Maine voters reject gay marriage
flockwoodThe San Francisco Chronicle reports that roughly 53 percent of Mainers voted to reject same-sex marriage, adding: “Tuesday’s battle pitted Mainers’ ‘live and let live’ values against the moral power of the Catholic Church, which was at the forefront of the Stand for Marriage Maine campaign to repeal the law.”
November 4th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Yet another example of the hypocrisy in those who decry that “socialism” will result in a loss of individual freedoms and vote for measures such as this that restrict the freedoms of others. “Freedom” to these people means you’re free to do whatever you want so long as I agree with it.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Cheese, you are aware, I hope, that the majority vote in Maine is consistent with the position taken by Barack Obama.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Is my name Barack Obama?
November 4th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Let me elaborate. Yes, I voted for Barack Obama, who has publicly stated that he does not support same-sex marriages. Do I agree with everything Barack Obama stands for? Absolutely not, but I had more in common with his positions on other issues than those of the people on the other side of the ticket. What Barack Obama thinks in no way changes the fact that these people’s messages are hypocritical.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
My point is: if your political philosophy includes an aversion to government intrusion in your life, then you need to keep your nose out of the business of consenting adults who are harming no one.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Cheese, you forget the Three Gs of conservatism: God, Guns, and Gays. The only properly intrusive function of government, according to them, is to promote God and Guns, and to exclude Gays from any political power. Beyond that, they don’t believe in governmental intrusion . . .
November 4th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Caleb, while you wish to criticize conservatives for the result in Maine, you ignore the fact that Maine is a very liberal state. It wasn’t your dreaded conservatives who produced this result. Barack Obama also opposes same-sex marriage, as do most African-Americans. While Obama campaigned on reversing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military, he has not done so. Since he could accomplish this by executive order, why has he not done so in 10 months? Or do you not apply the same standards, or any standards, to people on your side of the political aisle?
November 4th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
No, Forsan, I’m equal opportunity. To me, Obama is more dangerous than a conservative, because he’s a moderate in liberal’s clothing. My black friends see him as a horrible conservative. You’re absolutely right to suggest that he has done nothing to support the very gays and lesbians who helped elect him. And he will feel the heat of political retribution if he doesn’t straighten up on gay and lesbian issues. The problem, of course, is that while black voters tend to be liberal on most social issues, they appear to have a problem with the issue of gay rights.
November 4th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Yeah, a real liberal would have legalized marijuana on day one.
November 4th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Now that’s a proposal I can get behind, Cheese. Where’s Gatewood when you need him?
November 10th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
“Straighten up on gay and lesbian issues.” Good one, Caleb!
I think the real issue here is that conservatives and even many liberals don’t want to be forced. They don’t want to be forced to accept gayness as “normal” in the sight of the law. Let me clarify here: I support gay marriage and could care less if the law says they’re married or not. But, I’m also with the majority (for now) in not wishing to force others to accept something they feel is morally reprehensible. Whether is actually is or not is beside the point. The gays need to continue their work of proving to the majority they are not deviants. They don’t really have that far to go, as long as they remain civil about it.
Many conservatives (maybe even a majority of them) are not against gays being gay, they’re just against being forced to acknowledge them as normal. That doesn’t mean they are “less equal” either, they have all the rights of married couples–just not the name. They are just not normal in some people’s eyes–including many liberals, as the numbers seem to show.
I’m proud of Barak Obama being his own man on this issue and not swallowing literally everything the liberal establishment spews out. I don’t agree with him completely on this, but I agree that he has a perfectly logical argument (which is quite refreshing coming from him, actually).
As an illustrative example of what I’m talking about: A friend of mine took his family to Disneyland a few weeks ago and happened to go on Disneyland’s “Gay Pride Day” or something like that. The whole park was filled with gays, doing what regular heterosexual couples would do, I suppose, but sometimes maybe exaggerated–lots of groping and smooching and such. My friend didn’t care so much that their are gays in the world, but it made him and his family (especially the younger ones) a bit uncomfortable. They left after only an hour or so. Maybe it would be ideal if these things didn’t bother people, but the reality is that they do. So, the gays still have some work to do, I suppose.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
The problem with conservatives, John, is they never want to change anything. If they hadn’t been forced to accept integration, they’d never have accepted it. Barry Goldwater, the great patron saint of conservatives, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later, he was against making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday. If conservatives hadn’t been forced to accept the idea of women’s suffrage, they’d never have adopted it. If they hadn’t been forced to accept the idea that gays and lesbians are human beings, too, they’d never have accepted that.
