Zelophehad's Daughters

This is a talk I gave in my ward at the end of January.

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My husband grew up backpacking, and it was one of the conditions of our marriage that I would learn to backpack too. I do it now, and occasionally even enjoy it, but it’s definitely a stretch to say that I’m good at it or love it as wholeheartedly as Mike.

I say this by way of prefacing a personal story, so that you understand the context when I tell you that once, last summer in Yosemite, I was nearly defeated by a large boulder field at the end of a long day climbing mountains with a heavy backpack.

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When it comes to navigating the gay Mormon thing, I’ve been in many ways incredibly fortunate. When I first came out to my siblings and a couple of close friends several years ago, the response I got was largely a matter-of-fact acceptance, one that left me plenty of breathing room and no pressure—and I got similar reactions as I told more people over the years. When I publicly came out last November, the experience was mostly positive: people responded with kindness and love and support. After years of involvement in the world of Mormon blogging, I am fortunate to have a network of LDS friends who aren’t freaked out by this. And I live in what I imagine is one of the most gay-friendly stakes in the church. As Effie might say, the odds truly have been in my favor. Read More

This the second part of a series in which my friend ajbc gives her personal, long-winded, and rambling answers to each LDS temple question, since the actual interviews do not allow for elaborate discussion. The first post is here.

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It’s taken me a while to get to this second post, in part because I didn’t like part of my answer to the last one.  I wrote that I was most comfortable praying to a male or joint-gender god due to my upbringing, and I’m happy to report that I am now equally comfortable praying to Heavenly Mother as I am to Heavenly Father.  I’ve even had one of my Teyve-style (out loud, casual) prayers to/with her in the celestial room, which, by the way, is my all-time favorite part of serving in the temple–getting the room completely to yourself.

The other reason I’ve been putting this off is because I wrote an answer to the second question a while ago, and was thoroughly unsatisfied with it.  It wasn’t that I was inarticulate (nothing can help me there, save an editor), but that I didn’t like what I had to say.  I’ve been so focused on God in general and also with particular issues with the LDS Church that I had neglected the more middle-ground of Christianity.  Thus, I did some soul-searching, found some peace, and am now ready to answer #2.

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One of my friends has been asking me questions about the Creation stories lately. What’s the value, she wants to know, in reading them? In their neat, tidy rendering of the world, what connection do they have to actual life here, in its complications and messiness? They don’t give us a scientific rendering of the origin of the world, obviously. But what do they give us? So I’ve been mulling over this question for a while, and this is what I’ve come up with. Read More

Following up to my first post on why homosexuality is a theological problem for Mormons—and the stark question of whether gays can be seen as fully human in LDS teachings—I would like suggest a few avenues for theological thought which may yield more encouraging results.

1. One possibility is to conceptualize the image of God in a different way. In my first post, I noted that the standard LDS read is to see it as a statement that humans are literally the children of God and have the potential to become like him—an assertion which is generally tied to gender, as God is understood as literally (and not only metaphorically) male. This is also linked to the scriptural context in which this notion appears in the first place: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27)

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Note: Just in case my title isn’t clear, I would like to state at the outset that I am not asking the question  of whether I personally think that gays are fully human; rather, I am looking at elements of LDS teachings which I find particularly disturbing. Please read the post before getting out your pitchfork.

The issue of same-sex marriage currently dominates much of the discussion of homosexuality, both inside and outside the Church. This makes sense, of course, given that right now, the question of SSM has become the center of gravity of the political battles over gay rights. But despite the significance of the marriage question, I think that Latter-day Saints are still struggling with a much more basic issue: are gays even people to begin with? Read More

[This post, from Jacob Baker, originally appeared at his blog All Eternity Shakes: Letters From the Vineyard. It has been slightly revised from the original. Jacob describes himself as “a student of religion and a stalwart fanboy of Zelophehad’s female offspring. Ok, and the guys too.” We’re excited to have him guest-posting for us.]

