote it off. A large portion of that is probably because I'm male, and we don't emphasize male "virtue" (again, virginity) as much in our culture and therefore in the church. I was taught correctly that even if I sinned, the atonement provided a way to be forgiven. I was not presented with the binary of you either are virtuous (virginal) or not. But I do distinctly remember a seminary teacher telling us to write in our scriptures "and men too!" in the margins next to Jacob 2:28 ("For I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women"). I never held myself to a double standard where men could repent of sexual sin but women cannot. I bet most Mormon men don't. Susan just never encountered those poor ways of teaching and those wrong ideas. She has a recollection of hearing some of the bad analogies and whatnot from her mother, but it was totally in the context of mocking and condemning them.

I'm not the only one who disagreed with the interpretation of Smart's remarks as "anti-abstinence." Nate Oman at Times and Seasons largely agrees with me, and has some great ideas on how to change the way we teach about chastity. The Deseret News also agrees with me, though others disagree with the Desert News' comments. For me, just because we teach some things badly doesn't mean we should junk the entire thing. The law of chastity is important. It helps us preserve all of us, male and female, as gift for our spouse, a whole-body, whole-eternity, whole-everything gift.

It can be taught wrong. Any teaching that could even in the slightest indicate that sexual assault survivors are somehow less desirable is a lie straight from the bowels of hell. This includes Moroni 9:9, which, sadly, is still used in the Young Women's curriculum. Some teachers of young women, though I'm sure they are well-meaning, still bring up poor analogies all the time, as evidenced by this post and its many comments. These things die hard. (We should also, in particular, not sexualize four year old girl's shoulders. But the many other bad ways we teach the law of chastity is a whole other blog post topic. This one is on chastity as the ideal.)

Incidentally, Mormons aren't the only ones with the problem of teaching correct principles poorly. I took a class at CUA titled "Christian Marriage and Family," by which they actually meant "Catholic" Marriage and Family. It was a MA level class for future monks and nuns. There I was, in a sea of people in habits and white collars, learning about sexuality, marriage, sacraments, chastity, etc. Professor Mattison told a story of a young man who said to him: "I can't wait for the wedding night, when I will finally be able to understand the metaphor of Christ's unity with the church!" Solemnly, Mattison said, "do you think we might be setting too high an expectation there?" There was nervous laughter.

I believe in my church's teaching on sexuality. It is a gift (both male and female) reserved for one's spouse in legal marriage to help bind the two of you together physically, emotionally, neurochemically, and parentally. It is a beautiful thing. And it is a thing to be worked on. Through your entire marriage. Because human bodies change. Pregnancy changes things. Menopause does. Or age. Or just being plum tired because of the kids/work/church callings/life/whatever. This article is just wrong wrong wrong. Wrong. Obviously I can't comment on the entirety of the failed marriage she talks about, and how their sexual relationship was a total disaster, but if even half of that article is true or unexaggerated there was zero communication, zero working with each other, zero desire to satisfy one another, zero education on sex and sexuality, and zero . . . well anything. In short, if your approach to sex is to have the woman "close her eyes and think of England" because women aren't as sexual as men, or whatever lame untrue excuse you have, you're doing it wrong!! (If you don't get that reference, here.)

Abstinence teachings are not wrong. They, in the end, will help people live happy, more fulfilled lives. My wife and I can both attest to this, and there's plenty of actual data to back it up. The way that those very teachings are introduced and discussed, however, can be very damaging. So I look forward to all the unpaid volunteer teachers in the church getting better at teaching the law of chastity in healthier ways, because right now the way we teach it can have devastating effects-this link made me want to cry, but it also made me happy by the end. They will get better at it, but they will still be teaching the law of chastity. The actual doctrine of the church is true. The ways we teach it and much of the culture built up around the actual doctrine have a long way to go.  It's important to not throw out the baby with the bathwater, and a lot of the responses to Elizabeth's remarks did that.

Arbitrary Rules are Easily Circumvented

Sometimes I don't get arbitrary rules that make no sense, like "Missionaries can use Skype, but not Google Plus Hangouts to call home on Mother's Day." Smart families will have ways to get around that.

Like Google Plus Hanging Out with a Skype Call.

The funniest parts of this call? Well, first, Gabriel saying "hi Uncle Xan!"

Second, Caleb saying "Hi, Bronson," and Alex going "huh?" with a really confused look on his face.

