For a seriously-not-funny laugh...

Please read this, if you can can swallow hyper and ludicrous conservative drivel: http://mormonstories.org/meridian-magazines-are-you-a-liberal-mormon-by-joni-hilton/

Sister Joni Hilton has some repenting to do, and I usually don't take that stance with anyone. After all, I sit with the rest of the sinners and church and hope my God, friends and family will forgive me for the many mistakes I have made in my life. Deriding others for their band wagons is not usually my style, unless that wagon runs down innocent people -- like Sister Hilton's article on "liberal Mormons" did.

You, know.  "Liberal Mormons?"  They are the group of people that are going to hell based on her recommendations to God and the hierarchy of the church because she disagrees with them liberals, all of them, every single one she has lumped together into a hot balloon that is now hovering over the great abyss. 

I do not know Joni Hilton.  If I were sitting by her in church, I may not notice, from looking at how she dresses, or how she treats people, what she believes about her neighbors.  Based on the essay she wrote in a publication that has since recanted, Sister Hilton is pious and holy-er than you could ever hope to be.  She has stored a whole lotta oil for own personal lantern and if she were ever to share, she would first take out a full page ad to let everyone know how spiritual she is.

Please, do not seek out her upcoming book, or look on her website. When she is on Oprah, just turn the station. When she comes out with her own line of Mormon crockery or a calendar of "little reliefs from the worlds best Relief Society President, don't hand her your credit card.  Please do not support the kind of close mindedness that comes from her self-aggrandized beautiful mind.

However, if she should come out and blame her essay on her sleeping meds, try to forgive her.  She truly may not know what she does.     

Gay ads for Mormon men

I just happened to log on to this blog from an others computer and I saw an ad that made me cringe.  It was for a gay dating site.

I don't really have a problem with gay dating sites or straight dating sites, or  even for the farmers only dating site I have been seeing ads for on TV.  Frankly, the farmers only ad's looked like something off of Saturday Night Live.

But I do have a problem with this site that was being advertised on my blog.  It showed a half naked man from the back. 

The problem was this:  First, as a LDS/gay/recommend holding author, I am about giving gay men more options that are in keeping with standards that allow these men to earn temple recommends and to hold and use that priesthood honorably. Soft porn is not one of the options I am promoting.

Secondly, is that what we have come to as a society?  Pornography based (hard or soft) dating sites?  Regardless of the gender exposed, it does not say much about our depth of morality or character if ads created for success are based purely on sex and sexual arousal.

Is that how gay men are perceived -- that all we want is sexually based?  How cheep do they think we are?  Then again, if being gay is the major charateristic we identify with, then we may have caused that to happen, and we can only diswaied that perception by showing them everything we really are -- not just our sexuality, but our humanity as well.

And third, I am sad that some ad guy at a desk in Ithaca, Cleveland or Sacramento thought that my blog was a good fit for such an ad.

Nevertheless, I am trying to get this ad off my site.  If it is still up (just look to the left), tell me if you agree with me or not, and if it is down, then be glad for me.

Rise up, O men of God! -- Gentle Masculinity

What an interesting article  from "Religion and Politics".  The following excerpt is from "Why Mormon Men Love “Church Ball” and Are Scared of Homosexuality" By Kristine Haglund | September 10, 2012


GENTLE MASCULINITY

"When the women of the church convene for their annual meeting in Salt Lake City, they are likely to hear things like:

“Sisters, we love you. We pray for you. Be strong and of good courage. You are truly royal spirit daughters of Almighty God. You are princesses, destined to become queens.” And they may be gently admonished to refrain from gossip or increase their self-esteem.

Fine and not so fine lines

Yet men are often bluntly castigated over the same pulpit for using pornography, abusing women and children, and otherwise failing, as the late Mormon Church President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in 2006, to “‘Rise up, O men of God!’ and put these things behind you.”

Mormons learn early that “maleness” is by nature potentially sexually dangerous. These lessons begin with the Book of Mormon itself. “For the natural man is an enemy to God,” Mosiah 3:19 reads, “and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man.” This “putt[ing] off the natural man” requires a total prohibition of sexual activity before marriage and strong taboos against masturbation.

Obedient Mormon boys are thus excluded from their peers’ conversations about sexual discovery. Participating in the casual misogyny and homophobia typical of teenage boys’ locker rooms induces discomfort and guilt in a boy who regularly hears admonitions to abstain from sex of any kind before his wedding night—with himself or anyone else.

Mormon boys might laugh at or even tell gay jokes, but they cannot brag about how far they’ve “gone with the girl” or what they’re planning to do with their prom dates. For a Mormon boy, becoming a Mormon man means not becoming a man, at least not the “natural man” engendered by the adolescent onslaught of testosterone. This means that, perhaps paradoxically, while most

Mormons would assert that both biology and God establish gender at birth, Mormon men’s experience of masculinity is highly performative. They learn that the natural tendencies of maleness must be subjugated to religious principle.

This performance is taught most intensively during the two years of missionary service that devout Mormon men undertake, most often beginning at age 19. Two-by-two, Mormon men knock on doors or pass out church pamphlets and Books of Mormon on street corners. During their mission, they are instructed never to be apart from the companion. They eat, work, pray, and sleep “in the same room but not in the same bed” with their companion.

Missionaries are even instructed to conduct a weekly “companionship inventory,” the instructions for which read like a self-help book for married couples: “Discuss the strength of your relationship with your companion. Discuss any challenges that may be keeping your companionship from working in unity or from being obedient.”

This intense camaraderie combined as it must be among celibate 19- and 20-year-old men with sexual repression, is Mormon men’s induction into masculinity. In this context of profound homo-social bonding, they learn that masculinity is both a privilege and a danger. It is something to be controlled and sublimated to religious ideals of gentleness that are, in many other contexts, coded feminine.

If, on the one side, the danger is giving into the “natural man”—becoming promiscuous or abusive—on the other side the danger is that one might become too gentle and meek...

The performance of Mormon masculinity is a difficult balancing act, a tightrope walk between poles established by a brutish, hyper-masculine “natural man” and an effeminate gay man."