Apology for the Priesthood Ban / "March of Dimes Syndrome" / "Mission Creep" / "Spencer's Law"

[smac97]

On 10/11/2024 at 1:12 PM, smac97 said:

From September 2023: The pullback from youth gender transition has begun

Hmm.

"{T}he Transgender Center could have continued to prescribe puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to current patients. However, it decided to back away from these interventions altogether."

This seems to vindicate at least a substantial portion of Reed's concerns.

We'll see, I suppose.

I suspect the lawsuits about this will be legion.  I suspect a lot of issues in my list of bullet points will be heavily litigated (centering on "Informed Consent" about the other bulleted items not being sufficiently disclosed/addressed) :

• Comorbidities. 
• Informed consent. 
• Compromised assessments of the best interests of the child. 
• Irreversibility. 
• Sterilization. 
• Cutting off healthy body parts. 
• Longitudinal studies essentially absent. 
• Lifelong medical regimens. 
• Massive ideological/sociopolitical influences/pressures on medical care. 
• Massive social contagion risks. 
• Massive risk of financial devastation for the individual (and burden on society).

Thanks,

-Smac

Further to my above comment ("I suspect the lawsuits about this will be legion..."), see here:

UCLA student sues California doctors, says she was 'fast-tracked' into transgender surgery

Quote

A UCLA student is suing multiple California health care providers and hospitals for medical negligence, alleging she was wrongly diagnosed with gender dysphoria and then “fast-tracked onto the conveyor belt of irreversibly damaging” puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery, according to her lawsuit.

Kaya Clementine Breen, 20, said she experienced sexual abuse as a young child, and by the time she was 11, she “began struggling with the thought of developing into a woman and began to believe that life would be easier if she were a boy,” according to her suit filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court. When she expressed this to her then-school counselor, the counselor told her “that she was transgender and called her parents to tell them the same.”

Breen, who was also suffering from anxiety, depression and undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the lawsuit, was then taken by her parents to the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where she said she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria — the distress one can experience when their gender identity and birth sex are in conflict — and began to receive transition-related care at 12 years old.

“This case is about a team of purported health care providers who collectively decided that a vulnerable girl struggling with complex mental health struggles and suffering from multiple instances of sexual abuse should be prescribed a series of life-altering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, ultimately, receive a double mastectomy at the age of 14,” Breen’s lawsuit states.

Breen began receiving puberty-suppressing medication at 12, was prescribed cross-sex hormones from 13 to 19 and underwent a double mastectomy at 14, according to court documents, which stated that her “her mental health progressively declined” following these treatments.
...
The defendants in Breen’s lawsuit include Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, an adolescent medicine physician specializing in gender-affirming care; Children’s Hospital Los Angeles; Dr. Scott Mosser, a plastic surgeon specializing in gender-affirming surgery; the Gender Confirmation Center of San Francisco; UCSF Health Community Hospitals; and psychotherapist Susan P. Landon.
...
The politics surrounding gender-affirming care for minors were also reportedly behind a decision by Olson-Kennedy, one of the defendants in Breen’s lawsuit, to delay publication of a study she conducted on the effects of puberty blockers. Olson-Kennedy told The New York Times in an article published in October that she didn’t publish the results, which found the medication did not improve the mental health of minors with gender dysphoria, because she feared the findings might fuel the types of political attacks that led to state bans on gender-affirming care.

I suspect there will be more, likely many more.  We'll see.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Analytics]

On 12/5/2024 at 10:12 AM, smac97 said:

@Analytics, who had previously seemed to rely heavily on the credibility and prestige of WPATH…

in your imagination, maybe. I never relied heavily on WPATH, seemingly or otherwise.

On 12/5/2024 at 10:12 AM, smac97 said:

The piece also specifically addresses WPATH, much vaunted by our @Analytics:

I never “vaunted” WPATH, much less much so. If you think I did, CFR.

