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I hope we can focus on the topic. Thanks, -Smac

I anticipate Navidad pointing out these are technically Fundamentalists even if our experience is they called themselves Evangelicals. If I understand correctly Evangelical is more a broad category rather than a set of beliefs or a movement. One could be an Evangelical Catholic. So perhaps I need to start thinking of them as Evangelical Fundamentalists rather than Fundamentalist Evangelicals. That way I include the label they typically chose for themselves while being accurate (hopefully).

I read that article and the ordinance and I don't see any "explicit let transgender people use the restroom of their choice". The ordinance is an anti-discrimination ordinance. It does say that it covers "public accomodations" that could cover public restrooms, but it isn't explicit and I don't see any attempt to use this ordinance in that manner. Additionally, in 2001, there was a case in Minnesota where a transwoman sued her employer because she was denied the right to use the women's bathroom. It went all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court who ruled that the Minnesota Human Rights Act (which had similar language to the Minneapolis ordinance) did not protect her and that her employer could force her to use the men's bathroom. The case is GOINS v. WEST GROUP (https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/mn-supreme-court/1061687.html is one location to read it). If the Minneapolis ordinance actually allowed transgender people to use the restroom of their choice, then it is odd that she didn't sue under that ordinance. And it is interesting that a very similar law was read the opposite. So, I don't think that the Minneapolis ordinance has anything to do with transgender people and bathrooms.

I think the State and its extensions should not regulate speech as to either "preferred pronouns" or "deadnaming." No ifs, ands, or buts . . . this is more than just politics . . . https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1DLiZ1f9yb/

When that article was written, it was a battle. And they were losing, as evidenced by the disappearance of rabid Evangelicals who stalked us on every LDS site created. (Rabid EVs are a breed unto themselves, not reflective of the entire group.) Mosser and Owen used to post on the old FAIR board. Mosser tended more toward the caricaturing of Mormonism than Owen....who eventually converted to an Orthodox religion. It wasn't so fun for them when we started critiquing their beliefs...and it was very easy to do, even using their own scholars.

It used to be. It is not anymore. This happens a lot. The commandments are much more malleable than the leadership of the Church likes to acknowledge.

Of course the former isn’t actually abuse or grooming and the latter often is so why are you making them equivalent? You’re implying that watching a drag queen read a children’t book is somehow equivalent to being molested or assaulted or propositioned or whatever. That is gross. Again, this is just making drag queens (who often aren’t transgender) into porn. Always. They are a threat just by existing in the vicinity of children. This kind of thinking is sick and demented and wrong.

This has nothing to do with what you quoted me saying. Why bother to respond if you are just going off on an unrelated tangent?

I don’t know about 1971, but iirc (I no longer have the book with the info in it), for a time after switching to mass produced garments, they allowed members to still make their own based off of the garments they already had, it looks like patterns were not provided by the Church according to the link marineland provided (thanks for that as my memory was wrong). It was stopped, again iirc, because some took liberties with not following the pattern sufficiently. This may have been reality, may have been perception (a few reported cases may have given the impression of widespread noncompliance). Can’t recall if the chapter commented on the reality or not.

In order to be responsive to your point, I did some more research on Lilly Tino. I'd never heard of her until you repeatedly brought her up as a source of daily discussion, debate, and news here. Here is the big question: is "my side" somehow trying to leverage her content to make trans issues "a source for daily discussion and debate and news"? I just can't imagine that you were minding your own business and she suddenly showed up on your Tik Tok feed, much less that the New York Times or Huffington Post brought her to your attention. Lilly is clearly trying to be an provocative influencer, but by herself she is only reaching a few hundred thousand people. In absolute numbers that is impressive, but it's a tiny percentage of the population. So why are we talking about her here? To research this, I made a list of the top 10 right-wing news/editorial sites, and the top 10 mainstream/liberal sites, and then, with the help of AI, searched all 20 for content on Lilly. Here is what I found: BOTTOM LINE: Among 20 major news organizations I searched, right-leaning outlets produced at least 13 substantive Lilly Tino stories/segments. Mainstream/center-left outlets produced 1. For the 2025 Disney controversy specifically, the score was 10–0. I searched the same ten large right-leaning outlets and ten large mainstream/center-left outlets for both “Lilly Tino” and “Lilly Contino,” counting only pieces substantially about her. On the right, I found coverage from Fox News, New York Post, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, Townhall, RedState, Daily Wire and PJ Media. Breitbart and RedState covered her repeatedly. On the other side, I found nothing from the New York Times, CNN, Guardian, USA Today, NBC, Reuters, AP, Washington Post or NPR. CBS had one 2023 story—about Tino being the victim of anti-trans harassment. This doesn't mean Tino herself isn't seeking attention. She obviously is. Some of her TikToks have received tens of millions of views. But that's different from secondary amplification: Who finds this transgender TikToker, decides her behavior is socially important, and puts it in front of millions of people who don't follow her? On that question, the evidence is overwhelmingly one-sided. The major mainstream/left outlets largely ignore Lilly Tino. Conservative media repeatedly tells its audience about her. So using Lilly Tino as evidence that “liberals are shoving transgender issues in our faces” seems almost exactly backwards. The people working hardest to make Lilly Tino part of the broader political conversation are her critics on the right.

