Watching movies

So this past weekend my family sat down and watched the movie The Singles Ward. (Jeanne and i had seen it before, but it was the first time any of our kids had seen it.) If you haven’t seen it before, it’s not world-shatteringly great but it’s also not a bad little movie, and you should watch it if for no other reasons than (a) it has a really fun soundtrack that would drive some of our more, um, intensely artistically conservative church members absolutely insane* and (b) the rest of this post assumes you’ve seen the movie and at least somewhat remember it.

Anyway, as i watched this movie for the first time in several years, i was struck by two things. One is that the Discman shown at the beginning and end of the movie certainly dates it, even though it’s only just over a decade old. The other is more substantial: The big important turning point of the movie involves the female lead becoming severely angry and hurt because the male lead makes jokes about Mormons in his stand-up routine.

This reminded me of what i thought was the really, really major flaw of the movie:** Was the female lead character really worth chasing after? I mean, anyone who would be offended by such mild jokes, well, i don’t think such a person is worth it, you know?† But no, she gets held up as this amazing ideal, and we’re supposed to feel empathy for her. Sorry, folks, but if someone can’t watch others poke fun (mildly, even!) at a group they’re a part of, they really need to grow a thicker skin before they’re such the ideal.††

* Seriously—find Rooster’s version of “Popcorn Popping” from the movie’s soundtrack and download it now. You will be happy.

** Also, in the same sequence, a minor flaw: The evil female character’s use of the verb “to play” in a way that i’m still trying to figure out—it almost but not quite matches any of the (slang) meanings i’ve ever heard, or that i can find even on Urban Dictionary.

† There’s an irony of sorts, too, in that one of the stock characters that the movie uses to make fun of singles ward folks is a woman who is offended by patently non-offensive things.

†† I think i’m going to use the rare “Mormon-oriented literature” tag on this one, just to annoy the kind of people who don’t think literature departments should teach courses in film.

More lockstep claims

So in my last post, i wondered aloud where the idea that Mormons are a lockstep people comes from. Wherever it comes from, though, it’s become a part of the narrative, and as evidence for that i give a line from one of Aaron Blake’s recent columns in the Washington Post,* this one about how the Mormon vote has helped Mitt Romney in the past, and how it was expected to help him in today’s caucuses. Here’s the line:

Because Mormons vote in unison and because they turn out in large numbers, a state like Nevada is virtually impossible for any of Romney’s opponents to win.

Did you catch that? “Because Mormons vote in unison…” Interesting phrasing there—it presupposes that Mormons vote in unison, rather than trying to establish whether that’s actually the case. It certainly is the case that Mormons have tended to vote for Romney at rather amazingly high rates in the past, but how would one know that Mormons voting for Romney at such high rates isn’t simply a case of identity politics, rather than the group voting as a (near-)monolithic bloc?

* I grew up near Washington DC, and a lot of the Mormons i grew up around were convinced that the Post was an ardently anti-Mormon newspaper. I never really got that, myself—rather, the newspaper, like very many newspapers, was intensely after the merest whiff of scandal coming from any large organization, and that occasionally meant they reported on negative stuff about the Mormon church. There is a difference between that practice and being anti-Mormon, though—if you’re an equal-opportunity muckracker, i don’t think the charge of being anti-anything-specific can actually stick, you know?

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?

Whence conservatism?

So Mormons are of great interest to political reporters here in the United States right now, what with a Mormon locked in a tight race for a major-party presidential nomination and all. One thing that’s frequently been reported is the result of an opinion poll that (supported the conventional wisdom and) found that a majority of Mormons self-describe* as conservative, and only a tiny sliver as liberal.** This leads to a bunch of assumptions about Mormons and their political leanings—but i’m wondering if this isn’t getting the causality precisely backwards.

I mean, a whole bunch of Mormons are from the central Rocky Mountain region, and that’s a pretty conservative region—even states there where Mormons don’t hold a majority (as they do in Utah) are pretty intensely conservative.† So is it that Mormons are generally conservative, or is it that people from the central Rocky Mountain region are generally conservative, and the Mormons from there†† are just along for the ride?

I’m thinking the latter, myself.

* It’s rarely clear whether these surveys mean to measure political, social, economic, or whatever attitudes, and that bugs me.

** That is, “liberal” in the United States sense, not the rest-of-the-English-speaking-world sense.

† In fact, i’d argue that Utah has only the third-most conservative electorate in the region, following Idaho and Wyoming.

†† And very specifically from there, not just living there—i’d expect Mormons from, say, Pocatello, Idaho to be likely to lean right, even if they happened to be living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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?

Choosing to debate, or not

So i’m at a research conference right now, and it’s being hosted this year by Georgetown University. Georgetown University is a Roman Catholic university (specifically, a Jesuit one).

So while i was wandering around campus i saw tables set up by some student groups, and one of them was by Hoyas* for Choice. This is, as you might expect from the name, a group of Georgetown University students who favor the continued legality of abortion.** Of course, this goes against Roman Catholic dogma, which is firmly and completely against abortion under any circumstances. (Oh—and they were giving out free condoms, another practice against Roman Catholic dogma.)

This got me thinking that i can’t imagine the administration at Brigham Young University accepting the existence of a “Cougars for Choice” group, and particularly not tolerating such a group having a table on campus, or giving out free condoms. I’ve heard some Mormons say that this is a good thing, and a sign that Brigham Young University is something approaching perfection in higher education, because dissent from religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy simply doesn’t happen there.

It leads me to wonder whether such a lack of debate is actually healthy, though. I mean, how does someone really learn to defend (or even argue for) their religious perspective if they’re sheltered from alternative points of view? Relatedly, i know that there’s a diversity of opinions on a lot of really intense issues among Mormons—but does it actually serve us well to reinforce the idea held by a lot of non-Mormons that we’re a bunch of groupthink types, when we’re actually not?

