Robert F. Smith

When reality is fully accounted for (career vs child-bearing, etc.), the gap is miniscule. In fact Claudia Goldin calls the gap a "motherhood gap." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13XU4fMlN3w https://youtu.be/P8P8eDSA5S0 There is a reason why Bari Weiss says that DEI is bad. There is a reason why she is now Editor-in-Chief at CBS.

Grooming young boys to believe that they are either trans or naughty by nature (and white boys especially with inborn racism), and then saddling them with enormous college debt and other absurd expectations, will of course drive them away from feminized and Marxist higher ed. No wonder they choose more practical trade schools. No surprise at male flight from the DEI dominated Democratic Party. Naturally, male and female political views now so strongly diverge.

Nonsense. Women have been receiving the same pay as men in the same fields, and far more women have been entering professional fields such as medicine and law. The lag time has influenced the interim figures, but that is a thing of the past. Women have been getting equal pay for equal work for some time. Asians with higher scores have been systematically excluded from top colleges. There are quotas to prevent colleges from being overwhelmed by Asians, just as was done in the past for Jews. Sounds like an excuse in search of a reason. A Mormon or Protestant work ethic may apply in some limited circumstances, but America at large is not so blest. A fentanyl or zombie culture is competing for attention.

The Mormon approach is pragmatic, not ideological. Even as an American Church, Mormonism represents praxis, not doxis. It goes back to the old joke about Saint Peter giving a tour of heaven to a group of new arrivals: When Pete offhandedly pointed downward toward Hell, and someone said "Yes, but it is so green down there," and Pete replies: "Those Mormons are at it again." Yep. That's why, before Xi, China had made great capitalist strides forward.

True enough, but the CCP is a top-down organization. Corruption actually gets things done just as it does in a mafia family. Xi is losing power, and the new order might shift back to special privilege for those who follow power Machiavelli style -- including imposition of some new order. The dictatorship of the proletariat is, after all, merely the new class.

Nonsense, the true expectation is that Asians and Jews will predominate, and Marxist Harvard (for example) has done everything possible to prevent that catastrophe. As to "men," again nonsense. Two-thirds of university students are women. So-called "white men" are being systematically excluded due their toxic taint.

Pres. Nelson had earned some sort of respect from the CCP, and our missionaries in Europe actually converted a lot Chinese students. Yes, they are quiescent. So you don't include Mormons in the nebish category?

So, why hasn't the CCP persecuted Mormons?

Correct. However, the twelfth article of faith declares, “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.” Mormons are not known as rabble rousers. The CCP could easily adopt a 19th century Mormon United Firm/United Order communal approach. LDS chapels and temples could transform mainland China.

Perhaps, but also possible that it is highly accidental in nature. As if this is the way the LDS Church would have moved forward in any case, staid and unremarkable. Moreover, this Conference suggests that the Brethren understand very well that the fastest growth is in Africa. Too bad that Chairman Xi Jinping hasn't realized that his CCP could very profitably adopt Latter-day Saint tradition (real or a clone) in order to get China back on track. Currently in the doldrums.

Any of us can take the modern moral high ground and condemn people in the past, and we can even blame God for it all -- instead of describing how people lived in those times. This goes back to the false notion of infallibility of prophets or anyone else. Absolute judgments are easily made, but seldom amount to more than an evanescent value judgment.

Good. Now, how do you judge people living in the past who have done things we don't approve of today? Presentist like Ben McGuire apply current moral judgments to everyone in the past.

I appealed to a broad range of cultural facts (including state law in Joseph's day) which do not fit our later, presentist assumptions as a society. You carefully ignore the impact of very different societal norms -- which do change over time. Presentists pass absolute judgment, as you are doing, on the actions of past peoples. Anthropologists don't. Historians don't. They describe people as they were, warts and all. This is especially difficult for fundamentalists and literalists who read the Bible and are shocked by the horrors to be found in Holy Writ -- often attributed to God. Why are you afraid take people as they are? You are quick with accusations, but slow on the uptake on the infantilization of youth -- which entails treating teens as babies, instead of giving them responsibility. You claim this to be "abhorrent" only because you deliberately misinterpret the concept. It has nothing to do with your personal need to see it as sexual. It is rather the observable fact that young people raised with real chores to do, as a real part of the community, somehow mature more quickly -- whether living in a paleolithic group or on an Israeli kibbutz. Those are indeed our modern problems, which you use to attack a convenient and innocent target -- rather than simply understand in the broader historical context. That is true hypocrisy. As to politicians, you probably need to apply a Machiavellian interpretation to their actions. It's all about power, Ben. It always has been.

Yes, you can deliberately reverse the argument and play fast and loose with stats, which is your wont. All good arguments for complete relativism, if that is what you seek. Then anything and everything is "true." And all facts are then meaningless.

Yes, of course. You and I live in modern times and should avail ourselves of modern medical fact. However, blaming people in the past for not knowing all this is the true fantasy of presentism.