None of this is to say that I think you’ve successfully discredited WPATH. I don’t know very much about them either way. But I do know that trusting you to curate objective insightful info on them would be just as silly as trusting Ed Decker to curate objective info on the Church.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

5 hours ago, ethansmithjim said:

This discussion touches on some deep and complex issues, and it’s clear that historical decisions continue to have lasting impacts on communities today. Acknowledging past mistakes is important, but so is focusing on constructive ways to move forward and create understanding. Open dialogue, empathy, and education can help bridge gaps and promote healing, even when the topics are difficult. It’s similar to how thoughtful care matters in other areas of life—like with self-improvement or personal treatments, the right guidance makes a real difference. Places like visagesculpture show how expertise and careful attention can create positive results, whether in personal care or broader growth.

Welcome to the board EthanSmithJim. Too few members these days.

[JVW]

8 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Welcome to the board EthanSmithJim. Too few members these days.

Haha, you got pranked! I bet a penny that this is an AI bot advertising for visagesculpture company.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

Just now, JVW said:

Haha, you got pranked! I bet a penny that this is an AI bot advertising for visagesculpture company.

Lol, rereading I'm almost sure you are right. 

[Teancum]

Whatever happened to @smac97?

[JVW]

14 minutes ago, Teancum said:

Whatever happened to @smac97?

He was gone for awhile but has resurfaced recently on a trans thread in the News section. I don't think he intends to actively engage in the forum anymore.  

[InCognitus]

5 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Welcome to the board EthanSmithJim. Too few members these days.

In the absence of other new members I think I'd welcome AI bots anyway if they could engage in reasoned discussions without selling goods and services in the process.  

[smac97]

On 6/18/2024 at 11:24 AM, smac97 said:

Having referenced (and linked to) then-Bro. Corbitt's talk against activism, and also to then-Elder Oaks' talk about addressing disagreements in the Church, and in the spirit of "start{ing} a conversation" about activism in the Church, I submit the following article: 

The March of Dimes Syndrome

Some excerpts:

This seems to be a common - perhaps inevitable - trend in "activism" (which trend may be part of why Bro. Corbitt's 2022 talk is so relevant and resonant).

Obviously "March of Dimes Syndrome" is a neologism.  Although I have frequently perceived its manifestations in much of today's "activist" stuff, I was not aware of the label.  The earliest instance of it I could find was in 2016:

A similar label I have previously encountered is "Mission Creep," described here:

Quote

Mission creep is the gradual or incremental expansion of an intervention, project or mission, beyond its original scope, focus or goals, a ratchet effect spawned by initial success.  Mission creep is usually considered undesirable due to how each success breeds more ambitious interventions until a final failure happens, stopping the intervention entirely.

I think "activism" these days is often quite susceptible to the March of Dimes Syndrome / Mission Creep phenomenon.  This includes activism in the Church.

Back to the Tierney article:

Quote

Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting? Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?

These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes syndrome, named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio. The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.

For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.

I wonder if activist calls for an apology from the Church are borne of this "March of Dimes Syndrome" mindset.  Any progress/success the Church has made/had relative to condemning racism, fostering goodwill, etc. is a threat.  In the minds of some activists, they can never declare "mission accomplished."  Mission Creep happens.

Quote

Consider the current cultural conflicts over gender and sex. As the gay rights movement achieved its initial goals from the 1970s, overturning antisodomy laws and destigmatizing homosexuality, the movement expanded to include so many new causes that it required an acronym, LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and more). Its leaders declared a new cause, same-sex marriage, which vanished after the Supreme Court legalized it nationally in 2015. Five years later, the Court extended civil rights protections to people’s sexual preferences.

What were activists to do? Gays could marry in every state, and the whole LGBTQIA+ alphabet was a protected class—what more could groups like the Human Rights Campaign or the National LGBTQ Task Force possibly demand from the government? What would get the attention of crusading journalists? An antigay hate crime would generate a brief publicity and fund-raising burst, but even progressive journalists struggled to sustain the groups’ narrative that America was a homophobic society.