There has never been a time that I know of when conservatives have ever been out in front on any idea that had any social progressiveness to it. And they wonder why people like me don’t take them seriously.
As for your friend’s experience at Disneyland, I guess it says something that your buddy wasn’t worried about the fact that the Disney organization has paved over half of Florida and what part of California it could get to, substituted its own ideology and (to some degree theology) for that of the rest of us, and no doubt has created an ecological disaster that the rest of us will have to clean up. None of that bothered him, but let two gays or lesbians hold hands, or as you say, smooch, and the gloves are off. Good conservative thought, there.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Wow Caleb, your are weird! Disney has a theology? If they do, I don’t think it’s much different than the rest of the entertainment industry or Hollywood. You want the force of law to restrain any entity that you don’t agree with? Shut down Disneyland? There are far bigger polluters than Disney Corp. Your really think my friend should have been thinking about Disney’s “carbon footprint” or whatever more than a gay couple making out right in front of his 8 year old? Weird. I think you expect too much of people. I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast this morning, let alone some 50’s movie about a “Great White Hope” character.
You missed the critical element in the Women’s Suffrage and Civil Rights movements: The majority voted for them! That’s all I’m saying here. It took some time, but the laws were not enacted until the will of the majority was brought into line. This must be the process (and really the only one that works) or we face the very real risk of tyranny. Otherwise, we might as well just find the most enlightened person we can, like yourself, and make him king. Democracy is not always perfect, but it does a fairly good job–when people are informed–of maintaining the most happiness and the least misery for the greatest number of citizens. Just like the Women’s Rights and Civil Rights movements, the gays have got to continue to work within the system to convince the majority that they’re okay.
These are not always “conservative” issues. More than 80 percent of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 (or was it ‘65?) as opposed to only 50 percent of Democrats. Granted that includes the “Southern” Democrats, but still that’s a big majority of the conservative party. You honestly think reasonable people hate someone because of the hue of their skin? I understand prejudices and stereotypes exist, but most mature people understand, at least on an intellectual level, the reality of others–their hopes and fears, etc.–regardless of mere skin color, eye color, height, or what-have-you. You simply loose credibility when you paint a whole class of people as bigots. Many conservatives that did oppose the Civil Rights legislation did so because they didn’t think we needed LAWS to MAKE people do the right thing. However, history has proven that, to some extent, we did. My personal dream is that someday we can repeal the Civil Rights laws simply because they are on longer needed–no one would ever think to mistreat someone because of their race.
Conservatives are not on the bandwagon for change simply for change’s sake. They look at the possible outcomes, the unintended consequences (there are ALWAYS unintended consequences), and weigh the options before taking risks. Something “knee-jerk” liberals could learn from.
November 11th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Can we drop this conservative v. liberal stereotypical nonsense? Conservatives and liberals are just like any other group of people, a few winners, a whole lot of losers.
November 11th, 2009 at 11:31 am
John, you’re right that more Republicans voted for the civil rights act than Democrats, but that’s because the Republicans weren’t all conservatives then. The Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party was liberal by modern standards, and folks like Everett Dirksen, who was a major force behind the passage of the civil rights act, would have to register as members of the Green Party today. It’s not just that modern conservatives don’t favor change for change’s sake, they don’t favor it for any other reason, either.
It always tickles me when the grass eaters say we don’t need laws to make people do the right thing, then advocate making abortion illegal and keeping marijuana illegal. Of course, they’re always in favor of laws requiring the posting of the ten commandments everywhere. But I suppose that won’t make people do the right thing.
As far as the majority being for civil rights and women’s suffrage, that may be true today, but only because we’re at the end of a long fight. In 1954, when the Brown v. Board of Education decision came out, the entire South refused to obey it, and got away with refusing to do so for ten years, until the passage of the civil rights act, and its enforcement really didn’t get under full swing until the ’70s. So much for the majority winning. I know that you’re a lot younger than I am, and the fact that you don’t show much historical perspective on all this, I suppose, is more a function of age than anything else, but it makes me sad to see that we’ve lost so much appreciation of history.
People marched and were jailed and died for the civil rights movement long before the majority came around. In the area of gay rights, we’re at about the equivalent of where we were in 1950 on civil rights for blacks, on the eve of the Brown decision. Some religious groups today are openly opposed to equal rights for gays and lesbians, just as some of them were for blacks in 1950. The more liberal churches today support these rights, just as the more liberal churches supported civil rights for blacks in 1950. And, just as the grass eaters ultimately lost that fight, they’ll ultimately lose this one, too.
