Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

I'll bow out now, because there's no use kicking against the pricks. Just a few final things. First, Utah is widely seen as being a leader in resolving these issues—even, it will shock you, by people who think. I know taking shots at Utah is always good sport, but almost anyone would tell you that y...

I just don't get it. None of these people are asking you to "get it." They're asking you to believe that they get it. There are loads of religious people everywhere who believe stuff that strikes me as genuinely nuts. That doesn't mean that their beliefs are insincere, that they don't bel...

Regardless of the legal grounds of this issue, I think that the sheltered Hoosier cake bakers will need to get with the times to be profitable and viable. In a world where hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Syrians are refugees, taking such umbrage and saying God will bring down condemnation upon...

Well, not really. The compelled speech doctrine is powerful; it overrides public accommodations law (the compelled speech doctrine is part of the First Amendment; laws that mandate serving everyone are just normal statutes, so the Constitution wins). My point isn't that discrimination makes the case...

So, in the compelled speech context, it depends whether you think of a typical wedding cake as expressive. I think most bakers would tell you that they consider their wedding cakes to be expressive, creative works of art (like what a florist would tell you about a floral arrangement). That's true ev...

Hi folks. A couple of things. Offering to make wedding cakes for heterosexual couples, but not homosexual couples, is discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It might be discrimination we're okay with, but if you're with the baker, the way out of this problem isn't saying that this isn't ...

Getting the Presidential Scholarship (now Monson, Hinckley when I started) at BYU is a total crapshoot even with great stats. I got it, but many of my friends with as good or better grades/test scores didn't. So don't be fooled about certainty—the fact of the matter is that 3.9x/35 v. 3.9x/34 may ma...

from what I had heard there are absolutely no ovaries in the building during the priesthood session. This doesn't appear to be correct. Yeah, I'd like to see confirmation on having female ushers in the session, because my understanding was also that they weren't allowed. This seem to be closer. Sev...

Let me try again. Some people have an idea of what they believe God's will is. Say, a close relative will die soon. But they really want something else—say, the relative would live. They wish that it were God's will that the relative would live, even though they've figured it's not. So when Portia s...

You're right. The fact that people wish for things that they believe aren't God's will means that God's a sexist. I am crushed under your logic.

People wish that things they don't believe are God's will were actually his will all the time.

I think unless you are part of a minority group, it's hard to articulate what systematic inequality feels like. Certainly true as a general principle. That said, it seems clear that a significant majority of even the people in the Church who know what "systematic inequality feels like" do...

[I think that is one route for activists to consider. Having their husbands ordain them. This would just get people excommunicated. It got people excommunicated TWO YEARS before the ban was lifted in 1978, when many of the Brethren were clearly already contemplating the ban being gone. How in the w...

Thanks, Whistler, that's helpful. I mean, there's quite a bit on extra-Church protesting, and there's the Genesis Group. The Genesis Group was Church-sponsored, it's important to note: its leaders were actually set apart (the idea for the Group, the article says, actually came from then-Elders Hinck...

Out of curiosity, can anyone point me to instances of protest analogous to what OW is proposing related to blacks and the priesthood from the 70s? The whole "This is like blacks and the priesthood, people agitated, and after a while the Brethren asked, and what do you know, we got the answer we...

Plus this quote from (I assume) one of the founders of Ordain Women: "It's striking they would direct us to the free-speech zones," Kelly said. "We feel as faithful, active Mormon women we have nothing in common with people who oppose the church and want to protest against it. The ch...

I don't think that many pregnant non-Mormon women are frequently surrounded by 20-year-olds, to be fair. Then the problem has little to do with short engagements and abstinence and lots to do with living in a college town. "I have a hard time dwelling negatively on my size when I'm wrapped up ...

Maybe the short dating and engagement periods, coupled with the tradition towards abstinence, makes people feel insecure even after being married? Because only Mormon pregnant women wish they had their pre-pregnancy bodies? Come on. This is trying way too hard to take a very normal pregnancy outloo...

I think the underlying assumption is false. Fair enough—the scriptures are a history, after all—although I was careful to only imagine that someone would describe the scriptures that way. My guess is that for the questioner, the reason the scriptures include descriptions of sin is to condemn them. ...

I'm going to push back a bit and point out the double standard in this attitude. Would it still be adhering to a double standard if one said that the only reason the scriptures ever portray sin is to demonstrate its bad outcomes, and that the same is rarely true of any modern media that also portra...