What’s in a name?

Admit it: Back in the day, you got the names of Richard G. Scott and George C. Scott mixed up in your head once in a while too, didn’t you?

Daughter effects?

So the “daughter effect” has been well-documented in the business world—if a company’s chief executive officer (or similar) has any daughters, and particularly a daughter as an oldest child, that company is more likely to have policies and practices of the type that are generally seen as being friendly to women.

So this has gotten me wondering—is there a similar sort of effect among Mormon leaders (bishops, stake presidents, mission presidents, general authorities)? If one of them has daughters, especially an oldest child who’s a daughter, is he more likely to, say, listen to women in stake or ward or whatever councils, or focus on young women equally as much as the young men, or promote visiting teaching as vigorously as home teaching, or whatever else one might come up with? Also, how would one measure this?

Utah Valley University has a decent and growing Mormon Studies program, and Brigham Young University has a lot of folks interested in the social scientific study of religion, and the University of Illinois has a history of research into Mormonism, so there’s got to be somebody out there who has the desire and training to look into this.

Tradition!

Easter weekend traditions we’re celebrating this year at the David B and family home:

• Having an Easter feast with, as its centerpiece, a pork shoulder brined overnight in a cola beverage (in order of preference, Dr. Pepper, Coca-Cola, or—the one we have to use this year—Pepsi, whichever we can most easily get in a made-with-real-sugar variety)
• Listening to a recording of David Sedaris’s reading of his own essay, “Jesus Shaves”
• Watching Jesus Christ Superstar

In other news, it’s fun occasionally making our fellow Mormons’ heads explode.

In lockstep

In a comment on my last post, Heather the Mama Duk raised the point that the sociopolitical term conservative is locally defined, really—so polls saying that most Mormons in the United States self-identify as conservative might well not be parsable. Of course, this won’t kill the narrative that Mormons are a lockstep-type people. So:

Why is the idea that Mormons are a monolithic block (socially, politically, religiously, and so on) so pervasive? I mean, anybody who’s talked about caffeine (or Mitt Romney, or traveling on Sunday, or cooking with a wine reduction, or…) with a cross-section of Mormons has disproved that claim by their own experience, so what’s up with the continued vector of this particular pop-culture meme?

What happens when the world isn’t as bad as we say?

One thing that y’all may have missed in the excitement of Thanksgiving weekend and Xmas shopping was the news that the teen pregnancy rate in the United States declined last year. And when i say it declined, i mean it declined—it dropped to a record low rate for the entire time records have been kept (70 years!), and this isn’t just a little blip downwards, but a continuation of a long-term trend.*

And yes, some of this is due to an increased use of contraception, but the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s analysis (which is only available in PDF format, and i don’t like linking to PDFs, so no link here, but it’s googlable) finds that a lot of it is also due to teens simply choosing not to have sex.** Kind of runs counter to the common Mormon meme that the world is busily going to hell in a handbasket, and that we need to aggressively shelter our kids from whatever the rest of the world is doing, since everybody else is getting more and more evil.***

So i’ll just say that what i became very thankful for this past Thanksgiving weekend was that my children are growing up in a world that seems to be getting more and more moral in some very important ways, whether we care to notice that or not.

* I recognize that the unwed teen pregnancy rate is a more interesting statistic for this entry than simply the teen pregnancy rate, but those statistics turn out to be really hard to come by—or, at least, reliable ones are hard to find. Part of the problem is that the best numbers for my purposes would be teen pregnancies in which conception (not just birth) occurred outside of marriage, and that doesn’t seem to be well-tracked by anybody.

**And before anybody decides to pull out the abortion card, i’ll simply note that the teen abortion rate has been steadily falling over the past several decades, and that the stats i’m talking about are pregnancy rates, anyway, not birth rates.

*** As does the fact that the peak year for the teen pregnancy rate (in the United States) was 1957. You mean teen pregnancies have been lower than that for more than 50 years, and we still haven’t realized that maybe the world isn’t all that more evil a place for our kids to grow up than it was when we were kids?

Things to be happy about

Can i just say how happy it makes me that our church is cool with Halloween, and lets us dress up as devils and witches (or even angels and teachers) if we want to?