Oh, and the movie “The Great White Hope” came out in 1970, not the ’50s, and was beaten out for best picture at that year’s oscars by “Patton,” a movie about a white guy which I’m sure you do remember, as I do. As for what you had for breakfast, I don’t know, either.
November 11th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Caleb, here a few changes brought about by liberals/progressives you forgot to mention.
The racial segregation of the armed forces (Woodrow Wilson).
The forced sterilization of mentally handicapped people (Oliver Wendell Holmes).
Internment camps for Japanese-Americans (FDR, affirmed by his good buddy on the Supreme Court, William Douglas).
November 11th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Grass! That’s what I had for breakfast this morning! Now I remember. Thanks!
Thanks for the compliment about my youth. I thought when I turned 40 I was getting up there, but I guess I still have a long way to go. Yes, being born in ‘69, I missed MOST of the Sixties, but my parents and older siblings (7 of them) remember much of what went on. My Dad in particular was involved in Republican party politics since 1951. Some of that time he was in your beloved Kentucky. He remembers racist attitudes all too well, and never supported them. Fortunately, he personally watched as blacks were slowly, and finally, coming in and being accepted into mainstream American society. It may not have been fast enough for everybody’s liking but he appreciated it nonetheless. As a conservative, he had nothing against the goals of the Civil Rights act at all, he simply was worried about the intrusion into the private rights that would be necessary to enforce these laws. He remembers how Kentucky schools were integrated all on their own even before Brown vs. Board of Education.
You need to be immersed in the culture of the time to fully understand the revolution that was finally occurring. Bob Shieffer of CBS News remembers growing up in Texas where blacks were not allowed in city parks. He and all he knew literally thought nothing of it. That’s just the way things were, wrong or right. He says in his biography he did remember that one day blacks simply started coming to the public parks and nobody had any problems with it long before the Civil Rights movement fired up with Rosa Parks and MLK.
You see, I believe most people are naturally good, otherwise we never would have survived as a species. Blacks were on the same track as the Irish, Italians and many other ethic classes on their way to full American integration. Problem was, we as a people, to our great discredit, didn’t take action when a minority of truly racist leaders made proactive efforts to hold the blacks back. The blacks were holding public offices and integrated into the Army until our much-beloved Democrat (and Nobel Peace Prize laureate) Woodrow Wilson segregated them. Post Civil War blacks were, with good intentions, pushed into roles in society they were not quite ready for. Illiterate public officials are not good, black or white (then again maybe they would be… hmm…). The South and others pushed back with Jim Crow laws and the such. The Republicans shamefully backed down in the face of these atrocities thus eventually sparking the backlash that made the Civil Rights Bill necessary.
BTW, I got my bachelor’s degree in history and had a few semesters on contemporary European and American history. However, I don’t remember discussing Oscar runner-up movies in any of them (or I might have just missed that day). I apologize for not knowing the second place movie from 39 years ago when I was 1. Forgive me.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
True, Forsan, and modern liberals have rejected each of these things; in fact, each was overturned by liberals:
Truman ended the ban on segregation in the military by executive order, years before the Brown decision, and MANY years before the passage of modern civil rights laws. I’ll let you slide on that one, because even though the military was segregated long before Wilson was president (remember the Buffalo soldiers), he did segregate other aspects of the Federal government, such as the post office. Of course, Wilson also inaugurated the eight hour work day, and fought for child labor laws, which conservatives of the time lobbied considerably against, not to mention that whole Treaty of Versailles debacle.
Liberal judges struck down the forced sterilization of anyone. And, when one gets into the area of eugenics, one finds a scab on both liberals and conservatives that doesn’t bear pulling off.
Liberal judges later re-visited the Korematsu case, which had initially approved the internment of the Japanese-Americans. I suppose I can’t wiggle out of that one, given that FDR had appointed eight of the nine justices sitting, and the lone Republican appointee, Owen Roberts, voted against the internment, one of three justices to do so. Another of the three, though, Frank Murphy, who was described as “a New Dealer before there was a New Deal,” issued a vehement dissent, in which he compared what the government was doing to the racial policies of Nazi Germany. The third dissenter, Robert Jackson, was arguably the greatest justice of that era. So, the liberals were divided (just not divided enough) on that one. Ironically, Earl Warren, the Republican California governor on whose watch much of the internments occurred, wrote the decision in the Brown case. As I said earlier, not all Republicans were conservatives in those days. Harry Blackmun, who wrote the decision in Roe v. Wade, was a Republican and Republican appointee.