The laws against homosexuality had been toppled. The culture that produced those laws has been overthrown, too. Most Americans now support same-sex marriage. The Pride flag flies at corporate headquarters, churches, schools, city halls, and the White House. Uttering once-common antigay slurs is now career suicide. Gay characters, long taboo in television scripts, are now practically obligatory. Gays once felt overwhelming social pressure to stay in the closet, but now many young adults are reluctant to admit to being heterosexuals, as reflected in the surge of young women classifying themselves as bisexual despite never having had sex with a woman.

So activists have moved the goalposts once again. It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings. It is no longer enough to protect gay students from harassment—now these students must have access in elementary school libraries to how-to manuals for **** sex. Public schools must encourage prepubescent students to explore the many possible gender identities without their parents’ knowledge. Biological males self-identifying as females must be allowed to compete against females in sports. These new causes have been wildly unpopular, arousing opposition from homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, and have led to a decline in public support for the gay rights movement. But however much the backlash has hurt the original cause, the controversies keep activists in business.

"So activists have moved the goalposts once again."  Yep.

If the Church were to issue a formal institutional apology, would self-appointed "activists" accept it and move on?  Or would they deem it insufficient, move the goalposts, and demand more?

Yeah, the SPLC has really had a lot of mission creep.

I can't help but wonder if some of the activists calling for the Church to issue an apology see Mission Creep not as a bug, but as a feature.  That is, these folks want the Church to issue an apology so that they can, in true "Mission Creep" style and form, deem the apology insufficient, move the goalposts, and demand more.  And the "more" would, in my view, almost certainly - and perhaps almost immediately - take us to demands that the Church "apologize" for the Law of Chastity, for its prohibitions against same-sex behavior, for its past opposition to same-sex marriage, for its current non-recognition (in an ecclesiastical sense) of same-sex marriages, and so on.  And I think the calls would not stop at just an apology, but for alteration of the Church's doctrines, so as to ratify same-sex marriages, to allow temple sealings between persons of the same sex, to allow same-sex behavior, etc.

Additionally or alternatively, I wonder if this is a pretext for calling for women to be ordained to the priesthood.  And perhaps disavowals of claims to prophetic/priesthood authority, the Book of Mormon, and so on.

The Tierney article goes on to explain a third label for this phenomenon (in addition to "March of Dimes Syndrome," mentioned in the article, and "Mission Creep," commented on by me) :

Quote

The March of Dimes syndrome is an ancient social affliction that is especially virulent today and destined to get even worse. Kings, generals, and high priests have always tried to maintain power by declaring new crusades—new enemies to conquer, new sins to extirpate. But it has gotten steadily easier for leaders to rally the public because of another phenomenon, known as Spencer’s Law, named after the Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer, who observed a paradox in the reform movements of his day to combat poverty, hunger, child labor, illiteracy, and alcoholism.

These problems were widespread in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. Then, as the Industrial Revolution lifted incomes during the nineteenth century, the working classes saw a dramatic improvement in their diets and living conditions. By mid-century, most Britons were literate because children were going to school instead of being put to work. Alcohol consumption fell dramatically. But it was only late in the nineteenth century, after so much progress had already occurred, that reformers captured the public’s attention with campaigns to help the needy, mandate universal education, and pass temperance laws. “The more things improve,” Spencer wrote in 1891, “the louder become the exclamations about their badness.”

Spencer’s Law has been reformulated by Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs: “The degree of public concern and anxiety about a social problem or phenomenon varies inversely as to its real or actual incidence.” Thus, we obsess about racism today more than we did during the Jim Crow era. From 1990 to Obama’s election in 2008, the African American homicide rate fell by 50 percent—and then the Black Lives Matter signs sprouted on lawns across the country. From 1995 to 2010, the rate of sexual violence against women dropped by nearly 60 percent in America—and then began the panic chronicled in The Campus Rape Frenzy, the book by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr., debunking the mythical epidemic of sexual assaults occurring on university campuses. By 2017, corporate America had instituted strict punishments and mandatory training to prevent sexual harassment—and then came #MeToo. Public acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage reached an all-time high in 2023—and then the media breathlessly reported that gay activists had declared a “national state of emergency.”