Yep. A fair summary from our modern, enlightened POV. Indeed, the tendency nowadays is to delay marriage -- if there is any marriage at all -- into the 30s. Of course the Latter-day Saint, Amish, Hutterite, and ultra-Orthodox Jewish subcultures are more likely to marry earlier and to have a higher birthrate. My own parents didn't marry until age 25, and then had five healthy children. Mom and Dad had both graduated college and established themselves first. It is presentism to expect earlier peoples to fit our preferred mode of life. We need to describe what they did, not pass judgment -- which is the true fantasy.

Spoken like a true presentist. Passing harsh judgment on foreign cultures is morally abominable. Anthropologists just don't do it.

What was normal at the beginning of the 19th century does in no way control the average (median) age at the end of the century. Presentism is the silly notion that what is acceptable today was always the case, which it was not. Especially among haters and rumor-mongers, anything can be asserted with fervor, and reality ignored. Presentism is modern people passing snap judgment.

Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliette were only 13 years old, scholars consider that Mary the Mother of Jesus was only 14 when she bore Jesus, King Josiah of Judah was 13 at the birth of his first child (his next children born when he was 14 and 16 to his plural wives Zebudah and Hamutal). Fourteen was a legal age of marriage in most American states in Joseph's day. Presentists ignore all that. Why? They had no high schools in those days, and a 14-year-old girl could teach school. My grandmother was already a legal secretary in Kansas at 14, although she did go to high school and then to Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia. Infantilizing our young people has not been a success.

You converted an offhand comment about "vicious lies" in the Expositor directly into a single lie about polygyny, and then you expanded that lie. The Expositor complained about a lot, not just about polygyny by Joseph. So why did you fasten solely upon polygyny? Had you listed all the accusations by the Expositor, and gone over each one with an assessment of fact or fiction, that might have been a reasonable approach. Instead, your focus was on only one issue. Finally, you vaulted the issue into recent times, where it clearly does not belong. Had I been there, I would have advised Joseph to leave the Expositor be. I don't like censorship, and I don't like lying. If modern historians consider the Expositor to be a good historical resource, I have no problem with that. Early books and newspapers are very useful in recreating that period. That a professional historian wrote a Gospel Topics Essay on any issue is fine with me (I even sent in some corrections to one such essay, not this one -- and the corrections were made). Your interpretation of this entire issue seems to me deeply bigoted and ahistorical.

Yep -- "completely honest" = infallible. Some writer working for the Church published a standard dictionary definition, and you falsely concluded that it is odd or somehow off the wall. That is not a completely honest assessment. You said the following in your initial post here: I quoted you repeatedly. You immediately connected the "always" here with polygyny. That is the only "vicious" lie that interested you. Why the deliberate deception? Joseph's practice of polygyny was common knowledge among Latter-day Saints long before 2014, and Church historians made a regular practice of discussing it. Indeed DNA studies were used long before 2014 to try to find any possible polygynous offspring of Joseph. Again, why your deception? The Gospel Topics Essays in no way justify your quirky claims. None are canonical and are provided for information purposes only.

Looks like a dictionary definition to me. Nothing noteworthy here at all, and I don't get your point. Perhaps you demand infallibility of human leaders, a demand which is completely foreign to Latter-day Saint theology. I treat this question briefly at https://qr.ae/pA0hkr . Some people claim that Jesus lied, as depicted in John 7:8-10. Indeed, the Bible is filled with thousands of internal contradictions. How is that possible? Thank you. I should have caught that first time around. However, you'll notice that it refers to "many vicious lies," not to polygyny. The Primary lesson nowhere denies that Joseph had plural wives, and they would have been foolish to have done so. Nonsense. At 84 years of age, I have never met any Latter-day Saints who claimed that Joseph did not have plural wives. I have met many RLDS members who did not believe in Joseph's polygyny, of course, but that was while I lived in Independence, Missouri. My friend Richard Howard, RLDS Church History Commissioner, was the one who wrote the important article destroying that silly notion. It was Fawn Brodie who had initially listed most of those wives by name for the general public (1945). Your claim that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had always claimed otherwise is absurd.

It is a model of success, but not very different from the once vast missionary efforts of mainstream Christianity (Methodists, Presbyterians, etc.) -- now not quite so bold or active. It was always considered part of the Great Commission directly from Jesus Christ himself (Matt 28:16-20). Evangelicals still consider it of vital importance.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not have its "own definition of lying." Any dictionary definition will do quite well. Victor Hugo said: “To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie.” Yet, his character the nun, sister Simplice, who had never told a lie, lied twice to protect Jean Valjean from evil Javert. Cite the date and page of the primary manual with that statement -- quoting it in context. I never saw such a silly claim and I am now 84. What is clear is that it makes no sense at all to claim that the Expositor lied about Joseph's practice of polygyny after Brigham publicly acknowledged the practice. Of course the RLDS Church did claim through most of its history that Joseph did not practice polygyny. Your false statement was that Latter-day Saints "always" denied the practice of polygyny by Joseph -- plainly absurd.

Is it true that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints "always taught the Nauvoo expositor was just a bunch of viscous lies"? Or does that claim fudge the facts? Can that claim be supported by actual LDS lesson materials and by formal Church histories published down through the years? And what is the content of such published views? Especially when Brigham made polygyny public in the Utah Territory.