So, from this, we learn two things. First, liberals are not perfect. Second, Republicans weren’t always the conservatives. And, given that the most recent liberal sin you mentioned was during World War II, that ain’t a bad record.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
John, you’re forgiven for your poor performance on movie trivia, but don’t expect to do well during the Double Jeopardy round.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
And, John, you do seem to have a good broad grasp of history, though don’t get fooled into thinking that segregation in the armed forces wasn’t around pre-Wilson. As Vann Woodward’s later work shows, segregation existed informally long before it existed formally.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
“Problem was, we as a people, to our great discredit, didn’t take action when a minority of truly racist leaders made proactive efforts to hold the blacks back.”
Replace “racist” with “homophobic” and “blacks” with “gays,” and you’ll understand how we view the assault against gay rights.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Caleb, on the subject of eugenics, that was quite the liberal/progressive cause pre-WWII when people like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, saw it as a way to limit the population of undesirables, including non-whites. Awards are still given in her name.
If you want a more recent example of liberal change making life worse, consider the urban renewal projects which created high-rise public housing ghettos in inner cities and destroyed neighborhoods. In places like Chicago, these projects were also used to intensify de facto segregation. The damage from these projects continues.
November 11th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Well, cheese, I see your point about gays; however, being gay is a behavior while being black is not. Not justifying anything, just pointing out a subtle nuance others (intolerant bastards!) might bring up.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Seriously guys, enough of the Democrat versus Republican thing. That southern wing of the Democratic Party included bigwigs like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, gentlemen who later found a more comfortable fit in the modern GOP. Shoot, even the Ronald Reagan was a Democrat back then. Whether you are being childishly argumentative or just delusional in making these cross-generational comparisons, let’s not waste any more breath on a historical point that is ironic and amusing but not particularly meaningful. As a party member I’m glad that the Republicans worked so hard to free the slaves, but that WAS 150 years ago and this IS the 21st century.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
“Conservatives are not on the bandwagon for change simply for change’s sake. They look at the possible outcomes, the unintended consequences (there are ALWAYS unintended consequences), and weigh the options before taking risks.”
It is more accurate to say that John’s heroes are tireless and enthusiastic advocates of inaction for the sake of inaction. Sure, there are a few good reasons for opposing change but a lot more bad reasons– cowardice, laziness, and complacency with one’s own situation coupled with a disregard for the welfare of one’s fellow.
Doing nothing takes no effort or imagination. On the other hand, doing something requires work and intention. How can you move without deciding which direction to go? There is an infinite number of options, but to move is to choose. John’s statement has an implied counterpoint, that liberals endorse change reflexively and perhaps blindly. That just doesn’t jive with my observations. I’ve seen a lot of folks work hard to make the world different. Sometimes they were radical or even revolutionary. A few even employed illegal means. However, they always had a purpose. It might have been a stupid reason, one made in haste or ignorance, but by golly there was a goal in mind. Is there risk in change? You’re darn tooting. But if our leaders relied on status quo conservatism then Christianity would have remained a weird Jewish sect. Mormons would have stayed put in the Midwest and let the town bullies continue to pick on them. Thank God for our ancestors who were brave enough to embrace change.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Jose, how does your change narrative accord with the outlawing of polygamy practiced by the Mormons in the 19th century? The Mormons embraced change, at least compared to centuries of Western culture. Polygamy had a basis in the Bible and current non-Western cultures. Yet polygamy was outlawed, and the Supreme Court upheld the ban. Polygamy has more precedents than same-sex marriage. There are millions of Muslims who practice polygamy. Should we embrace this change in our country?
November 12th, 2009 at 5:35 am
Forsan, I said:
“Is there risk in change? You’re darn tooting.”
Not all change is for the good, obviously. Not all change is successful, obviously. Furthermore note that Mormons also changed in ways that brought them closer to modern sensibilities, by discarding polygamy and by opening the priesthood to African Americans. Who knows, maybe LDS women will gain church rights some day!
Thank you for helping me clarify.
November 12th, 2009 at 6:26 am
Jose, why is polygamy a bad thing? A billion Muslims think it’s OK. You listed a number of reasons people oppose change — cowardice, laziness, complacency, lack of imagination. Why would opposition to polygamy not fit into one or more of those categories?