"'The more things improve, the louder become the exclamations about their badness.'"

Might this be said about the Church since 1978?

Quote

Several factors are responsible for this paradox. First is the negativity effect, or the brain’s innate bias to pay more attention to the negative than the positive. The better that things get, the harder we look to find something bad, a tendency termed “prevalence-induced concept change” by the social psychologists who demonstrated it in 2018, in a study published in Science. In one of the experiments, the psychologists showed people photos of faces and asked them to identify the ones with threatening expressions. As the series of photos progressed, fewer and fewer hostile faces appeared, but the people were so determined to see the negative that they started misclassifying the neutral faces as hostile. “When the world gets better,” explained one of the psychologists, Daniel Gilbert, “we become harsher critics of it, and this can cause us to mistakenly conclude that it hasn’t actually gotten better at all.”

As the world gets better—as people become richer, better educated, and longer-lived—we find new things to worry about and have more disposable income and free time to spend curing humanity’s woes, real or imagined. Our instinct to save others is noble, but it risks being corrupted. “As society grows wealthier,” the economist Donald Boudreaux observes, “the need to be saved by others from earthly misfortunes grows steadily less frequent and less dire while the itch to save others from earthly misfortunes grows steadily more frequent and more intense.” This itch explains why journalists and the public keep falling for hoaxers like the actor Jussie Smollett: the demand for racism vastly exceeds the supply. It’s not easy to meet the growing demand from saviors, given a shrinking supply of victims, but the potential rewards have inspired remarkable creativity—and there’s every reason to expect more in the future.

"First is the negativity effect, or the brain’s innate bias to pay more attention to the negative than the positive."

Might this be in play relative to how some folks treat the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?  

"As the world gets better—as people become richer, better educated, and longer-lived—we find new things to worry about and have more disposable income and free time to spend curing humanity’s woes, real or imagined."  Again, are black people in the Church better off now than they were in 1978?  If so, why is it that folks of an "activist" bent seem fixated on characterizing the Church in the worst possible ways?

Further to the foregoing evaluation of the "March of Dimes Syndrome" and "Mission Creep" and the seeming paradox in play ("As the world gets better—as people become richer, better educated, and longer-lived—we find new things to worry about and have more disposable income and free time to spend curing humanity’s woes, real or imagined"), I just recently came across another term:

The Tocqueville Effect

From Wikipedia:

Quote

The Tocqueville effect (also known as the Tocqueville paradox)^[1] is the phenomenon in which, as social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly.^[2][3] It is named after the French diplomat, historian, and political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville.
...
The effect is based on Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on the French Revolution and later reforms in Europe and the United States. Another way to describe the effect is the aphorism "the appetite grows by what it feeds on".^[4] For instance, after greater social justice is achieved, there may be more fervent opposition to even smaller social injustices than before.

I would like to hear any thoughts you all have about this stuff.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Tacenda]

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

Further to the foregoing evaluation of the "March of Dimes Syndrome" and "Mission Creep" and the seeming paradox in play ("As the world gets better—as people become richer, better educated, and longer-lived—we find new things to worry about and have more disposable income and free time to spend curing humanity’s woes, real or imagined"), I just recently came across another term:

The Tocqueville Effect

From Wikipedia:

I would like to hear any thoughts you all have about this stuff.

Thanks,

-Smac

Similar to the more we get the more we want? ETA: I think our world will go backwards and I guess we will not have too much to know what to do with it, our focus will change to survival according to a few YouTubes I've watched.

Edited Wednesday at 04:27 PM by Tacenda

[longview]

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

Quote

The effect is based on Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on the French Revolution and later reforms in Europe and the United States. Another way to describe the effect is the aphorism "the appetite grows by what it feeds on".^[4] For instance, after greater social justice is achieved, there may be more fervent opposition to even smaller social injustices than before.

