Its just amazing what happens when a bunch of lefties get all in a wad and start circling the wagons against the terrible forces of Christian morality.
Let me respond to several different posters at one time. First, we will deal with Scratch.
Which part of the Mission Statement, Loran? "Perfecting the Saints"?
Yes, precisely, as well as the Priesthood oath and covenant mandate to "preach, teach, expound, and exhort". Oh and, their is a general Christian mandate to warn those around us of the impending consequences of sin so that they may stop rearranging the deck chairs and get off the ship before it makes its final plunge.
"Attempts to influence legislators"? That crosses the line, in my opinion.
I'm sorry but you simply don't know what you are talking about. IRS laws on the matter involve nothing more than campaigning for or supporting specific candidates for office and
using church buildings for that purpose. You're blanket claim that the GAs have no business attempting to influence legislation as representatives of a faith community is just one more indication of what is ultimately the dogmatic, anti-democratic authoritarianism of the Left and its unyielding bigotry against its cultural opponents. The endless attempts to silence speech that liberals don't like has reached a point of no return, I fear. You can't persuade hearts and minds in the marketplace of ideas, so you rely on the the courts and the force of the state and its myriad unaccountable agencies (like the IRS), when those who believe as you do control the levers of power within it, to impose strict limitations of free speech upon those with whom you disagree. Your own near totalitarian understanding of the tax exemption laws regarding political activism among religious bodies, which only limits that activism to activities surrounding political campaigns, indicate what we would actually be up against were you or those like to to actually attain unrestrained power. Religious people and conservatives generally would simply be barred from participation in the political life of their committees and their country by the bare fact of being religious and conservative. Participation in the political life on the nation would be reserved for a special caste: Liberals, for whom such participation would be a constitutional right. Mormons, however, would be delegitimized as competent or qualified members of the body politic and barred from participation in its political life. Groups like the ACLU and People United For The Separation Of Church And State have been following this general schema for several decades, and McCain/Feingold finally drove much of this to actual policy.
You're intellectual patrimony Scratch (and Harmony), is not rooted in Jefferson but in Marcuse. To wit (From Repressive Tolerance, 1965)
Given this situation, I suggested in 'Repressive Tolerance' the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressed. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for 'the other side', I maintain that there are issues where either there is no 'other side' in any more than a formalistic sense, or where 'the other side' is demonstrably 'regressive' and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.
and:
The uncertainty of chance in this distinction does not cancel the historical objectivity, but it necessitates freedom of thought and expression as preconditions of finding the way to freedom--it necessitates tolerance. However, this tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the' possibilities of liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.
Or as Harvey Mansfiield encapsulates it:
At that time, Herbert Marcuse set forth his notion of "repressive tolerance," an attack on the liberal free speech doctrine which claimed that, while pretending to tolerate free speech, liberals actually repressed it. This was because liberals frowned on radicals like Marcuse. Real dissent would have to challenge the whole of liberalism; in fact, the only true dissent is challenging liberalism. Conformist speech defending liberalism is worthless; in fact, so worthless that it can safely be repressed. No, safety demands that it be repressed, and in making a demand, safety is transformed into morality. Morality requires repressing liberalism. Downs calls this "progressive censorship," and says it is just as detrimental to free universities as traditional censorship from the right.
Thus, "repressive tolerance" has quite a punch in two words. By the late 1980s Marcuse's thinking had infused liberals and deflected many of them from liberalism into postmodernism, one feature of which is a soft therapeutic notion of sensitivity. Instead of repressing liberalism, let's make it sensitive. Between the late '60s and the late '80s feminism came on the scene and embraced sensitivity as the peaceable, womanly way to victory over liberalism.
Your idea that simply by being a conservative Christian, and by opposing the ERA and making that opposition publically known, the GA's have
broken laws and are morally or ethically suspect, is a part of another tradition and mindset that has no relevance to the founding principles of this nation. Further, by attempting to influence legislation through the use of their own free speech rights, they, again, simply by opposing the ERA as committed religious people, have "stepped over the line". In other words, free speech and participation in the public arena of ideas as political actors is
only for people like you, not for people like me. There is a word for the kind of political system you believe in Scratch, and it is not representative democracy.
Does "teased hair" or multiple earrings constitute a form of "free speech"?
I don't know what the relevance of this may be, but to answer the question, no, teased hair or multiple earrings have nothing to do with free speech.
I believe this sort of act falls under what the Supreme Court has referred to as "symbolic speech." So actually, teased hair and multiple earrings *do* have relevance. The Church---BKP in particular---are advocating the squelching of free expression.
You're not going to like this, but frankly my dear, I don't give a damn about the fictional extrapolations of the constitution's actual text that have flowed repeatedly from the pens of the mighty men and woman in black for upwards of thirty years and continue their rampage logical, legal, and cultural destruction. My only interest is in the original text of that document and its original intent. We also know, because we have so much of the writing of the men who conceived and wrote the Constitution, that the original intent, and primary intent of that document relative to free speech, was to protect political speech.