Discuss.***

* Georgetown’s sports teams and students are called Hoyas. No, it doesn’t make any sense to me either.

** And any comments on this post that even begin to hint at arguing about abortion rather than the main topic i’m getting at here will be summarily deleted—i find abortion flamewars tiresome.

*** That is, discuss while keeping footnote ** in mind.

So this is an interesting turn

There’s a presidential election coming up next year here in the United States, and as part of our (insanely) long election process, a few interesting things have come out. First of all, for the first time as far as i can tell, there are two serious candidates who are Mormon, both of them running for the Republican Party’s nomination. Now, the Republican Party is the United States’ mainstream conservative party, but as an example of how socially conservative that party has drifted, consider the following intriguing factoid:

Out of all the candidates for that party’s nomination (and there are quite a few right now), the only two who agree with the scientific consensus that Darwinian evolution is a real thing and with the scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is the result of human activity are…the two Mormons.

Mormonism: The religion of modern science. Who’da thunk it?

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.

Youth dances and hair

A couple weeks ago, i chaperoned a church youth dance for the very first time.

It was a weird experience, being the grown-up. But that’s not the aspect of it i want to talk about today.

Here’s what really caught my attention: There’s a dress and grooming code for attending dances in my stake. (As far as i can tell, there’s such dress and grooming codes for church dances at least nearly everywhere, though the details of what they are may be different.) Here, the dress and grooming standards are, essentially, the same ones that Brigham Young University requires of its students.

For the most part, this isn’t a problem, because my stake allows youth who come to the dances but aren’t following those dress and grooming rules to change their appearance on the spot, and then they’re allowed in. So, for example, a girl with more than one pair of earrings (or a boy with any earrings, or anyone with any visible non-ear body piercing) can simply remove the piercing and they’re good to go.

This even goes to the clothes the kid is wearing—if, say, a girl comes in wearing a skirt that’s too short, the stake holds a bunch of teen-sized clothing in reserve that they can change into so that they’re then following the rules. (In my opinion this is good, by the way—if you’re going to have rules on appearance that have somewhat subjective boundaries, providing a way to adhere to them on the spot seems only reasonable.)

There are, though, a few rules that don’t lend themselves to on-the-spot changing—and there lies the problem. For example, one of the rules in my stake forbids youth with multiple colors of hair (you know, like bleached ends or a streak of color)* from attending youth dances.

Fine. You can make whatever rule you like. But i wonder about whether this is actually a good sort of rule to have, one where the so-called “problem” can’t be fixed on the spot. (Basically, if someone shows up with multiple hair colors, they’ve got to go home—there’s no good way to cover it up, especially with hats not being allowed.) What, though, if a non-member who has, say, blue and blond streaks gets invited to a youth dance here? They’re not allowed to enter—if they show up, they get barred from going in. Of course, if that happens they’re less likely to show any interest in the church in the future, i would expect.

And there we have a real issue (and not necessarily the one you’d immediately think of). The big problem: Our expectations start to feed our reality—i mean, a kid with blue and blond streaks clearly isn’t the sort of person who would ever have any interest in the church, anyway, right? After all, they never seem to want to come to our dances, so their hair color must just be a reflection of a hard heart and spiritual weakness, right? And we wouldn’t want someone like that in our church, would we?

* Of course, the enforcement of this rule doesn’t extend to girls with blond highlights. I suppose they can’t really enforce that one ’cause if they did, they’d have to ban some of the youth leaders from showing up. Amazing how the practices of the ones holding more power are acceptable, even if it goes against the literal statements of those in power, isn’t it?

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.

Spirituality and boys

I’ve gone back and forth on posting (well, reposting, sort of) this, but i want to get people’s reactions on it.

A couple months ago, Heather the Mama Duk related this story in a comment to a post on this blog:

Not really on your point, but it reminded me of something I found totally weird.

My former visiting teaching companion in my old ward once said she felt people who were given several boys were the more spiritual people in the church. She said that she knew I must be a wonderful person because I have 3 boys. She wasn’t so much because she only had one boy.

Um, yeah. I seriously had no response. Totally speechless. It was the strangest conversation I’ve ever had with another Mormon. I mean, I’d had almost the exact same conversation a few days before with my next door neighbor, but she was Muslim so culturally her point made a lot more sense.

For the record, I do not believe at all that Mormons with lots of boys are any better than those who have lots of girls…or no kids at all.

I’m (re)posting this to find out if anyone out there has had similar experiences, or has heard similar things from other Mormons. Is this widespread and people just don’t say it to my face ’cause i have all daughters (and so therefore must be unspiritual)?* Or is this the sort of thing that comes about ’cause we’re gathering our converts from all the wrong neighborhoods?** Or is this actually an integral part of Mormon doctrine, and i’ve just managed to miss it in my readings of canon over the years?

* I mean, unspiritual for that reason, not for things like that i run a vaguely snarky blog.

** Not that i’d blame relatively-recently-appeared-in-Mormonism social attitudes that are clearly borrowed wholesale from evangelicalism on such things. No, of course not. Never.

Not better, just different

I’m not a fan of the “my wife is better than me” meme that you hear guys offer up occasionally in sacrament meeting speeches and class discussions. (I’m also not a fan of its less-often-heard “my husband is better than me” analogue.) The truth is, everybody’s better than everybody else, if you focus on an overly narrow slice of characteristics in each case. So your wife’s better than you, and you’re better than your wife. Stop trying to impress us with your fake humility, and you might become even better.

Big dumb guys

You know, the story of Samson really is the ultimate big dumb strong guy story, isn’t it?