November 12th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Polygamy is not a bad thing if people enter into it by their own volition, but that is not often the case. In the FLDS, girls were married off at very young ages to men who were much older than they were. They were expected to be compliant and obey. If they didn’t, they were liable to be punished. If the man could not maintain harmony between his wives, the religious leader could punish the family by breaking apart the marriage. A man could lose his entire family, because his wives could not get along. Too often, polygamous relationships are made and maintained by force, not free will.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Forsan, you’re right that some urban renewal projects didn’t turn out well. However, these projects were a good faith attempt on the part of progressives to help poor people. The opponents of these projects offered nothing as an alternative other than these same people living in slums which were also de facto segregated. As Jose suggests, when you actually DO things, sometimes you get them wrong, but most of the time you get them right. The same people who gave us the blighted housing projects also gave us integration, civil rights reforms, school reforms, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the United Nations. The opponents of these programs gave us nothing but hot air, and not enough of that to heat anything useful. If they’d had their way, segregation would still be the law. I know my side of the debate is not perfect, but I’ll still take it over the alternative.
November 12th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
José and Forsan:
Just to clarify. I made the statement about conservatives to point out that often they are more reflective than liberals–more cautious. Many liberals, with good intentions of course, rush into fixing a problem without even considering the side effects. These are generalizations here, on both sides, but I’m just trying to emphasize the point. There are certainly elements of laziness or complacency in the conservative way of thinking as well as healthy caution. Likewise there are certainly some really bone-headed liberal ideas that are almost laughable in their lack of foresight. We need both kinds of people, but maybe a little less of the two extremes.
As far as polygamy is concerned, it’s just simply not acceptable in today’s Western culture. Just like homosexuality is not fully acceptable yet in American culture. There is nothing inherently wrong with polygamy, I guess, as long as all parties are in agreement and they are rational (which can be disputed, I suppose). One of the main articles of faith in the Mormon church is that we believe in honoring and sustaining the law. We gave up polygamy once the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s ban on it–we hoped it might be found unconstitutional up until then.
I’ve always maintained that if we “legalize” homosexual marriage, we will need to be consistent and “legalize” polygamy. Either the government should get out of recognizing marriages altogether or it should simply honor the will of the majority in defining marriage, which means someone is going to be left out. I’m fine either way, but the easier way, I think (being a lazy conservative), is to let the majority rule on this one. Rats! I guess that rules out ever getting a second wife.
BTW, when I talk about polygamy, I’m saying that it goes both ways. Women should be allowed more than one husband as well, as long as all parties are in agreement. This never happened in the Mormon church (it was never brought up to my knowledge and is probably against our doctrine), but most women are not inclined to have another man, whereas men are, well, let’s just say men are a little more versatile in this area.
As far as LDS women getting “rights,” they already do. Both sexes are 100% equal (at least in theory) in Mormon doctrine. We simply believe that the different sexes have different roles in God’s plan for mortal life. Each role is just as important. The woman bears the children and has the more powerful emotional bond to raise them, and in theory at least, has no further need for the man in this area. Having the priesthood in the Mormon church is quite different than having the priesthood in other churches. The man has no power to bless himself or exalt himself with his own priesthood. He can only do one thing with it and that is to bless others. He also has the responsibility to seek the will of the Lord in guiding his family. This ALWAYS includes consultation and input with his wife. The wife is not obligated in any way to follow her husband if she feels he is not following the will of the Lord. This sort of “restores balance,” if you want to look at it that way, by giving the man a bigger reason to stick around and help raise the children. One reason Islam was appealing to blacks in America, beside all the others, was that it gave men a clearly defined role–beyond simply spawning the kids and contributing financial support–in the family structure. Islam goes too far, in my opinion, in that it actually teaches that men are superior, but it serves a purpose nonetheless. Women actually DO have the priesthood in Mormon doctrine through their husband. If he is not around, they can call on its authority to bless when needed through their bond with him.
As far as blacks getting the priesthood in the Mormon church, it was always part of Mormon doctrine that they eventually would get the priesthood in the future. When that was, nobody knew, but they would get it! Joseph Smith actually did give the priesthood to several blacks in the first few years of the Church’s restoration. However, he stopped doing it, probably because of a revelation from the Lord but we don’t have a record of that. During this time the Mormons were fighting for their lives being anti-slavery in the slave state of Missouri, and having blacks with the priesthood was just not something they needed to deal with at the time. They had to make priorities. Being free to act for oneself is key in exercising the power to act in God’s name. The issues of slavery would have to be resolved (as Joseph Smith said they would, and violently) and the blacks needed to gain full citizenship rights (which didn’t really happen in practice until the Civil Rights movement) before they would again be entrusted with the priesthood. It is interesting to note that the priesthood was never rescinded from the several blacks that Joseph Smith ordained and one of them at least continued to serve in the Church years later in Utah.