I would like to hear any thoughts you all have about this stuff.

The more blessed and prosperous the American Experience grow, the more hedonistic and ungrateful succeeding generations become.

[Calm]

7 hours ago, longview said:

The more blessed and prosperous the American Experience grow, the more hedonistic and ungrateful succeeding generations become.

They learn what the older generation teaches them.  They are targeted as youth and taught the best way to have fun or to be somebody is through possessions and popularity (often through being the first to have whatever) because the older generation wants to make money off of them.

The advertising to promote consumerism by businesses (whose owners are often indeed obsessed with making as much money as possible since it would be difficult to use what they already have) makes it difficult to not have the mindset that more is better when that is all that entertainment and many public figures promote.  If you want to see hedonistic, go look at the videos many public figures put out on their homes.

if the older generation wants a more grateful and less hedonistic younger population, then they the older generation not only needs to model such  behaviour themselves, but stop pushing consumerism/materialism, bigger is better, etc.

Younger people use less of their spending for entertainment than almost all of the older ones….the oldest ones (“Greatest or GI generation, born 1901-1929) probably have limited mobility and possibly control over their money, so hardly surprising they aren’t spending that much.

Generation	Entertainment spending	Total annual expenditures	Entertainment as % of spending
Millennials	$2,186	$47,113	4.6%
Gen X	$3,231	$66,981	4.8%
Baby Boomers	$3,286	$59,646	5.5%
Silent	$2,276	$42,348	5.4%
GI	$885	$29,041	3.0%

BLS stats pulled up for me by chat

Edited Wednesday at 11:35 PM by Calm

[MrShorty]

My immediate reaction was to invoke the idea of progressive revelation and divine accommodation. In many apologetic discussions around slavery and/or the priesthood and temple ban, the idea gets suggested that God temporarily accommodates our human foibles, progressively revealing higher truths to gradually get us to grow out of evil. In a thread whose starting point is the priesthood and temple ban, my example might be slavery which we practiced for thousands of years, somewhere in the 18th century (or thereabouts), enough people started to become uncomfortable enough with the practice that abolition began to become a thing. In fits and starts, we eventually abolish slavery, and we then become more aware of the racism and tribalism that were often the basis of slavery, and we start to question those and seek to eliminate those injustices. Nowadays, as we've largely suppressed overt racism, some are pointing systemic ways that racism might still exist and we debate what, if anything, we should do about it. The main point being that, as we eliminate social injustices, we find ourselves better able to recognize social injustices adjacent to the eliminated injustices and seek to make society progressively more just. Some might even say that this is how God guides humanity to become better.

The flip side might be that, as we eliminate one legitimated social injustice, we might imagine up some new injustice that really doesn't exist rather than just be satisfied with our improved state. On short notice, I don't come up with a ready example, but I'm sure it's just a matter of someone thinking about it long enough. The tricky part is in discerning what alleged injustices are truly unjust, and which ones are hyped up to stir up societal unrest.

One possible discussion question, then, would be how do we feel about this kind of "progressive revelation?" How do we feel about the notion that God waits for us to recognize injustice rather than outright tell us about it through prophets or scripture? In a church that tends to be conservative, how do we feel about this model of how God slowly and progressively causes us to grow as a people?

 

[longview]

3 hours ago, Calm said:

BLS stats pulled up for me by chat

Inflation adjusted? It would be nice if the AI would add span of birth years next to the generations.

[Calm]

13 minutes ago, longview said:

Inflation adjusted? It would be nice if the AI would add span of birth years next to the generations.

Since it’s for current spending  why adjust for inflation?

In 2015, baby boomers and the silent generation were spending more of what they spent on entertainment than millennials or Gen X.

 

GI is 1901-1927, silent is 1928-1945, baby boomers 1946-1964, Gen X 1965-1980, millennials 1981-1996.

Edited Thursday at 12:09 AM by Calm