Fun with platitudes!

So yesterday was Mothers Day, and we got to hear all the usual Mothers Day sacrament meeting platitudes, along with a number of actual insights.

And it just so happens that one of my least favorite Mother Day illustrations got vectored. It goes as follows (you may recognize it):

A good mother is someone who, upon discovering that there are five people at the table and only four pieces of pie, suddenly declares that she never cared much for pie anyway.

Even leaving aside the glorification of such self-abnegation as a uniquely and positively maternal quality (which is simply wrong on many, many levels), i’ve long thought that there is one good thing about this false statement about what it means to be a mother: It lends itself well to parody.

Consider:

A real mother is someone who, upon discovering that there are five people at the table and only four pieces of pie, suddenly points out that it is time for everyone to go to bed. Fortunately, when the morning comes she has disposed of the pie so that there can be no arguments about it.

Alternately, we could go all mathematical about it:

A smart mother is someone who, upon discovering that there are five people at the table and only four pieces of pie, recognizes that if four people each get 80% of a piece of pie, what remains gives the fifth person an equal share.

In a perhaps more serious vein, Jeanne (my wife) jotted down her version, which emphasizes foresight in avoiding arguments:

A good mother is is someone who, upon discovering that there are five people at the table, cuts the pie into five pieces.

Any of y’all have any other ways to spin this?

Just a little vignette for you this evening

So my family* is going through the Book of Acts in the Bible. At one point, Paul and his companions stop for a while at the home of Philip the Evangelist, who has four unmarried daughters who all prophesy.

Well, we use a lot of different Biblical translations simultaneously in our family scripture reading,** and the version that was being read through at that moment rendered it “four unmarried daughters who had the gift of prophecy”.

My oldest recognized the parallel in the family structure, and said “Well. That would be hectic.”

So it would, kid. So it would.

* Which, in case you don’t know (and this is necessary information for the story), is me, my wife, and our four daughters.

** Yeah, i know, i just started J. Reuben Clark, Jr. spinning in his grave again. Not to worry—he’ll stop eventually.

All those in favor, please signify…

I’ve been thinking lately about the asymmetries in the ways girls and boys are treated in the way things are currently structured within Mormonism, and here’s a subtle but (i think) important one: Active teen Mormon boys get more public approval of religious rites of passage than active teen Mormon girls do. Consider:

When a boy turns twelve, he gets presented before his congregation for being ordained as a deacon, and gets the affirmation of having everybody there affirm his worthiness.* When a girl turns twelve, she gets…well, bubkes. If she’s got a reasonably progressive bishop, she gets called up in front of the congregation and congratulated, but no affirmative vote by the congregation.

Age fourteen, same thing. Age sixteen, repeat it. And at age eighteen or nineteen, yet again. Every time, the boy gets positive affirmation, while the girl gets something rather less.

I’m not sure how this could be fixed, but i don’t think this is something rooted in doctrine so much as a “that’s the way we do stuff” sort of thing. I don’t know that the solution would be to have a sustaining vote for the girls at various ages (i mean, i don’t know what would be voted on, to begin with), but there’s got to be something. Thoughts?

* Yeah, i know, it’s possible that somebody in the congregation objects—but that’s rare enough that we can ignore it for the purpose of discussion, i think.

Basketball for girls (or not)

So there’s a longstanding Mormon meme about basketball being the default youth night activity for the young men when the leaders don’t have anything real planned.

But after having lived a couple places with a daughter in young women, might i suggest that “health and beauty nights” serve exactly the same purpose for that organization?

Why these differences?

So my oldest is a teenager, and as an active teenaged Mormon girl she’s working on her personal progress program (alliteration!), and so this last Sunday i went over the stuff she’s supposed to do for it with her, figuring out what she’s done and what she hasn’t, and so on.

The main thing i learned from this review: Some of the requirements involve some pretty insipid stuff. I mean, don’t get me wrong, some of the things she’ll be doing for this are actually really cool, but nearly all of them are basically to read a bunch of scriptures and reflect on how it’ll relate to your life as a wife and mother. Oh—and then write about it in your journal. If the number of repetitions is indicative of importance, then the most important thing she’ll ever do in her life is write about what she’s thinking in her journal. Gee, excitement. Or something.