This was the digital equivalent of my driving over to my parent's house to see the call. I think it's silly that if I lived close to them, I can officially talk to Caleb in Taiwan for Mother's Day, but if I don't, well too bad for me. Then again, I've always had a flexible relationship with such rules. I actually called home eight times on my mission. Father's Day 2000 (I was in the MTC for Mother's day and convinced President to let me call home), Christmas 2000, lost a contact down the drain on a Sunday and just had Mom and Dad send me another one, Mother's Day 2001, 9/11 (before we officially could call home to leave a 5 second message letting Mom know I was okay), 9/11 again (after we had official permission to call home), Christmas 2001, Mother's Day 2002.

It was great to talk to my brother briefly. So proud of him. He'll be home in 6 months.

I Finished My Fishing Merit Badge!

Many years ago I caught a rainbow trout in the dead of winter in Utah, on Deer Creek Reservoir, while ice fishing. That, along with many other things, allowed me to nearly complete my fishing merit badge. At the time, as memory served, you needed to catch two different kinds of fish "in a sportsmanlike manner." As I had only caught one, I had not completed the requirements. I mentioned this once to one of my scoutmasters, and he told me to go to a pet store, get a fish net, and catch a goldfish. "That's sportsmanlike!" he said.

I didn't think that would count, but nice try Brother Clark.

Today I went fly fishing with my bishop, a man I greatly respect and admire. I had bought the outing at a recent service auction. His "service" was to take the three top bids out fly fishing, and I was one of those top three bids.

Oh, lookit me! I caught a fish! And it's not a rainbow trout! Bishop said it was called a squaw fish.

I'm too old to be a scout, but I can say I've officially completed the requirements for the Fishing Merit Badge.

Of course, I looked up the requirements, and I'm pretty sure they have changed since Brother Clark and I were discussing them. The current requirements only say you have to catch one fish. Darn. I hope that change was done after I turned 18 (when they kick you out of scouts), otherwise I would actually have finished the requirements, and should have gotten the merit badge! Ah well.

I Beat Shadowness!

I don't play video games very much. I'm too easily addicted. I've been sober from World of WarCraft for almost 4 years. I sometimes play game on my iPhone, but that can be frustrating. I beat all of Plants vs. Zombies on my phone before losing all of the data in an upgrade, so I just quit. Susan, however, went back and re-beat the entire game.

But I ran across an online flash game about a month ago, linked from one of my humor sites. These little online flash games are fun, and this one was pretty addicting. Yeah, I got sucked in.

It's called "Shadowness," and I highly recommend it if you have a little bit of time. Some of the levels are incredibly hard. Took me a while just attempting it on and off, but I beat it. I think it took me about a month. It was difficult enough, that I'm posting the proof for all of you to see. That's all.

Awesome Con 2013

I was invited by a member of my ward to be part of a panel at this year's Awesome Con in DC. So I went. It was a Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate, and I was on the Star Wars side. I think we lost the debate, but I was one of those who thinks that debate is kind of silly, so I didn't care. Both franchises are great for entirely different reasons.

Anyway, I took some pictures. Good times.

Here's the crowd getting ready to hear the debate. We filled a 240 person room to overflowing, at the same time one of the major guests of the Con (Nicholas Brendon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) was doing his panel. We even got mentioned in the write-up in the DCist online newspaper. Nice!

And the one picture I could find online of our panel. (I'm on the far left.)

And here's all of us in a blurry photo after the panel. 

Jango and Boba Fett from the 501st.

 Warhammer 40k Space Marine. This guy's costume was awesome.

Slender Man. He wasn't that tall. There was another one floating around, but he was even shorter. They were underwhelming. Next time I'm bring my friend Russ and having him go as Slender Man, because he's perfect for it! 

If I had time and money, I would play table top wargames like this one, Warhammer 40k. Warhammer would also be fun and I'm sure there are others I'd enjoy, but I've only ever played 40k myself. I even know who I'd get to paint my figures to make them awesome like these guys!

Also, Sci Fi nerd Speed Dating just looks awesome. Here we have a female Jayne from Firefly talking with Garrus Vakarian from the Mass Effect video game series. (Also got this from the web.) 

I didn't get a picture with any of the guys dressed as Spider Man, but I should have to send to my nephew Bronson, who you can see here shooting his web at you. Next year. If he's still into Spider Man.  

I saw some people videotaping my panel, but none of them apparently uploaded it to youtube. If they do, I'll link it here. 

100k Hits Celebration Post

My last post was the one that pushed the total number of visits to this blog over 100,000! Yay! I thought it might be the case, so I was watching it, and managed to catch it right at the moment the number of visits went over the top. 

