De-conversion has an excellent summary of existentialism and how it contrasts with religious fundamentalism. The world is a different place when you try to strip away fantasy and live as true to your experience as possible.
Mormonism has a long history of slandering its opponents. Witness the straw man Korihor, or those who allegedly stole the translation of the Book of Lehi. It is so easy to blame any opposition to the Mormon church on Satan’s machinations. It keeps the faithful in line.
So I shouldn’t be surprised when good Brother Lawrence asserts that the arguments for recognizing same-sex marriage are the same arguments used by Satan in the war in heaven. Aside from being hyperbolic, his comparison is inapt.
As the story goes (as Brother Lawrence notes himself) Satan’s plan was to destroy humanity’s agency, its free will, so that everyone could get to heaven. It is presumed that he would do this by making everyone obey God’s commandments so that no one could sin. If no one sinned, then everyone went to heaven.
Lo and behold! We have Mormons championing an effort to make sure that no one can sin with the blessing of the state. They want to make it as difficult as possible for homosexual people to sin. They want to facilitate, urge, cajole, even force people to marry only heterosexually. Is this not a perfect analog to Satan’s plan according to the Mormon myth?
We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government, whereby one religious society is fostered and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members, as citizens, denied. (D&C 134:9)
This LDS Satanic effort has irony written all over it… in big capital letters.
And here I thought Muslim fundamentalists looked stupid for getting violent over the Muhammad comics. Some Catholics sent death threats to a man and accused him of hate crimes because, instead of eating the cracker that is believed to become the body of Jesus once blessed by a priest, he took it home. While the act was disrespectful, the reaction was out of proportion with the crime.
Let’s get some perspective here folks. It’s a fucking cracker! How did a cracker become more sacred than a human life? I thought Christianity had grown beyond its most violent tendencies, but I guess it’s in no position to judge the violence of the Muslim world. 
TAG recently sent me a link to The Wives of Joseph Smith which contains a short biography on most if not all of Joseph Smith’s wives. (Thanks, TAG.) It seems well researched and reputable. The most interesting to me are the stories about his wives who were still married to living men at the time of their marriage, like the story of Zina Huntington Jacobs who was the polyandrous wife of three men: Henry Jacobs, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young.
In 1839, the Huntington family arrived in Nauvoo, along with daughter, Zina. Within months, Zina’s Mother died from the malaria epidemic which claimed the lives of many of the early Nauvoo settlers. About this same time, Zina met and was courted by Henry B. Jacobs, a handsome and talented musician. Sometime during Henry’s courtship of Zina, Joseph Smith explained to Zina the “principle of plural marriage” and asked her to become one of his wives. Zina remembers the conflict she felt about Joseph’s proposal, and her budding relationship with Henry: “O dear Heaven, grant me wisdom! Help me to know the way. O Lord, my god, let thy will be done and with thine arm around about to guide, shield and direct …” Zina declined Joseph’s proposal and chose to marry Henry. They were married on March 7, 1841.
Zina later wrote, that within months of her marriage to Henry, “[Joseph] sent word to me by my brother, saying, ‘Tell Zina, I put it off and put it off till an angel with a drawn sword stood by me and told me if I did not establish that principle upon the earth I would lose my position and my life’”. Joseph further explained that, “the Lord had made it known to him she was to be his celestial wife.”
Zina chose to obey this commandment and married Joseph on October 27. She later recalled, “When I heard that God had revealed the law of celestial marriag … I obtained a testimony for myself that God had required that order to be established in this church … I made a greater sacrifise than to give my life for I never anticipated again to be looked upon as an honerable woman by those I dearly loved …”. Zina continued, “It was something too sacred to be talked about; it was more to me than life or death. I never breathed it for years”.
Zina’s first husband, Henry, was aware of this wedding and they continued to live in the same home. He believed that “whatever the Prophet did was right, without making the wisdom of God’s authorities bend to the reasoning of any man.” Over the next few years, Henry was sent on several missions to Chicago, Western New York and Tennessee. Henry missed his family and wrote home often. One of Henry’s missionary companions, John D. Lee, said, “Jacobs was bragging about his wife and two children, what a true, virtuous, lovely woman she was. He almost worshiped her …”.
Shortly after Joseph Smith’s death in 1844, Zina married Brigham Young. In May of 1846, Henry was sent on a mission to England. In Henry’s absence, Zina began to live openly as Brigham’s wife and remained so throughout her life in Utah. Henry seemed to struggle with this arrangement and later wrote to Zina, “… the same affection is there … But I feel alone … I do not Blame Eny person … may the Lord our Father bless Brother Brigham … all is right according to the Law of the Celestial Kingdom of our God Joseph.”
For what it’s worth, I wore a rainbow ribbon to church yesterday in support of same-sex marriage.
I realize that I don’t live in California where the letter from the First Presidency was to be read, but I wanted to do something. I’m probably motivated a bit by the my regret for having supported the amendment to my state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage. For whatever reason, I couldn’t sit quietly as the LDS church works to force its view of marriage on all citizens of this nation.
I didn’t expect any overtly negative responses. Except on the internet, Mormons are generally too polite for that. If anybody asked, I had a few practiced answers:
A few people cast furtive glances in the direction of my ribbon. I assume most people had no clue why I was wearing it. I might consider wearing it again if in the future the LDS church goes beyond just sending a letter to California congregations.
One moment toward the end of church beautifully captured what the rainbow ribbon represented to me. I was sitting in the foyer reading The Dharma Bums. An elderly man shuffled into the foyer to attend the Spanish-speaking ward that meets after my family’s ward. After a minute or two, he approached me and asked—through gestures and broken English—if I would help him put on his tie. I took the tie from his tremoring hand, tied it loosely on myself while he fumbled to button his collar, took the tie off my own head, slipped it down over his head and around his neck, turned his collar down, and straightened the tie. He thanked me and sat down.
It was a simple gesture but to me it illustrated people coming together despite differences to help meet our needs and make the world a more humane place.
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