Women cannot be regarded as fully human until the full measure of responsibility and accountability is theirs. This is where the charged rhetorics of modesty, pedestalization, and singularity and specialness of gender are all mutually embedded–in the wonderful-terrible blessing and burden of cultural, institutional, and religious responsibility and accountability. This is also why the rhetoric of “equality” should be replaced with one of responsibility and accountability. Responsibility is what is really at stake with this kind of empowerment, and it is really what we mean by “equality.” Responsibility is the decisive and irrevocable difference between becoming angels or becoming gods. Read More

In this week’s edition of Tuesday’s Twice-Baked ZD, we revisit Eve’s 2006 post where she confronts despair.

The first and most severe episode of depression began the winter I turned thirteen and lasted eighteen months, at the end of which I was numb, seared, barely alive. During the summer that followed, as I began the slow process of putting my life back together–a process which would take many years, and continues still–every weekday morning I would get up, put on my old jeans or shorts and a T-shirt, go out into the desert heat, and cross the street and the blazing, empty parking lot where the seagulls congregated on the dumpsters to the junior high, where I had to attend summer school. This winter I will turn thirty-five. During most months of most of the intervening years, despair has been my quiet, constant companion, in Lauren Slater’s words, my country. After more than two decades of struggling against the illusion that comes with every intermission, the illusion I have conquered, and the fatal false hopes that it will not return, I struggle to face the prospect that despair may be the condition of the rest of my life. Read More

Follow-up to this.

1) Theological anthropology

Essential to this feminism is the belief that we are all the literal children of God, women and men alike, with infinite divine potential. This means that anything which gets in the way of the development of that potential, or undercuts the full humanity of any of God’s children, is something to be resisted.

We are also eternal intelligences in our own right, and agency is an eternal principle. It pre-existed the war in heaven, which was fought to preserve it. This gives agency a particular importance, even sacredness.

Additionally, because of our eternal nature, one could make the case that we have an inherent access to moral law (a knowledge of right and wrong); in any case, we clearly have this in mortality, as the light of Christ is given to everyone (see Moroni 7). This means that we can take our own moral judgments seriously.

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As Eve alluded to in her most recent post, a conversation that we’ve been having lately has to do with the relationship between secular and Mormon feminism. I’ve noticed a tendency—and doubtless engaged in it myself—to take feminist theories from a variety of places and simply graft them on to Mormonism. Mormon feminism is then Mormon in the sense that it concerns itself with Mormon issues, but not Mormon in its roots. Read More

Several lifetimes ago I went through voluntary training to become a white ally to people of color. Although much of the information was instructive and eye-opening, I never shook the feeling that something about the entire proceeding was off. For one thing, the only admissible structure of oppression was race. All of the other familiar sea creatures that inevitably crawled out of the personal-encounter dragnet–class, gender, sexual orientation, and religion, among others–were declared, prima facie, irrelevant to the overwhelming problem of racism, a declaration that made race itself abstract, strangely disembodied, and reductively binary. But there were bigger problems. The biggest was that any dissent from the politically correct perspective, no matter how tentatively offered, was immediately, reflexively interpreted as evidence of the dissenter’s privilege. The ally induction, like the classical psychoanalysis and communism of old, was a realm in which there could be no legitimate critique. This is a tale we moderns know well.  Read More

In this edition of Tuesday’s Twice-Baked ZD, we reprise Lynnette’s critique of Valerie Hudson’s talk, “The Two Trees”. Dig in!

(The original post and associated comments can be found here).
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I would indeed be ungrateful if I didn’t acknowledge the contributions of my co-bloggers; Petra read an earlier draft and made a lot of great observations, many of which are included in the footnotes, and Kiskilili and Melyngoch kindly allowed me to quote them.

Many of you are probably familiar with Valerie Hudson’s talk, “The Two Trees.” (You can go read it here.) In this talk, Hudson explains that one of the things that she values about the church is its feminism. In her words, she seeks “to review the main points of LDS doctrine that make this a revolutionary religion from a feminine perspective.” I can see why people are drawn to the talk; it has some powerful imagery. I have to give her credit for arguing for an equality that in some respects goes well beyond standard Mormon apologetics about women’s roles. I like how she emphasizes roles for both Heavenly Parents, and is not shy about bringing Heavenly Mother into her scheme. I also like that both men and women are explicitly connected to spiritual power.

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