I'm pretty sure that this guy was visitor number 100,000. From the great state of New York!

I started tracking such things when my post on the LDS Cult of False Expectations went viral and started getting hundreds of hits every minute. When I put that widget up on the blog that very day (I also installed google analytics coding to more accurately track things) it was already at 25k, reflecting I think the amount of hits I'd already gotten up until then. That post, my post on Alignment, and my review of Marble Hornets Season 1 seem to be my most popular posts.

Not too shabby, I think, for my random rantings on science fiction, my nephews, Mormonism, politics, why sports are evil, and anything else the voices in my head want to discuss. Thanks to everybody who has visited.

You should all comment more. ;)

Thoughts on Current Mormon Goings-On

There's a lot of things that have happened in the past month or so in the Mormon world that I've wanted to put my two cents into, and so now you're just going to get it all at once. 

New Scriptures

The LDS church put out a new edition of the scriptures. Most of the changes are small and have to deal with punctuation. You can see a quick overview of the changes here. The more interesting one, to me, was the big PDF that showed all the individual changes to the Doctrine and Covenants side by side with the older edition. Again, most of the changes are small, dealing with dates and small changes to make appropriate edits. The interesting one is that there are now more official introductions to the two Official Declarations. This is where I'd like to comment. 

The intro to OD-1 says that "monogamy is God's standard for marriage." There goes the folklore doctrine that we will all have to be polygamists in heaven. It also says that plural marriage was introduced to the church in the 1840s, which is technically true. Joseph, however, started attempting to practice it much earlier. I would have gone with the earlier date, were I in charge, just to continue to avoid charges of obfuscation. It concludes with "this led to the end of the practice of plural marriage in the church" which is ambiguous enough to me that it's accurate. Members of the church, including members of the 12, continued to enter plural marriages until 1904, when Joseph F. Smith released the "Second Manifesto," which basically said "we weren't kidding, now knock it off!" This is further evidenced in the new edition of the scriptures in the removal of the sentence "the vote to sustain the foregoing was unanimous in the affirmative," because it totally wasn't. 

The intro to OD-2 is fantastic! It clearly states that we've always had members of the church of all races, that Joseph Smith ordained some black people, that the practice stopped by there is no clear point why (and certainly no revelation), and that leaders waited until the Lord told them to change the practice in 1978. There's a lot more context going on there, and I appreciate it. We really don't know why the practice was begun. If you'd like to see various church scholars and historians bickering over when it did, you can look at this post on the changes from By Common Consent. There's a lot of back and forth in the comments on exactly when the ban was enacted. Ultimately I agree with Brad who says "The conversation here among some of the most prominent experts on the question in the world demonstrates that we do not have a clear answer to that question [when the ban began]."

Also, the intro to the Pearl of Great Price slightly backs off of exactly where the Book of Abraham came from. Not sure if that was necessary, but sure, why not? (I myself find the arguments that it was an authentic translation of the papyri good enough that I think it's at minimum plausible, and no reason to leave the church.)

All of these are good because the begin to introduce some of the nuances of church history, which right now are sorely lacking in official church curriculum. 

New Ages for Missionaries

We're looking at like 90,000 LDS missionaries, ladies and gentleman! The Lord is indeed hastening his work. We, here in Rockville, have our first 19 year old sister missionary. This coupled with the announcement of what I'm designating "Sister APs" shows that the Lord is indeed listening and making things more equitable for women in the church. On that note of gender equality . . . 

Women Praying in Conference and Wanting the Priesthood

There are genuine inequalities between men and women in the church, some apparently deliberate, most cultural. When I had to describe this to my class at Georgetown I said that the church's official position was (my wording) that men and women are "separate but equal." That phrase obviously comes with a lot of baggage. There are many ways in which we can do better, though, to maintain the "equal" part. I particularly like this talk from FAIR's conference last year. I am sympathetic to many Mormon feminist goals, inasmuch as church culture can be incredibly stupid sometimes. If you are one who just thinks that Mormon feminists need to "get in line" I invite you to read this post from LDS WAVE. While I do not agree with all of it, my friend Chelsea makes many good points and makes her case incredibly well. There are many links in this blog post of mine. This is the one to read. 

Wear Pants to Church Day was fine. Originally I was all "is sacrament meeting really the place to be pushing or demonstrating, even a little?" and then the internet was all "Die, Mormon Feminists, Die!" and then I was like "well, it might not be the best place to be demonstrating even a little but I'm on the side of the people not giving out death threats for breaking a cultural rule that is officially not even a real rule rule." I didn't wear a purple tie myself because it was our Christmas program, so I wore a red one as instructed by our choir director. 