@quietcanon, do you believe that "God does now reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God"? If so, how might we recognize them? And, how would they fit into your "canon first" theological hierarchy?

Part 2 of 2 I was wondering if "my side" is "moving heaven and earth to make trans issues a source for daily discussion and debate and news," I decided to go to FoxNews.com and see what issues they were talking about there, and compare it to what is in the New York Times. Fox News had multiple top stories about trans issues, and I couldn't find any in the New York Times about them. I decided to enlist AI to help me conduct my research. ChatGPT could easily access FoxNews.com, but couldn't access NYTimes.com. So, I printed off the launching pages of 4 sections of the Times (Headlines, Sports, Lifestyle, and Editorials), and uploaded it to GPT, and asked it to compare what is in the New York Times to what is in Fox News. Here is what it found out: On August 22, I took a simple snapshot of what two major news organizations were actually putting before their readers. For The New York Times, I looked not merely at its homepage but at four separate pages: the main news page, The Athletic, Lifestyle and Opinion. After eliminating duplicate appearances of the same article, those pages contained 281 unique stories. Not one was about transgender issues. The Times certainly publishes stories about transgender people and policy when it considers them newsworthy. But on this particular day, across hundreds of opportunities—including sports and opinion—it wasn't pushing the subject at all. Fox News was quite different. Its homepage contained 145 unique articles, of which six—4.1%—were substantially about transgender issues. They included transgender athletes, the WNBA, “XX-XY” messaging, a teacher disciplined over a chromosome T-shirt, and a family involved in a dispute over a transgender teacher. Fox also placed “WNBA CONTROVERSY” in its “Hot Topics” banner at the top of the homepage, giving the subject prominence beyond the individual articles. This doesn't prove that liberals never emphasize transgender issues, nor can one day's webpages establish what every person on either “side” does. But it is difficult to square this evidence with Smac's assertion that my side “is moving heaven and earth to make trans issues a source for daily discussion and debate and news.” On this day, the supposedly trans-obsessed New York Times offered zero transgender stories among 281 choices. Fox News offered six among 145, while separately promoting the controversy as a Hot Topic. If the question is who was working harder to keep transgender controversies in the daily news cycle, the evidence from this snapshot isn't ambiguous. It was Fox News.

