Just making sure

So today has been 20 April, a date on which it has become tradition (in the United States, at least) for certain people to hang out and smoke marijuana publicly.

So i figured it was a good idea to re-read the Word of Wisdom, and i found that, fortunately for us all, it’s totally cool with contact highs.

I mean, the text has definitely got nothing against them, right? Cool, then.

Settling an old one

As you may or may not know, the Lion House was one of Brigham Young’s homes, but it is now run by the Mormon church as a reception center, and it has a restaurant. I don’t know how long the image will be live, but this link shows an image of the daily menu for the Lion House Pantry (the name of the restaurant) for this past January. Note that one of the entrées is [drum roll] Coca-Cola pork.

I’m glad that the church has embraced cola beverages, so we can stop arguing about caffeine and start arguing over important things, like whether women must wear nylon stockings to church or not.

Offensive!

So, just as some of you may have, i heard the news yesterday that Idaho’s liquor stores won’t be stocking Five Wives Vodka, made by Ogden’s Own Distillery, because it is (quoting from the newspaper article about it here) “offensive to Mormons who make up over a quarter of Idaho’s population”. And this isn’t just the reporter editorializing—the letter sent from Idaho’s regulatory commission actually used the word “offensive”.

And you know, i think they’re entirely right! You can’t have state-controlled liquor stores carrying products that are offensive to segments of the population that…aren’t remotely likely…to walk into…any of those stores…

Oh, wait.

Marking devotion

As some of you know, a part of my scholarly research deals with the relationship between religious affiliation and devotion on the one hand, and language use on the other. Right now i’m at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, and in discussing this topic with other researchers, an interesting couple of questions about ways Mormons mark themselves as devout or not came up, and i didn’t know the answer—so i’m crowdsourcing it.

We all know that devout Mormons don’t drink coffee or tea (as in infusions made from tea leaves). Some Mormons mark themselves as extra devout by abstaining from all caffeine-containing foods, but with chocolate (in both liquid and solid forms) excepted. So, the questions:

1. Are there any Mormons who mark themselves as hyper-devout by choosing to abstain from chocolate due to its caffeine content?
2. How do fundamentalist (i.e., polygynous) Mormons mark themselves in terms of abstaining or not abstaining from any of these food and drink items?

Truth from the lips of a child

Thanksgiving is widely described as a “family holiday”, and so in honor of the day i give you a quote from a member of my family (my 10-year-old daughter) earlier today:

Hot chocolate is the Mormon coffee.

Wisdom and insight, straight from a child.

If it’s inside it doesn’t count

A friend of mine reports on her blog* that the women in her ward got chocolates this past Mothers Day.

All really very unremarkable—chocolates are a very ordinary default Mothers Day gift in our church, after all.

Well, unremarkable except for the latte fillings the ones from her ward had, that is.

* Which i’m not linking to, since she regularly includes details about her children on it.

One word, different worlds

You know, it occurs to me that the abbreviation “WoW” means very different things to Mormons and non-Mormons.

For all the Mormon MBAs out there

It's worth remembering that the plain text of the Word of Wisdom says that Mormon-made sacramental wine is acceptable. There's gotta be a Mormon entrepreneur out there who sees a money-making opportunity in that.

Against overextension

God seems to be into dietary restrictions without regard to whether it's a health thing or not. (Consider the prohibition on shellfish in the Mosaic code, and on meat sacrificed to idols in the early Xian church.) I think we've done ourselves a disservice by treating the Word of Wisdom as a “health code”—it's not, it's a dietary restriction. Full stop.

What if it’s entirely legal?

Here’s an honest question: Are Peruvian Mormons allowed to use marijuana?

Peruvian law, as i understand it, allows the possession of up to a certain amount of marijuana for personal use. This means there’s no illegality involved if an individual grows their own (as opposed to purchasing it from someone who presumably has a larger amount available, since that would introduce some illegality into the process). However, the Word of Wisdom, by relatively recent tradition, includes a prohibition on illegal (or illicit) drugs. If it’s not illegal, is it allowed?

(And yes, i know that the prohibition is sometimes described as forbidding “harmful” drugs, but i haven’t seen that ever get defined rigorously anywhere—not to mention that there’s an open question on how dangerous, by whatever definition, marijuana-laced brownies might be in comparison with something like, say, overeating.)

Anyway, i suspect the answer is (a very firm) no, but i’m curious what the basis for it would be.