For me this is the most significant comparison. Spot on.

American football is ending.

Read the article below for a quick review of why. It simply is too dangerous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy

Consider these lists of former NFL players with CTE. A group of 4500 of them won a class action lawsuit against the NFL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NFL_players_with_chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy.

For perspective this will be nearly 10% of the number of soldiers who died in Vietnam before it is over- in the NFL alone. Thousands and thousands of of college, or high school players with mostly less severe but real damage will also be afflicted.

Mothers of young boys are getting the message and enrollment in pee wee football is declining sharply.

***

I have a son who was gifted with the physique to play college football. But he was never interested in team sports. He was curious, a scientist at heart, almost from birth. He likes friendly one-on-one contests of strength between friends; such as arm wrestling, or tug of war, especially while standing on stumps, and thumb wars. He clearly was stronger than the scouts in his non-LDS troop who played high school football and they convinced the coach to ask him to consider leaving the sissy sport of distance running and join the manly football team. He famously replied: “With all due respect, coach, I have better things to do with my head than hitting other people with it.”

Some of these other things included carrying the heavy packs of younger scouts on backpacking trips, carrying my Dutch oven on the same, saving an overweight LDS scout’s life during an asthma attack, who out weighed him by carrying him up a 2000 feet elevation gain over 4 miles in less than an hour on a hot, humid day ( 108 F – 95% humidity).Tonight he is in Houston mucking out flooded houses for the umpteen weekend since the storm, gathering small teams from among his friends and driving them down there. I imagine he takes a thoughtful approach to each task and applies his tremendous strength to it and he can work like a mule for 12-16 hours in the worst conditions. I imagine they get quite a bit done.

I will skip over his many academic achievements, but summarize with the claim (of a biased parent) that he might be among the very brightest graduate students in physics in the USA.

One of his current assignments is teaching physics to undergraduates. He has quite a number of football players interested in his classes and he is gently teaching them the basic principles they need to know in order to make a sensible decision on what is the better thing to do with their heads. Not a few are quitting the team.

In the mean time, BYU football continues to languish, I believe they are disgracing themselves yet again at this very moment loosing to a very wimpy U Mass team. At least they are not getting into brawls with ghetto thugs like they did under Bronco M____. For this I am grateful. If our church leaders had wise vision they would cancel BYU football at the end of this season and quietly launch a campaign to end it for other teams as well. And if they had more wise vision concerning the direction of the church they might take equally drastic measures. But I have almost lost my faith in them, personally.

Don’t watch any football.

Don’t let your babies grow up to be football players.

As for the LDS church- I leave that up to your own judgment.

Also, anytime people are allowing their cause of offense to matter more than the gospel, they’ll destroy the church if they are allowed to thrive rather than cut out like a cancer.

This necessarily puts the LDS church in a cultural position it will never effectively meet. The LDS church may not offer a one-size-fits-all gospel of the Christ, but it cannot support the individual defining of moral and ethical behavior. Such behavior, as far as the LDS church is concerned, is necessarily defined by the Christ as the only fitting judge of this behavior.

It’s also worth noting that many football fans are walking away because they’re finding the game inherently destructive (see photos of Aaron Hernandez’s brain). The equivalent within Mormonism is obvious; many are leaving not only because they’re miffed over one policy, but because they arrive at the conclusion that the whole belief system is wrong.

It seems unfair to suppose that SWK and other Church leaders ever thought homosexuality, understood as same-sex attraction, was a sin. They seem to have been unaware that it existed. They (and Pope John Paul II and many others) used the word “homosexuality” to mean same-sex erotic behavior. As described elsewhere, at least as long ago as the early 70s some local Church leaders had begun to learn that “being gay” was not the same thing as engaging in same-sex sexual intercourse. But the trickle down (or up) effect of that learning has been slow and incomplete. Judging from his October 2010 conference talk as given, BKP had still not learned that distinction. I have not found any evidence that he ever learned it. And you have cited for his “steadying hand” on that subject only the fact that the November 2015 policy followed BKP’s death (by about 4 months). His passing followed the Supreme Court Obergefell decision by only a week. He likely didn’t do much steadying in that time.

Actually, it’s hard to tell IF the Church is pursuing any long-term strategy. I suspect we agree on more than we disagree. It’s hard to pin a particular steadying hand role on any particular leader.

It’s hard to tell what long-term strategy the Church is pursuing here. The present policy seems to be to stay as conservative as possible for as long as possible, and compromise only when the alternative is to take unacceptable hits to credibility or social acceptability. It’s an ad hoc retreat. A good discussion outlining the difficulties Church leadership faces going forward (because it has not really grappled with the underlying scientific facts about homosexuality) is this recent presentation by Greg Prince.

“When our positions do not prevail, we should accept unfavorable results graciously and practice civility with our adversaries. In any event, we should be persons of goodwill toward all, rejecting persecution of any kind, including persecution based on race, ethnicity, religious belief or nonbelief, and differences in sexual orientation.”

(I wonder if here he was speaking less to the church body and more to other, more right-winged members of the Q12.)