My brother’s new wife curls up against him on the pew, toying with his hair. Two of my little girls sit on his lap. A third stands on the bench next to him to better rub his back. He stares rigidly at the speaker and blushes. His wife smirks.

A morose priest slouches morosely to the podium and morosely gives a 15-minute talk he wrote himself. He morosely bears his testimony and sinks back into his chair.

My girls tire of my brother. They squall up and down the bench, bearing their testimony in ribbons and ruffles of the natural man.

Comment at the Junior Ganymede.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the first and great acommandment.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Thus Christ’s summary of the Mosaic law.

But Christ came to fulfill the law. He gave a new commandment:

As I have loved you, love one another.

Loving our neighbors the way we love ourselves is no longer enough. We must love our neighbors with the love that Christ has–swift, implacable, the love that moves the stars.

Comment here.

[they] are necessary for you, after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels, being enabled to give them the key words, the signs and tokens

So, the deepest, most mystical, most mind-blowing things are . . . passwords? Secret handshakes? Door codes? Jon Stewart says, “Really, Brigham Young? Angel security guards. Really?”

How crude. How earthy. How unspiritual. Its like God is some kind of man and salvation is a thing and the Kingdom isn’t a metaphor. Really.

Mormonism is the deal God makes us:
Less vanity, more reality.
Less discussion, more answers.
Less everywhere, more somewhere.
Less theology, more God.

A prophet has no honor in his own country, Jesus says. In Mormonism, God asks us to honor a prophet from our own country. He asks us to honor a God from our own country.

If I had to bet, I’d bet that the Navajo didn’t really used to do that, or if they did they didn’t do it to all adulterers, male and female, in-group or out-group, alike. But that’s not the point. Adultery is something that matters a lot to people. It hits them in the gut. And widespread tolerance of adultery is an acid to the institution of marriage. But our law hardly does anything about it.

Today Maggie Gallagher proposed a revived adultery tort (alienation of affection) that would make the other man or the other woman liable to the wronged spouse. Something like it sounds like a good idea to me.

I would also favor making adultery a prominent factor in determining custody in a divorce. Making adultery a crime again has its attractions to, though whether we should have laws on the books that rarely get enforced is a question.

My (limited) understanding is that a law to this effect has been in place for awhile but that the current budget bill overrides this law. The amendment that was just defeated sought to restore it.

I suppose a Mormon could make an argument for involuntary sterilization under some circumstances. Is there any Mormon argument to be made coerced abortion? I don’t see any, but the bloggernacle often surprises me. What about this amendment–is there anyone out there convinced that the United Nations Population Fund is doing such good work that the good outweighs the bad? Or has China been misrepresented and local authorities there aren’t really coercing abortions like people say?

When I was a law clerk, I worked on a fair number of immigration cases. Chinese often claimed asylum because of fear of coerced abortion or sterilization or severe persecution for having more than one kid. Under the circumstances, they would have an incentive to lie, of course. But much of the evidence, including some medical evidence, seemed credible to me. Still, the scope of the problem might be exaggerated, at least.

Maybe its the achievement of Godhood in family, you could make an argument for that. Although that’s pretty remote and abstract. We don’t have any visuals or stories about that.

In the temple, and in our central book, the Book of Mormon, and in its central passages, the 3 Nephi narrative of Christ in the Americas, the central experience is seeing Christ, and hearing his voice, and pressing his wounds.

Note that D&C 130 (the one on marriage) implicitly combines these two.

See also here.

http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2008/12/relics-2/#comment-280569

This suggestion has not been without controversy. An irate reader of our blog even got my contact information somehow and called me to rant about it.

The best take-down I’ve seen is here. See also here, here, and here.. Besides the points made in the linked articles, I’d only add that in my experience men, especially young men, who live in circles where porn use is not condemned have ready access to gigabytes of free porn and may be less likely to use a paid internet pornographer.

So the study tells us something, but I don’t know what. At the end of the day, all we know is that some Mormons have a pornography problem and that the irate reader who called me is a nut.