Comments on: Notes on the Proclamation

By: Anne Olsen

Anne Olsen — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 20:45:05 +0000

RW – hey I am an old lady. Not up to the minute on a whole lot since the world is changing faster than any one person can assimilate all the changes and ideas. What I do know is this, science, ideology, philosophy etc, do not contain the whole of the whole, as it were. Some day all truth will be made known. At this time we are mere infants reaching for understandings. This is good, but never let what we think is the current truth override what our supreme creator has told us. So, what do I do when something that is from the restored gospel smacks me in the face? I think hard about it, I study it. Just like you! That is so great we have these wonderful minds and all the knowledge of peoples at our disposal. Then, I try to work it out in my mind. Sometimes it fits, sometimes it doesn’t. But in the end, even if I think I have worked it out, it is taken to Heavenly Father who will tell us each very directly if we are off track or not. (Mosiah 4:9)I have taught my children and hopefully they will always retain it as part of themselves, “Heavenly Father wants you to know the truth. He will make available to you the answer to your questions. The problem is in preparing ourselves to receive the answer. Sometimes we have to be prepared over a time period. Sometimes we are so prejudiced by our own thoughts and feelings and experiences that we don’t really want to hear what he is telling us.” RW, please take your thoughts to Heavenly Father. I can only tell you that I ahve much peace with the proclamation and it hasn’t come by dissection but through faith and through the actual power of the Holy Ghost. Something about your article just shouts out, “I want it to be my own way and I won’t really listen unless it is my way.”

By: Joel D.

Joel D. — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 15:00:16 +0000

Re: J. Stapley #47 [about resurrection of reproductive organs]

In addition to what I put above, see also my post #44 at http://www.timesandseasons.org/wp/index.php?p=1600. [On Our Ambiguous Origins]

By: Adam Greenwood

Adam Greenwood — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 04:10:16 +0000

“The FACT that genders are often determined by doctors at the birth of an ambiguously-gendered child seems to make little difference to those people convinced that the Proclamation is revelation from God.”

How right you are, sir.

By: Rob Briggs

Rob Briggs — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 03:50:31 +0000

“Man Roslynde,”

What a difference a comma makes. ;>

By: D. Fletcher

D. Fletcher — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 03:39:09 +0000

I don’t have smart things to say about the Proclamation. I repeat the story, that when it was announced, it was at a Women’s Conference, the week before General Conference, 1994. That night, I was playing the piano at Gordon Bowen’s wedding reception in SLC (ironically, he is now divorced). After the conference, President and Sister Hinckley showed up at the reception. My sister asked Sister Hinckley if anything of portent happened at the conference, and she replied, “no, same old, same old.”

The Proclamation seems designed as a political tool to limit the further advancement of same-sex marriage, or at least, to give scriptural weight to previously ambiguous ideas. The FACT that genders are often determined by doctors at the birth of an ambiguously-gendered child seems to make little difference to those people convinced that the Proclamation is revelation from God.

By: Joel D.

Joel D. — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 22:58:27 +0000

Re: J. Stapley #47

See my post #28 at http://www.timesandseasons.org/wp/index.php?p=1600. [On Our Ambiguous Origins]

By: Blake Ostler

Blake Ostler — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 05:26:17 +0000

Man Roslynde, you always make me think and your style is so … well, provacative. Perhaps gender is more than genitalia (sorry I didn’t know how to put it less offensively). Perhaps gender is more like a way of being than physical presentation. I think of the problems that cases of hermaphroditism and gender-confusion (where gender is ambiguous at birth) create for the “eternal gender” issue. While my spirit definitely feels male, I’m open to the possibility that gender is more than … well you know.

By: Rosalynde Welch

Rosalynde Welch — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 01:58:53 +0000

Mark B: I vote for “carnal embrace” as my intercourse-euphemism of choice! Sexual congress is pretty fun too, though.

By: Ana

Ana — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 01:06:33 +0000

Ed: Of course I’m not sure God has only one wife. But I am sure he has at least one and that she is female. I thought that post was getting long enough without going to the polyg place.

Rosalynde: Thanks for the kind, telegraphic words. I miss my one-handed typing days. I think it took my writing out my thoughts to realize that I agreed with you.

By: Mark B

Mark B — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 00:48:39 +0000

I’m all in favor of sex.

Now, that may seem a simple proposition, but . . . let’s use “sex” when we mean “sex” and “gender” when we mean “gender.”

There was a time when “gender” had to do with grammatical distinctions which, as my OED says, corresponded “more or less to distinctions of sex (or absence of sex) in the objects denoted.” Now, unfortunately, too many people say “gender” when they mean “sex”, probably because they’re trying too hard to avoid the “too frequent repetition” of a word that they think is identical to “sexual relations” or “sexual intercourse”. Which, of course, it is not.

Now, the penultimate sentence in that paragraph suggests yet another rant on the word “intercourse,” which has lost many of its former uses because people afraid of saying “sex” have used it as a euphemism for sexual relations or sexual congress, so we can no longer speak of intercourse between nations without a smirk, and Intercourse, PA, raises all sorts of questions like, “What, after all, do they do in that place?”

Just think how much fun we could all have if “congress” rather than “intercourse” had become the euphemism of choice!

By the way, sorry for injecting this irrelevance into this thread.