Seriously: As long as the program for (most of) the boys of the church involves things like first aid and emergency preparedness and woodcarving and survival skills plus—maybe—some spiritual stuff that gets snuck in here and there, while the program for (all of) the girls of the church involves what it involves, well, some of us are going to continue to be bothered by the disparity.

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.

Parent(s)?

Here’s a question: The church’s records have spots for each member’s mother and father. However, there are plenty of family units out there where children are legally the children of two mothers or two fathers. So how do the church’s records deal with this, given that they enforce mothers as female and fathers as male?

Is separate equal?

Why are the annual relief society and young women broadcasts separate events? I mean, the young men and the male adults of the church have theirs together (i.e., general priesthood broadcasts),* so why not do the same for the females in the church?**

* Insert obligatory snark about how they’re actually really only young men broadcasts, though, what with the number of addresses in them that begin, “I direct my remarks to the young men in the audience tonight.”
** Which would presumably give them two broadcasts, too.

A room full of men

Church disciplinary councils,* by their nature as something involving deliberations by a bishopric or stake presidency and high council,** consistently result in decisions pondered upon and delivered by men. It leads me to wonder: Is it just an accident of history that we exclude women from such decisions, or is there something else going on?

* I totally get why they’re not called church courts any more, but church disciplinary councils really does lack any punch, you know?

** Yes, i know there are other possible configurations—these are just the most widespread. My larger point remains valid for all possibilities, though.

Beyond serifs

What is it with hyper-cheesy fonts in materials created by young women’s leaders? Is there something in the handbook that mandates superfluous curlicues? ’Cause if there is, i missed that line somehow.

Men on this side, women on that side

So why do primary presidents have to be female, while Sunday school presidents have to be male?

I mean, i guess i can kind of (but only kind of) understand why primary presidents are female, ’cause there’s the whole women-taking-care-of-children thing. But Sunday school presidents having to be male, that i don’t get at all. Seriously, that requirement seems like it was simply made up to give some guys something to do. It’s not like a female Sunday school president wouldn’t be able to be in charge of male Sunday school teachers, since female primary presidents are in charge of male primary teachers, so it’s not even something that can be explained away by appealing to stereotypes of sexism and authority. So what’s up with the policy?

Deciding who speaks when

Is there actually a church policy that someone who holds the Melchizedek priesthood (or at least a man) must be the closing speaker for sacrament meeting? (Or maybe that a woman can’t be the closing speaker?) There actually is, as far as i can find, no direction on this, which presumably would mean that it doesn’t matter—so why have most of the wards i’ve lived in treated things (sometimes explicitly, even!) like that was the rule?

Padding

What’s with padded folding chairs where the relief society meets, but hard chairs everywhere else (at least in most meetinghouses i’ve been to)? Are women’s coccyges really that much more delicate than those of males?

Who does what?

A follow-up to my last post: While going through the theses and dissertations i’ve found on Mormon cultural patterns over the past few months, i found reference to a study* that found that Mormons express more intolerance for nontraditional gender roles in household labor (e.g., a husband doing the cooking, or a wife setting up a computer) than Catholics or Protestants, but that Mormons actually don’t differ from Catholics or Protestants in the way household labor is actually divided. Intriguing difference/non-difference there.

* Necessary disclaimer: The summary here is from a secondary source, i haven’t read the original, so i can’t vouch 100% for what’s here. The article that this comes from is referenced in the thesis as Bahr 1983—and then it isn’t listed in the works cited! Grrrr…How am i supposed to find it without a full citation? Well, i’ll be looking for it, definitely…

Partial truths

Some primary songs really bug me. Take, for example, the song “The Family Is of God”, which includes the lines

A mother’s purpose is to care, prepare,
To nurture and to strengthen all her children.

Are you kidding me? How about telling the truth: The purpose of human beings is to care, prepare, nurture, and strengthen children. (And not even just their own children, at that.)

So why the need to present this partial truth as a contrast to a previous verse describing a “father’s place” (which also only gives a partial picture)? This whole cultural need within present-day Mormonism to try to place mothers and fathers (well, maybe actually women and men) into neatly separated boxes strikes me as weirdly wrongheaded, and possibly even dangerous. So how did we get into it?