Part 1 of 2 Let’s do a deep dive onto this with a case study: the specific events that led to this thread being resurrected, which is you raising the issue of transgender women competing in the WNBA. As background, the WNBA started in 1997, and has had about 1,300 players between its first game and now. Of those players, one has been transgender: The transgender player was Layshia Clarendon, who played in the league from 2013 to 2024. Layshia’s original birth certificate says “female”, and she is 5’9” tall, 158 pounds. In 2020 she said she now self-identifies as “non-binary” and had chest masculinization surgery. Other than that, zero transgender athletes have played. The Collective Bargaining Agreement with the player’s union says “only players who are women are eligible to play in the WNBA,” and it assumes that the definition of “woman” is self-explanatory and doesn’t need a special definition. With regard to transgender athletes playing in the WNBA this was a non-issue as it had been for 30 years. If, hypothetically, a transgender athlete said she wanted to play, at that point the league and players union could work out how to apply their CBA to that situation. But until that were to happen, this would be purely hypothetical. Then on August 7, 2026, Fox News released a Fox Exclusive news story: two hard-core MAGA Republican ex-NBA basketball players were going to try and get into the WNBA. They were in fact on “your side”—they are card-carrying Republicans, speakers at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), frequent guests on Fox News, attending Charlie Kirk’s victory party for Trump’s 2025 inaguration, etc. One was a Republican U.S. Senate candidate. Objectively, this is a cheap publicity stunt and a non-event. So why are we talking about it? I did some digging, and the story made the New York Times. The Times didn’t think it deserved a fully story, but it did describe it in three sentences in an editorial about some bigger issues in the WNBA. Here is the totality of what the Times has published about it, quoted in its entirety: New York Times “Now we have ex-NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White mockingly declaring their eligibility for the WNBA Draft. These far-right flamethrowers, these retirees thirsty for attention, these unserious stunt artists are here only to condemn the theory of inclusivity and taunt the women of this league. Please, let me off this ride.” Again, those three sentences are everything the New York Times has said about this. I then tried the same thing at FoxNews.com. There were hundreds of hits about this story. I enlisted ChatGPT to summarize them. Here is what it came up with: Fox News Fox News didn’t simply report the Royce White/Enes Kanter Freedom WNBA stunt once and move on. It repeatedly promoted and repackaged it for nearly two weeks. I can document at least 22 distinct Fox treatments between August 7 and August 19—including news articles, opinion/analysis pieces, Fox TV segments, video clips, interviews, and full-show discussions. That’s a conservative count because I excluded later WNBA stories that merely mentioned White/Freedom or embedded earlier coverage. Fox covered the initial declarations, the WNBA’s response, supposed “loopholes” in league policy, White’s formal draft submission, Matt Gaetz’s involvement, and repeated interviews and discussions on Fox & Friends Weekend, Outnumbered, Fox News @ Night, Fox News Sunday, and OutKick programming. Fox also kept cross-promoting the controversy through related-story links and embedded White/Freedom videos. As of August 22, “WNBA CONTROVERSY” was still one of only four “Hot Topics” promoted at the top of FoxNews.com. So this wasn’t a story Fox reluctantly covered because transgender athletes were dominating the news. Two conservative former NBA players deliberately created a publicity stunt about a hypothetical issue, and Fox turned it into an ongoing news cycle—at least 22 separate treatments in roughly twelve days. Summary Using the New York Times as a proxy for “my side”, this is a total non-issue. Using Fox News as a proxy for “your side”, this is a huge issue where Fox is going out of there way to create multiple stories about it every day and is creating links across the site saying this is a hot issue that its readers and viewers need to be thinking about all the time. After Fox News convinced its readership that this was an important topic for daily discussion and debate and news, you raised the topic here to discuss and debate it here. So given how it is you personally and right-wing news sources who are pretending this total non-issue is a HUGE news event that deserves intense coverage and debate, it is very much mind-blowing that you somehow think “it is very much your side of the debate that is moving heaven and earth to make trans issues a source for daily discussion and debate and news.”

That's not the current policy.

Thank you for your thoughts. One of my divergences with the Church is doctrines and commentary can contradict canonized revelation. It is bad theology, detracts from the spirit, and causes our teachings and lessons to lack power. If instead we quoted, parsed, and analyzed Class 1 (quoted word of God) for every ounce of meaning, the Church would be far stronger.

"Individuals who have received their endowments who desire to make garments for themselves or a family member may do so" (Letter of the Office of the First Presidency, March 9, 1971). https://mormonstudies.as.virginia.edu/princes-research-excerpts-temples-mormonism/bergera-garments

Yes. Your assertion that LDS women in Gilbert wear workout gear specifically to deceive their bishops out of laziness or hypocrisy, that is an assumption about their internal motives, not a verifiable fact. I cannot "disprove" your cynical interpretation of another person's heart because motives aren't visible. You treat your cynical guess as a fact and then demand we disprove your guess. That isn't truth. Full of loaded phrasing ("what all the cool kids do") and hostile framing, you construct a deceptive narrative. You certainly don't know why every individual wears what they wear, so asserting they are all lying isn't 'truth', it's just your preference to assume the worst. We don't have to disprove your bad-faith interpretation. The fact that you always frame everything in the most hostile way possible speaks to your bias. It’s interesting how you demand strict literal proof from everyone else but expect everyone to accept your unprovable assumptions about Church members as absolute fact. People who operate this way rarely want an honest dialogue. They want to score points.