November 12th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
We may have to legalize polygamy in the future, but I’m not aware of anyone asking for the right to marry multiple partners yet, so it won’t be anytime soon. That, however, is no reason to deny the right of marriage to two competent, consenting adults who may happen to be homosexual and who are doing no harm to anyone else. There is no
And yes, they’ll probably flamboyant about it for a while, but the sooner we do the right thing, the sooner they’ll cool off about it. You can’t blame them for celebrating their individuality. Once gay marriage becomes normalized, it’ll be seen in the same light as inter-racial marriage. No big deal.
November 12th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
John, I don’t know whether to take your hook, line, and sinker acceptance of Mormon doctrine as refreshingly naieve, or just gullible. Joseph Smith had black priests, then decided not to do it any more, because he had a revelation from God? Right. I imagine the more plausible explanation is that he followed the racial mores of his time.
The problem is that the church then canonized those nineteenth century racial attitudes and didn’t change them until the late ’70s. And, you’re sugarcoating it a bit, too. The Mormon church didn’t just say that blacks couldn’t be priests, it said that their skin color was a curse; in fact, the mark of Cain. I’m not sure why anyone would believe that, but it’s probably not the wackiest part of Mormon theology (there’s that whole Kolob thing). I suppose that waiting until 1978 to decide that the races really are equal is the very definition of that conservative desire not to jump to conclusions. I suppose you were all thinking that maybe that whole civil rights movement was a flash in the pan, and we’d go back to the bad ole ways, just like you apparently think that whole gay rights thing will go away if we just throw legal stumbling blocks in their way. I’d hate to think like that, but to each his own, I suppose.
November 12th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Caleb, you seem to have some real hatred issues. Some of the General Authorities tried to explain why, maybe, blacks could not get the priesthood yet, but none of their “explanations” were ever accepted or preached by the Church. They mostly took the form of hearsay and rumor. They could have very well come from the lips of a GA, but they were never preached openly or written down. There are two references that Brigham Young made that might be construed as racist and one by his successor, John Taylor, that definitely was, that we have any direct written record of. I’m not excusing them: however, everyone to one degree or another is a product of his times and they are still human with all the fallibility that comes with that (unlike the pope). But it was NEVER preached or inferred officially by the Church that blacks were inferior or not destined to the exact same rewards for faithfulness as the rest of us. They were simply not ready, for whatever reason–no one knows for sure–, just like the Gentiles in general were not ready until Peter received his revelation and the rest of the tribes of Israel, other than the Levites, were not ready for the priesthood back in Old Testament times.
There is plenty of written records of authorities in the Church trying to see if blacks could get the priesthood going all the way back to the turn of the century. Some leaders thought it would be soon, others thought it would take centuries. I guess it depended on their experiences or lack thereof.
I think it is a tremendous credit to Joseph Smith, considering his times and circumstances, that he was so accepting of blacks when social pressure ran the other way. He was a revolutionary. Believe what you want, maybe he didn’t get a revelation in a form that you would accept, but he still DID ordain blacks to the priesthood at first. I think he deserves great credit for that when he could have easily excluded them from the start and no one would have criticized him at the time.
What really bothers me sometimes is when people say, “I know a Mormon who said…” There were all sorts of wild conjectures spewed about over the years on the blacks-and-the-priesthood issue from people just being people who, in the absence of any better explanation, thought they knew more than God.
Caleb, I could say your church is wacky for believing angels have wings or that the communion bread actually turns into the body of Christ (wait, I think that’s just the Catholics). I would assume you know next to nothing about the Kolob “thing” and any attempt at explaining it’s deeper meanings would be lost on you–just like I would be clueless on some of your Episcopalian deeper doctrines. That’s okay, but it serves no purpose belittling another’s cherished beliefs. It simply brings the discussion down to snippy teasing. I bet you make a fabulous lawyer. Uh oh, now there I go.
November 13th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
John, I suspect that Anglican theology is largely silent on the issue of whether angels have wings. And yes, I do know next to nothing about Mormon theology. However, I do know how to read, and have been able to understand everything I’ve read about Mormon theology, so if I reject what I’ve read, it’s not because I don’t understand it, but because I think it is silly. There’s a difference. As to Anglican theology, yes, much of it is equally silly, though perhaps more dull.