Hopes and dreams

One day—and i’m hoping it’s in my lifetime—someone will deliver a general conference address about how cultural traditions are good, but that they may need to be laid aside to conform with church principles.

Well, we actually already get those now and again. What i’m hoping to see, though, is one that goes just a little bit further and explicitly points out that some jello-belt traditions are among those that will need to be laid aside. That’s what we haven’t really gotten yet.

Good timing

Today is the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001—or, in other words, it’s rather a big deal day to a lot of people.

We also had stake conference today (and yesterday).

And in none of the stake conference meetings i was at (that is, the general meeting this morning, the adult session* yesterday evening, or the leadership meeting yesterday afternoon) was there even an oblique reference to the anniversary.

I would just like to say that i’m happy that my religion was able to serve as a refuge from the incessant coverage of the date that national and local media has been throwing at me over the past week or so.

* I can’t be the only one evil enough that the term “adult session” instantly triggers the concept of an “adult movie”, can I?

David B gingerly touches the third rail, again

Same-sex marriage is a big issue for a lot of people, both within and without the Mormon church.* (In fact, it’s become a big issue for a lot of non-Mormons with regard to how they view the Mormon church itself. But that’s a side issue for today’s topic.)

In pretty much every opinion poll of the US population that i’ve seen on the topic of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to get legally married, there’s been a consistent age breakdown: Those younger than me generally think there’s no problem with the idea, while those older than me think that it should never be allowed—my age seems to be the swing point for this effect.**

I haven’t seen any such polls of Mormons, though. That is, there are plenty of opinion polls that show that Mormons† are generally not in favor of allowing legal same-sex marriages, but there don’t appear to be any easily allowable breakdowns that show whether there’s an age effect among Mormons that parallels that of the general population.††

Anyway, i’m curious whether younger Mormons have different views on the subject of legal recognition of same-sex marriage than older Mormons do. Anyone know if there are any reliable poll numbers on this issue?‡

* And, as i’ve written before, i really don’t get why it’s such a big deal to so many Mormons, but I recognize that it is.

** And it’s not that people tend to be less likely to approve of it as they get older—i’ve been watching the polls on this issue for some years, and it really is my birth year that seems to be the most reliable inflection point.

† Important caveat: I’m talking only about Mormons in the United States here. While i’d be interested to learn the attitudes of Mormons outside of the United States (particularly in jurisdictions where same-sex marriages are legally recognized) on this subject, it’s beyond the bounds of what i can deal with in a single blog post.

†† I did find a report of a poll that reports on the breakdown of recent opinion polling on the subject among Utahns, and it found sharp differences by both religion and age, but it didn’t provide any sort of cross-tabulation ability to figure out what the effect of religion and age was.

‡ And yeah, Gallup may have it, but i’m not going to shell out cash to get past their paywall just to look into this. Maybe i should clarify: Anyone know if there are any reliable poll numbers available for free on this issue?

Oh the time has come

True story: There was once a full-time missionary with the last name of Christen in my ward. Every time her name got mentioned as a speaker or as someone who’d be doing whatever else, i expected to hear a chorus start singing “Motorin’…”

The memes of my youth

One last thought from my trip to Oregon a few weeks ago:

So, upon finding out we were going to be singing the song “They, the Builders of the Nation”, what with being faced with the refrain “Blessed, honored Pioneer!” while being in Oregon, of all places—well, all i’m trying to say is that i couldn’t have been the only one whose brain kept looping the phrase “You have died of dysentery”.

That’s all.

Bad science! No biscuit!

So my wife and i had a snarf-the-beverage-of-your-choice moment the other day, when we ran across this gem from the current year’s young women manual* (ch. 25, p. 91):

Explain that one of the primary aims of science is to discover additional laws. When scientists discover these higher laws and obey them, marvelous things can happen. The successful landing of men on the moon is an example of the importance of obedience. Men spent years concentrating on discovering and obeying the natural laws that governed gravity, jet propulsion, and other things. Their obedience resulted in the successful landing of a man on the moon.***

Um, no.

Or, for emphasis: NO!!