But, then the group organizing Wear Pants to Church Day went on to do a letter-writing campaign to have a woman pray in General Conference, something that had never been done before. Another small step for womankind in the church, one that there's no reason we shouldn't have women praying. Originally I wanted to blog about it and say something like "let's be clear, the church is a top-down hierarchy, so while you can point disparities out, you won't actually change unless they want to change." Basically, I didn't want a woman to pray in conference this time because it would empower those who think that the brethren actually respond to opinion polls. Because the next opinion poll that would rear up would be for women to be ordained, because yeah, that's going to work just like wearing pants and praying in conference. 

Turns out I was totally right, and there's now a website asking for women to be ordained in the LDS church.

Then a woman prayed in conference. Then another woman prayed in conference. Done. Moving on. 

But I think there's some pushback from the church on this issue of gender inequality. On Friday the church released this video of the Relief Society general president, the Young Women's general president, and the Primary general president. It reads a lot more like pushback than it sounds if you listen to the video itself. Coupled with the Sister AP announcement, it could be the church is simply saying that women should be more included in councils at all levels-something I think we can all get behind. I bet there are local levels of the church that the council system is not working as it should, and the video presents a corrective for that. The timing on that seems too coincidental, though, to not be slightly motivated by all this recent feminist stuff. 

There is one point I'd like to make, however. At 9:30 or so in the video President Burton says that women have access to all the blessings of the priesthood. I would like to point out that this is false. A major function (if not the major function) of the priesthood is to perform authorized ordinances to make covenants, and women certainly have access to those ordinances and covenants. I think this is what President Burton meant. However, I, as a priesthood holder have additional blessings that come from officiating over those ordinances. In particular I think I've developed spiritually by giving blessings and ordaining people. The development that comes from such free-form prayers acting on God's behalf is a blessing of the priesthood that women do not have access to, and has probably been the most important part of having the priesthood in my life. 

I don't know why women don't have the priesthood. I am sympathetic to a church with a disproportionate number of active women somehow "incentivizing" men to stay, but that seems like a poor way to go about doing it. The best explanation I have right now is that the current structure of priesthood ordination and advancement teaches men in particularly male ways about responsibilities and aids them in their spiritual development. And there I go being slightly gender essentialist again in my open-minded chauvinist way. I'm even sympathetic to the idea that women are more "innately spiritual" than men, though there's a whole host of caveats to that idea. However, maybe tomorrow Thomas S. Monson will get a revelation that all women will receive the priesthood and all men will have theirs revoked. Who knows? 

I'm more sympathetic, actually, to a male-only priesthood in Roman Catholicism, where the priest is supposed to serve as an image of Christ. Because whether or not Christian feminists like it or not, Christ was actually male. Whether that means that no woman could ever serve as a sacramental image of Christ is an interesting question, but in the end, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to answer that question "no, women cannot." This doesn't affect Mormons except for certain parts in the endowment, which already has women officiators in other ways, so it's not a reason to exclude women from our priesthood. More of the church should follow the ideals of the endowment, which can only be officiated if there is at least one of both a male and a female ordinance worker officiating. This seems to be what the church was saying with the Sister APs announcement and the video with the three women Presidents mentioned previously. 

We Now Have the Coolest YW General President Ever

The outgoing YW president went out with two bangs. First, a BYU devotional where she (pretty clearly, I think) pushed back against the pants-wearing, conference praying, priesthood-ordaining advocates. Second, her final talk where she used a terrible scripture about rape to make a point about the value of chastity. I'm all for chastity, but not at the expense of making sexual assault victims feel like garbage. Rape victims are not "less than" because of a crime committed against them. 

By contrast, our new YW general president has a pinterest account that has a "Funny Stuff" board. It's HILARIOUS!!! She makes fun of Kristen Stewart's acting, among other things. Here are a few I liked the best, and I have screenshots of them in case she ever takes some of these down. 

This one gives me doubts about her ability to understand men: 

She says "Starry Night, as rendered in bacon. But why?" Why? WHY?!?! It's bacon! You don't need a reason for that! 

There's also a long one that makes me wonder if she really read all of it. References to drinking and swearing, among other things. But it's still funny. 

And finally she can make fun of herself and Mormons in general. That makes me happy. She's in the pink in the first picture-from the official announcement of the new YW general presidency. 

So the church moves forward. New scripture updates. New programs. Fixing things that are mere culture. New leaders. 

But I personally am not holding my breath for the women ordination thing.