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 **.

It…It was the trousers, really.

We get weird about clothing in our church. Consider, for example, the one i’ve run across more than once that holds that women must wear skirts to go into the chapel. Why?

Weirdest instance of this i’ve ever run across: Some years ago, Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever youth activity night, and a handful of women huddled outside the entrance to the chapel, trying to figure out how to get the child of one of them who was running around in the chapel. The problem? All of the women were wearing trousers. I walked by with a (male) friend, and they asked us to go fetch the child, which was then done.

The weirdness? We were wearing jeans. At least some of the women were wearing dress slacks. So what was up with it being okay for us to go in the chapel but not them?

p.s. Ten bonus points for whoever gets the obscure film reference in the title of today’s post.

Boys and girls: Access to authority

Organizational leaders in the Mormon church get extra-special bonus meetings* on top of the meeting load that comes simply with being an active member of the church. Two of these are “priesthood executive committee” and “ward council”.

Priesthood executive committee is a meeting that includes the bishopric, those holding a couple of administrative positions, and the heads of priesthood groups.** Ward council is a more expansive group, including the priesthood executive committee plus the heads of the “auxiliary organizations”—things like the primary and relief society organizations, the young women’s organization, the Sunday school, and so on.

This means that the head of the young men’s organization attends both priesthood executive committee*** and ward council meetings, while the head of the young young women’s organization attends only ward council, thereby giving the young women’s organization less access to the bishop—and, probably more crucially, fewer opportunities to schedule things—in such settings, and only in a situation where the access is much more diluted. I’ve seen this lead to miscommunications before (never anything major, happily, but it certainly happens).

Of course, you could always do what a bishop i knew some years ago did, and say that since ward council includes everyone in priesthood executive committee, they’d be combined into a single ward council meeting. With our religion’s love of meetings upon meetings upon meetings upon meetings, though, i figure that many would consider that a heretical solution to the problem.

* Yeah, great joy and stuff.

** I seem to recall reading once that church leadership had said that the head of the relief society organization could be included in this group at the option of the bishop, but i’ve never known that to actually happen. Anyone know if that’s just a Mormon urban legend, or if it actually is an official option?

*** Ostensibly as the person in charge of the Aaronic priesthood-age boys, but the bishop is actually the head of the Aaronic priesthood in the ward (according to canon), so i’m not sure exactly what’s going on there.

Boys and girls: Callings

A few years ago, the church set up policies to protect children from sexual predators. (A good goal, certainly.) Among these, rules were set up for teaching primary classes that required that a primary class be taught by one woman, two men, or a married couple (i.e., a man and a woman). This makes it rather less efficient to have a man called to teach a primary class, since if a man is called to teach a primary class two people have to be called to teach it, not just one.* This means that, in most wards, women are more likely to be called to teach primary than men are.***

I tend to think that the heavy preponderance of women teaching primary classes simply serves to give support to the stereotype that women are the ones who should be involved with children, and that men should feel free to be the aloof father of Bambi type—in my own opinion, not very healthy.

* The policy puzzles me, incidentally. I mean, yeah, the popular stereotype of a sexual predator is certainly male, but there are a lot of female sexual predators out there. So why are women allowed to teach primary alone?**

** And yes, i know that the policy does provide some situations in which a man can teach a primary class alone. That’s certainly not the default, though.

*** This was probably already the case, but the current policy, i think, makes it even more so.

Introducing a theme: Boys and girls

Sometimes i feel like i’m the only active Mormon guy around whose family is done with childbearing and has only daughters, no sons.* Having all daughters, though, has had the result of me being intensely aware of differences in the treatment of girls and boys in church culture and programs.** I have a few thoughts on the subject, and i’ve been wanting to see what happens if i devote a series of four or five posts to a theme—so the next few posts will be on that subject.

We’ll see if it works out well.

* And no, we didn’t keep “trying” to have a son until we gave up. Actually, i only wanted daughters, even before Jeanne and i started having kids—and i can produce witnesses to that fact. The assumption that all daughters was some sort of a disappointment isn’t a Mormon thing, though—i get that from all directions.

** Me being me, that would have probably been the case anyway, actually. Having all daughters and no sons certainly makes it more personal, though.