http://www.utahcountydems.com/content/view/178

At any rate, we usually shut down comments near the 100-comment mark and so I’ll do that here.

(Yeah, I gotta work on the love unfeigned part… Come to think of it, I could be a tiny bit gentler in my persuasions… Stupid family… )

DB should keep on doing business promoting good, and suppressing liberalism, which liberalism apparently is the fountain you Rameumptom standers like to “suck” from.

Conservatism is to politics what Mormonism is to religion. Liberalism “is” the great and abominable whorish attitude, a real preexistence thing.

Julie S. and the other liberal leftists who support her views are what is wrong in Mormonism today. You lack discernment. You may be highly educated but, are apparently lacking in judgment. Your “I know best” liberal attitudes bring on punishments the rest of us don’t deserve. Your perverted logic of the way things should be is Book of Mormonesk bad.

So, climb down out of your Rameumptom’s and change.

Anyone who actually listens to a significant cross-section of Beck’s radio program knows that he isn’t the crazy hate-monger he’s made out to be. Sometimes he’s too sarcastic and his latest book title is foolish and does his cause no service, but his latest book is nothing but a list of facts with citations to back them up.

Ah, I was wondering when the “don’t take him seriously” defense would come. I guess he’s joking about Christmas Sweater too. Don’t take him seriously there. It’s just all a big hoot.

Here’s my point: I understood T&S as a place for discussion, not commerce, and I thought it applied to authors as well as commenters. I like this approach–no ads, no promotion, commerce-free. I pointed out two instances where you seemed to think some minor commercial promotion that would profit you personally was fair game, including in this very post. I critique that as being against what I see as the general and laudable practice of T&S.

But since you got angrier than me, tried to think of a way to embarrass me, and became defensive against my gentle chide, it’s obvious that you were right. I concede.

All nonsense aside, if you did take anything I said as a personal attack, please believe me that I meant it as a gentle critique–hence the special occasion moniker. If you felt attacked, I really apologize. Not because you strident types are deep down really sensitive, but because it’s right not to attack people.

I’ve never heard anyone talk negatively about Glenn Beck and actually address his positions or assertions. They just attack the messenger.

If there’s a reason one can’t fathom how Christmas sweater Beck and Hatemonger Beck can be the same person, maybe it’s that one of those isn’t him?

And no, I have not sustained Beck as my inspired religious leader. =)

That said, it is silly to have a book about arguing with idiots in DB. To be fair, though, he wanted to name it “Commies” but his publisher turned him down. =)

But note that Schlessinger’s entire show is based on the resolving or MORAL DILEMMAS.

What moral dilemma was she addressing when she was so rude to military wives, telling them not to whine? Or proclaiming that wives are to blame when a husband has an affair?

I agree that some of the principles that she talks (not necessarily lives) are consistent with LDS values. But she is so mean-spirited in the way she goes about it.

One of the things that bothered me about Schlessinger was her use of what I’d call vulgar or at least course language. She would say “screwing around,” “knocked up,” “shacking up,” etc. Later I heard her explain her device and while I don’t use it myself, it makes more sense. She said that when people approach sacred things like sex and pregnancy in an appropriate way (within marriage, etc.) she uses the sacred terms. When they approach it irresponsibly, cavalierly, recreationally, she uses the vulgar terms because the behavior is vulgar. That’s an interesting idea to me.

Exactly, that’s one of the things I don’t like about her show. I can’t imagine a disciple of Jesus Christ ever using those terms. And she often drops such judgement without having all the facts.

I worry that new converts, seeing her stuff listed in a Deseret Book catalog, will think that behavior is accepted or normal in our church. I don’t care so much what they carry in the stores, which are all out in the West I guess. But for those of us using their services in areas far away from church headquarters, where most people are converts, such a listing in their catalog seems wasted space and leaving a misleading impression.

I think this settles it now. Right?

Better, the scripture says, to live in the corner of a rooftop . . .

Mark B., I don’t tend to agree with most of what Alison has said here, and I’m not always comfortable with her tone, but this strikes me as chillingly sexist, in that you’re drawing on a very long tradition of stereotypes about the loud, opinionated, argumentative woman in order to dismiss her.

Please tell me I’m misreading you.