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There is certainly nothing wrong with critiquing someone's beliefs. That is often fun. Where we err is when we walk down the slippery slope to symbolic violence: Ranking, Generalizing, NormalizIng, Onlying, and Othering. Those are, in my experience, precursors to much of human conflict and all of the many forms of violence.

The current General Handbook, section 38.6.4, “Birth Control,” says: “The decision about how many children to have and when to have them is extremely personal and private. It should be left between the couple and the Lord. Church members should not judge one another in this matter.” the last sentence is important to note. Seems to me that it has been explicitly stated that your judgement of others on this topic is the actual sin?

The problem of course is that Satan in Job is not the Satan of Christianity. He's a member of the divine council and he's not working in opposition to God. He's just testing Job's loyalty, and God lets him. Trying to map Job onto LDS or Christian theology doesn't work well because their Satan basically functions as the god of evil. In Job Satan is on God's side.

We we have to be able to buy them if we are to wear them.

Agreed. It’s much worse for me now than it used to be

You know me too well. There are those who consider there to be a single continuum from Fundamentalist to Mainstream - meaning conservative to progressive or liberal within non-LDS Christianity. This view is made without regard to specific denominational affiliation. It is a continuum, something like a normal curve. Others, including me believe they (Fundamentalist, Evangelical, and Mainstream) represent three very different movements with different and specific characteristics, history, and orthopraxy in addition to orthodoxies. In my thinking the Mainstream was the original - mainstream Christianity in the USA specifically we might say. Then Fundamentalism arose to counter what had become the Mainstream social gospel at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. It became a distinct movement with specific characteristics and again was regardless of denomination or affiliation. Then in the 1940s, there arose a third, mostly USA-based movement known as Evangelicalism. It arose in reaction to Fundamentalism with its own unique orthopraxies and orthodoxies. Over the eighty or so years of the existence of the Evangelical movement, it has widened to become what is often deemed a “large tent” movement. Very simplistically, it is often said that ask an Evangelical what they believe and they will tell you what they are "for." Ask a Fundamentalist what they believe, and they will tell you what they are "against." This is overly simplistic, but at the same time somewhat broadly effective. Today, in one form or another, the Mainstreamers are characterized by what has become known as the "social gospel." Ask them what they believe, and they will discuss social justice and other "causes." They might be conservative theologically (rarely) or liberal theologically )more common). There are denominations that fall broadly within each of the three, but always with exceptions. Then of course, there are distinctions within each of the three groups, expanding the complexity. Inspite of the complexity it is pretty easy to determine to which your are speaking after about five minutes of conversation. This is moderately comparable to the movements that exist within Mormonism. They may have been formalized by the creation of a new type of Mormonism. They may also be characterized by orthopraxy within each Mormon group. By and large, when I go to a MHA meeting, I am meeting with a different form of Mormonism than when I attend a ward in Chihuahua, or a ward in rural Utah. Same church; different positions on a conservative to progressive continuum. I happen to believe I have friends who are Evangelical Mormons, and certainly there are Fundamentalist (not in the plural marriage meaning) Mormons, and there is a nascent Mormon Mainstream movement with a focus on social justice, and diversity, such as the Global branch of MHA. Since I live in Chihuahua, I have gone to meetings of the Global branch of MHA and I feel like a rank conservative. Then I hold a meeting here that is a family reunion with a group from Vernal, Utah and I feel like a progressive. So it is with Presbyterians (especially), Methodists (who have recently split into formalized groups representing all three (Fund - Evan - Main). In some sense, I see all three represented here in Latin American Catholicism. as well. Then we get back to the challenge of how do I identify and that being a valid indication of anything. That is where it gets very complicated, especially within the growing non-denominational movement within American Protestantism. When I was a boy, I went to an IFCA church; my dad pastored it. IFCA stands for Independent Fundamentalist Churches of America. That was our denomination; our orthopraxy and orthodoxy were clearly Mennonite. In the fifties it was also a way of separating ourselves from the new Evangelical movement and the traditional Mainstreamers. Now the IFCA type grouping is on the decline. It is not "cool" anymore to be Fundamentalist as it was in the fifties. Why? Because much damage has been done to folks in the name of Fundamentalism. So today, it is rare to walk up to someone and say, "Hi . . . are you a Fundamentalist?" They are more than likely to say, "No, I am independent, unaffiliated, or Evangelical" than they are to acknowledge their Fundamentalism, even though their very reasons for entering into a conversation with you may reveal their Fundamentalist tendency. Ok. . . . . . . Writing too much. I hope this helps. Blessings on all: Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, Mainstreamers, and none of the abovers. Navidad

This situation with the verifying is horrible. I am having to reverify every time I change pages. Very frustrating.

Exactly. Imagine if Jesus had said "I don't like this, I'm uncomfortable". There's really a lack of willingness to follow God at all costs. Perhaps we need to take the same approach to the garment that Pres. Woodruff had for fasting. "It was remarked this morning that some people said they could not fast because it made their head ache. Well, I can fast, and so can any other man; and if it makes my head ache by keeping the commandments of God, let it ache."

On what basis do you believe the conversation between Satan and God is a poetic rendition instead of actual one? Were the limits the Lord put on Satan to test Job also poetic?

I agree, though I also think there to be certain current canonized revelation that ought not to be canonized nor considered to be revelation, so you and I would perhaps diverge on that point.

Do you have a reference for that change?

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.”