Earrings and hairstyles are not speech. They are mute testaments to internal psychological states. Hence, earrings are not relevant to the First Amendment. It is for this same reason of irrelevance that pornography is not protected by the First Amendment. Pornography is not speech, but imagery, and pornographic imagery, whatever feelings, emotions, or thoughts in conjures up in ones subjective mind, has no political content. Affective, psychological yes, but not political. If one makes an argument in support of pornography, that is protected speech. All of this, of course, implies that much of the "speech" we engage in has nothing to do with the constitution and we can engage in it at our leisure because it has no relevance to national constitutional principles.
Then we have this howler:
So actually, teased hair and multiple earrings *do* have relevance. The Church---BKP in particular---are advocating the squelching of free expression.
Again, you demonstrate your leftwing totalitarian credentials. Again you conflate
persuasion with
coercion. Apparently you actually believe that a conference talk or BYU Devotional address in which a GA counsels and attempts to persuade youth to do or not to do certain things in accordance with church teachings is squelching free expression". or somehow imposing their values by force (in some way) on those youth, whom you conceive of as mindless, plasticine puppets without individual will or ego.
This, of course, is the traditional default position of sanctimonious, self anointed guardians of political and cultural rectitude like yourself on the nature of the benighted sots you, in your enlightened leftist benevolence, desire to save and sanctify.
Quote:
In the first place, it would have made convenience infanticide, for all intents and purposes, a constitutional right, primarily by wiping out all state anti-abortion laws and prohibiting any state from future legislation restricting abortion.
Call for references. How would it have done this?
Easy. Read the text of the amendment and go and study the ideological writing done around it by radical feminist authors of the time. The simple language of the amendment is a leftist lawyer's playground, an absolute three ring critical legal theorists dream come true. You apparently also don't know, or are pretending not to know, what radical feminism's position on abortion has been since the late sixties.
"Radical" feminism is a form of cultural Marxism, as are most of the other leftist movements of the sixties and seventies in that its origin is in the taking of traditional dualistic, Marxist conceptions of oppressor/oppressed, exploiter/exploited, and lumpen mass vs. lumpen mass, each with its own inherent and antagonistic imperatives and interests and applying it to the relations between the sexes. Although many of its founding intellectuals were of a more traditional revolutionary cast (Betty Friedan was a communist party member in the fifties and a committed radical before writing The Feminine Mystique), radical feminisms overall approach has been Gramsian, that is, penetrate the system and destroy it from within.
As to the church, uh....there is nothing wrong with anything the church did here, and none of it is illegal as far as the IRS is concerned. This is issue activism, not support of candidates. And as much of this was done by individual members, what you are trying to claim here about the church is tantamount to the repeal of the first amendment rights of every member of the church if he or she is politically active. And what do you mean by "ballot stuffing"? The ERA went down to defeat in a democratic manner.
Yes---it "went down to defeat" because LDS were given marching orders to flood the voting booths.
Again, the mindless automations are given marching orders by the hooded initiates in Salt Lake and, eyes glazed, proceed to obey. Of course, the actual fact of the matter is that 99.999 percent of faithful LDS would have opposed such a blatant attack on both the constitution and the institutions of marriage, family, and gospel knowledge of the proper gender roles of men and woman that nothing need have come from the GAs at all. Anyone who at the time understood what radical feminism was and what its agenda and core philosophical premises were would have opposed anything that came out of the mouth of extremist fanatics like Betty Friedan on general principles.
According to the only account available regarding Quinn's excommunication, he was given his walking papers for insubordination, not homosexual activity. You really ought to get your facts straight, Loran.
Right. There is no such excommunicatable offense in the church known as "insubordination". Quinn was excommunicated for his open and flagrant homosexuality and his attempts to discredit the church publically in his writings for the
primary purpose of forcing the church to accept homosexuality as legitimate within the gospel framework.Call that insubordination if you will, but you are as usual, playing word games. Quinn turned against the church and (like the famous housewife heretic before him) began using his writings to defame, slander, and impugn the church publically. A church, any church, reserves the right to disassociate itself from members who are openly and publically hostile to it in this manner and seek to deliegitimize it and hinder or destroy its work and mission among its own members and the society of which it is a part.
Next we have another disciple of the master of flower power, Harmony.
A little less sneakiness would be nice. No more pressure on members to donate to specific political causes. No more lobbying for support from the pulpit. No more covert stigmatism attached to LDS Democrats. No more dismissing professors from church colleges based on their support of diverse political affiliations.
1. There was never any sneakiness involved. These are your own paranoid and bigoted fantasies.
2. Preaching against ideologies and political policies from the pulpit, regardless of their content but especially when those ideologies or policies have relevance to religious concerns or principles, is none of your business and is guaranteed by the Constitution (would you and Scratch please friggin'
read that document before making another post).
3. Any stigma attached to LDS Democrats past roughly the early seventies has been brought by those individuals upon themselves. Regardless of what any particular LDS Democrat may actually believe regarding economic, social, or other issues, his or her association with a party so utterly bankrupt intellectually and morally, and which holds the views that it as a party does on so many issues, makes a stigma of sorts inevitable. One is known by the company one keeps, and when this is a political party that believes in and supports so many things that cannot be harmonized with church teachings, raised eyebrows had better be gotten used to.