That’s not the way scientific laws work. Folks didn’t make it to the moon because they obeyed natural laws—those laws were going to be obeyed whether they wanted to or not. (Gravity doesn’t really care if you believe in it, after all.) Now, the successful application of their understanding, yeah, that was necessary. But choosing obedience? No, that had nothing—really, nothing—to do with it.

I mean, seriously—who vets these things?

* Why are the young women manuals so out of date? It’s like the church decided that all the rest of the manuals would have an up-to-date feel, but the young women could make do with a manual with a copyright date of 1994, but content that feels so, so much older.**

** Like the clearly made-up (i.e., not based on true events) stories that start “A girl and her friend were invited to a party…” that the church has (happily!) moved away from in its other materials.

*** And i’m not even getting into the fact that humans making it to the moon isn’t just before the girls-being-taught’s time, it’s before my time. Apparently, scientists haven’t done anything lesson-manual-worthy during my life.

Planning ahead

From the it’s-never-too-early file, a thought on Halloween…

The church doesn’t allow gender-switching costumes at its costume parties. This means that whatever i (a guy) wear to a church event, i can’t go as a female person.

Given the church’s belief that one’s sex isn’t mutable, then, that means that i can totally go to my next church Halloween party as RuPaul, doesn’t it?

What we’re ashamed of

This is normally a text-only blog, but the following recently came across on GraphJam, and i just had to post it here:

Yeah, that seems about right.

One word, different worlds

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

Glurge

Why do so many speakers feel the urge to pepper their speeches in church with glurge? Particularly when a quick trip to Snopes could demonstrate the falsity of much of what’s out there—scroll through the list on the glurge page, and you’re bound to see a lot of thing you’ve heard before in sacrament meetings, i’d wager.)

It’s a serious question—especially since i have to wonder whether the Holy Spirit is going to testify to the truth of something that quite definitely isn’t.

Again with the modesty thing

So i was going through old emails (dating back to 1999, which really is too long to keep stuff like that around), and i found this response of mine to someone else’s post in a long-running discussion of issues of modesty (in the usual Mormon sense). I reproduce it here even though it’s longish, and even though what it’s replying to isn’t an attitude unique to Mormons (we share it with lots of other groups). I’m curious what others think of my reasoning, though.

So, anyway, it started with something forwarded from a website apparently called “Religion Today”:

“Lurid and sexually provocative magazines at supermarket checkout counters are inappropriate, most Americans say. Seventy-three percent of 1,006 people questioned by pollster Wirthlin Worldwide said the covers of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Redbook should be covered up.” The head of an organization called Morality in Media, Robert Peters, states: “…it is irresponsible to openly display at checkout counters, where children and vulnerable adolescents cannot help but see them, trashy magazine covers that so blatantly violate common standards of decency and morality,” Peters said.

My response:

I find this fascinating, myself, particularly since Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Redbook were singled out, all of which (usually) show women in to be honest not-terribly-revealing but certainly often enticing/​provocative (depending on your point of view) outfits. (Cosmo makes much use of push-up outfits in its cover photos, but swelling breasts are not in and of themselves revealing—if anything, they involve the creation of an illusion that hides rather than reveals.) What’s really interesting about this, though, is that magazines like GQ and Men’s Health, which often have men on their covers showing lots more skin than any of the women on the named magazines’ covers, were not mentioned. Is it only photos of fully dressed women that are “lurid and sexually provocative”?

For a moment, i’d like to reminisce on my own experience in Germany as a full-time missionary. Yes, magazine cover (and advertising, for that matter) shots of scantily-clad women (usually not men, interestingly, although there were some in my observation) showing more skin than would be allowed on the cover of Cosmo in the United States were quite common, but i have to admit that i don't necessarily see this as being related to any sort of “moral decay” in German culture—they simply showed more skin in their photographs than Unistatians tend to.

And this brings me to what troubles me about this whole discussion—there’s an underlying assumption that nobody’s questioning. That is, there’s a tacit ground rule people are using that having more skin visible in public places is necessarily a Bad Thing. Is it, though, or is this simply Unistatian (or American? Angloamerican? Euroamerican?) values being parrotted by the participants in the discussion? The assumption may well turn out to be correct, but never holding it up for questioning is, i feel, a disservice to the entire issue.