Ok . Well good luck to you

Hi Bluebell Although the Catholic Church, in principle, may accept Protestant baptism, making their Church members Christian. It is partly due to the understanding of Second Vatican Council in the sixties. Which Calm in previous post has touched on. The only Baptism fully recognised by the Catholic church, is by the Catholic which then makes you a member of it. If that makes sense. I think 3DOP can give a fuller explanation than me.

https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19641121_unitatis-redintegratio_en.html

Well, that's debatable. The two fellows are claiming to "identify" as women. And per standard trans orthodoxy, "woman" is an undefined or infinitely malleable term, and nobody is allowed to question anyone's declared identity anyway. Fallacy of relative privation (also called "appeal to worse problems" or "not as bad as"). Even if this were relevant, it would not really work as a basis for accusing me of hypocrisy, since I have frequently spoken at length about protecting children, including from other predatory Latter-day Saints, and I have utterly condemned any and all such abuse. I have never condoned any abuse of children, whether it be the sexualized/grooming antics involved in some drag queen story hours, drag shows, Pride parades, and on one, or whether it be a Latter-day Saint exploiting access to Latter-day Saint children. Again, I'm happy to discuss any concerns you have about bishops interviewing children, but not as a means of distracting from the topics under discussion in the last several pages of this thread. Again, you persist in attempting to distract from the topic and criticize me as a person. Classic ad hominem. I hope you can get past it. I acknowledge that the discussion of trans issues amounts to a straying a bit from the original topic of this thread, and that I introduced this straying topic into the thread. Fortunately, I contacted the person who started the thread and got his specific permission to talk about trans issues in it. He has no problem with it at all. Thanks, -Smac

We’ve had a lot of TULIP Calvinists who have posted here over the years. I’m aware of their doctrine. It doesn’t translate into a belief that a specific Calvinist church is the only true church though. Not as it’s been explained to me anyway. There is probably one out there somewhere that does believe it. Lots of independent Calvinist churches out there. Catholicism is probably the closest mainstream church to our views on one true church. The biggest difference is that they accept Protestant baptism as valid (if I understand correctly. Probably best to let one of the residents Catholics speak on that)

I had to go back and review what the topic of this thread actually is. You resurrected this thread a couple of weeks ago because a couple of conservative men decided they wanted to draw attention to a WNBA policy they don't like. The controversy is entirely hypothetical at this point: there is no identified transgender player currently seeking to enter the WNBA. Rather than let this non-issue lie, these conservatives announced that they were going to make an issue of it. And rather than ignore their stunt, you decided to resurrect this topic. I'm reminding you of the context because you said, “I think it is very much your side of the debate that is moving heaven and earth to make trans issues a source for daily discussion and debate and news.” This thread—and the news event that precipitated it—is a small example of the larger pattern. It is your side that keeps insisting that these issues become subjects of daily political discussion. I certainly don't claim that Grok's analysis of the issues I raised was perfect, nor that my prompts were. And more fundamentally, I have no idea whether you'd consider a lengthy response to all of that on-topic or another distraction. But I will reiterate my main point: if you are genuinely worried about children being sexualized and groomed, you might want to pay considerably more attention to your own house before worrying about whether some parent somewhere takes their child to a library event you don't approve of.

Excellent webbles! Thanks.

They don't say everything is unknown. There are somethings that are known per the scripture. But the parts that the scripture doesn't explain is the Mystery. So, if you try to force other Christians to define things in those mysterious parts, you are either going to get their own personal ideas or the answer "it is a mystery". Similar to asking us to explain how God came to be God. Is He the original one or does He have a Father? Was He a savior of His world like Christ or not?. These are things we don't know and only have speculation on. It also kind of defeats your statement of "God helps us understand Him by continuous revelation through living prophets". Even for us, there are limits on what has been revealed. I think the normal response for us is that it is not important to our understanding of God, and I would expect that is also the normal response for other Christians as well. The things defined for the Trinity do allow theological disagreements between trinitarianism and us. And it does also show that we "believe in a different God/Jesus". I'm not saying that the entire belief of God is a mystery. Only the details about the Trinity are a mystery. For the Catholic church, the declaration of what is heretical or not would be called continuous revelation to us. They have the public revelation, which is all of the revealed scripture. And then God continues to give inspiration to make sure that it is understood correctly. So the Nicaean creed is pretty much the same thing as our document "The Living Christ" (the one from 2000 signed by the 15). The first is from leaders of the church who got together, discussed, argued, and came to an agreement and wrote to the world. The second is also from leaders of the church who got together, discussed, argued, and came to an agreement and wrote to the world. And both groups believe they were inspired. We (LDS) accept the inspiration of the latter but not the former. Catholics (and other trinitarians) accept the inspiration of the former but not the latter.