I mean, it’s quite valid to propose (full disclosure: this is actually my position) that the problem isn’t visible nudity, but the problem is rather the people who view that nudity. I suppose that i’ll be the minority here, but i’d argue that a fear of viewing human skin is at some level irrational, and we should be less worried about what’s visible to the world and more worried about how we react to it. (Arguably, we should also worry about how others react to it, but in my opinion we need to work on ourselves first.)

Maybe i’m alone on this, but my reaction to scantily-clad men or women on magazine covers tends to be something along the lines of “attractive person” or “good muscle definition” or “that outfit’s entirely the wrong color for that person, and i can’t believe that shot made it to the cover”. Is this a bad thing? Is it a bad thing to think that the problem isn’t that which is seen, but rather the reaction of that which sees?

I mean, really—the reaction of most Germans i knew, when i asked them about the level of nudity on magazine covers over there or the topless beaches or somesuch was something along the lines of “But it’s just a body!” And that, folks, is all it is—it’s just a body. Yeah, that’s an important thing and all, but it’s not like what you see in front of you is something eternal, even given the Mormon doctrine of a corporeal postmortality—it’s just a mortal body. So why the uproar over something as ignorable as that?

More weirdness in Mormon culture

So i was at our local Mormon-oriented bookstore a little bit ago, and i saw that they had a bunch of motivational posters for kids based on heroes from the scriptures. (“Real Hero Posters”, they’re called.) I went over to look more closely at them, and i saw that there were about two dozen of them. It was a two-sided display, one side made up of Biblical heroes and the other of Book of Mormon heroes.*

The Biblical side was mostly male heroes, but it had threefour female heroes mixed in. Well, the Book of Mormon is pretty thin on female characters,** so i was curious what they held up as role models for girls.***

Correction: I’d originally only thought that three of the twelve Biblical hero posters featured female characters, but i was wrong—there are four: Ruth, Esther, Hannah, and Mary the mother of Jesus. Not a bad set, i’d say.

Rather to my surprise, there was only one poster out of the twelve Book of Mormon posters that had any female characters,**** and it was (wait for it) the daughters in the wilderness. (That is, the daughters of Lehi and Ishmael who subsisted only on raw meat but still were able to nurse the children they gave birth to.)

I’ve since learned that they’ve come up with one more female-oriented poster in the series: the mothers of Helaman’s stripling warriors.

Um, yeah. I mean, nice stories and all, but Abish gets bupkis? You know, you may remember her—she went house to house among the Lamanites to get attention to what was going on as a result of Ammon’s preaching. Pretty important for the story, and i’d say she’s a pretty good role model for girls (and boys, for that matter). Or if not her, what about the queen of the Lamanites from the same story?

No, instead of women who actually performed active, individual roles in the Book of Mormon, we get women who acted in groups, none of whom even have actual speaking roles.

Not cool, nameless Mormon-oriented commercial products designers. Not cool at all.

* Neat trick, really—you can send only the Biblical half to mainstream Xian bookstores and make money off a larger market segment.

** Famously, the Book of Mormon has only three named female characters that aren't shared with the Bible. There are a handful of other unnamed female individuals or groups that play some sort of plot-movement role, though, and i don’t think they should be forgotten.

*** I was kind of figuring the harlot Isabel was out.

**** See footnote **.

An unexpected biography

Thurl Bailey played basketball for the Utah Jazz from 1983 to 1991, and currently lives in Salt Lake City. He is also a Mormon. All of these things would seem to go together.

The fun thing about this is that he wasn’t a Mormon when he played for the Jazz—he became a Mormon some years later, when he was playing professional basketball in Italy.

Not at all significant, really, i just found it an amusing bit of unexpectedness.

p.s. And he has an amazing bass—basso profondo, really—singing voice.

Again with the skirts and trousers

One more thought on skirts: I know this isn’t limited to Mormons, but what’s the deal with skirts (not miniskirts here, i’m talking about knee-length things) and dresses being perceived as more “moral” than trousers on women? I mean, i always thought of skirts and dresses as somewhat less moral, what with sexual access being quite a bit easier with them and all. So what am i missing here?