It is quite true that one of her most famous lines as “June Bronson Cleaver” in Leave it to Beaver was indeed, “What is all the commotion out here? I’m breading cutlets.”
Actress Barbara Billingsley died on 16 October, 2010 at the age of 94.
At the time that Leave it to Beaver aired first on CBS then ABC TV, featuring Ms. Billingsley in top billing
Donna Reed played a mother in The Donna Reed Show
Harriet Hilliard portrayed a mother in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
Jane Wyman portrayed a mother in Father Knows Best
Shirley Booth portrayed a mother-feature housekeeper and Whitney Blake portrayed a mother in Hazel
June Lockhart portrayed a mother in Lassie.
Mary Tyler Moore portrayed a mother in The Dick Van Dyke Show.
At the time, audiences gave Billingsley the least attention. Nowadays 50 years later, her “June Cleaver” and Mary Tyler Moore’s “Laurie Petrie” still get lucrative rerun rating attention. But who follows Father Knows Best anymore?
At this point, the writer should disclose his biases on the subject of 1950s comedy programs.
In my opinion, these are the best programs of the period:
The Jack Benny Program
Your Show of Shows / Sid Caesar’s Hour
I Love Lucy
The Jackie Gleason Show / The Honeymooners. In the 1960s, I would list the first four years of The Jackie Gleason American Scene Magazine
You”ll Never Get Rich / The Phil Silvers Show
Leave it to Beaver
The Red Skelton Show, while very good, I do not list here in the 1950s because I think it became even better in the 1960s as The Red Skelton Hour.
Billingsley had a minor acting career before series creator/producers Joe Connolly and Bob Mosher cast her as June Cleaver in 1956. They cast Billingsley and Mathers in the first pilot. The husband and older brother and older brother’s friend went through two sets of casting before the producers found the magic combination of the Reverend Hugh Beaumont, Wally Dow, and Ken Osmond in the second pilot.
Billingsley performed roles in TV and movies after the first series and after the second series as well, notably the jive talking passenger in Airplane! and as a member of the Welcome Wagon Committee of TV moms in that memorable 1995 episode of Roseanne that also featured Patricia Crowley, Isabel Sanford and June Lockhart. Billingsley played straight woman of the bunch. June Cleaver did not like the language in Roseanne.
Referring to her years in CBS’s Lassie, June Lockhart got a huge laugh when she observed without missing a beat, “Those bastards told me that “June” was too long a name for a TV show. The dog got all the good lines; I merely interpreted. And then I got shot into outer space with the annoying Dr. Smith and that damned robot.”
It was Billingsley’s performances as “June Cleaver” in the first Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963) and in the second series Still the Beaver / The New Leave it to Beaver (1983 - 1989) that made her immortal in TV reruns and DVDs.
June Cleaver was beautiful to start. She was usually brunette, though in 1961 she went through a blond period. In some episodes, she had attended college long enough for her purposes; in other episodes she had known Ward Cleaver for ages before their marriage. The series had occasional uncles and aunts but no grandparents, so the audience focused on the parents and the two boys.
Veteran writers Joe Connolly and Bob Mosher created LitB, the story of the Cleaver family, an upper-middle class mother-father-two sons family unit living in Mayfield, probably in Ohio. Tony Dow, one of the cutest and most natural boy actors of that generation, portrayed the oldest son “Wally.” Jerry Mathers portrayed the younger son “Theodore.” Mathers was at best a good actor, but he projected regular boy anxiety amid the horrors of 1950s-1960s conventionality skillfully.
Connolly and Mosher closely supervised every episodes with few assistants. Nowadays, shows change producers regularly and have long lists of executive producers, producers, producers in charge of production, line producers. Today, the work Connolly and Mosher did for the six seasons of LitB looks positively herculean. In the first three season, they also wrote a majority of episodes. Their credit memorably read
Created, produced and written
under the supervision of
JOE CONNOLLY
and BOB MOSHER
They were just about the only TV producers I can remember who received such a grandiose credit, but they deserved it. They carefully made sure that the kids sounded and acted like real kids. As a result the utterly cool, athletic, understated, and popular Wally and his popular but anxious little brother Theodore were perhaps the most realistic children of television in that period. They used the slang popular at the time. In 1962, the Cleavers had this linguistic discussion at the breakfast table over bacon and eggs:
Wally: [discussing a boys club Eddie wants the two of them to join to become popular guys] “Eddie says they are the craziest.”
June: “Craziest??”
Wally: “Oh, that doesn’t mean squirrel-ly. It means they are really cool guys.” [The Cleaver boys were among the first TV users of the durable slang expression]
Ward: “You know, when I was a youngster and we said crazy, we meant crazy.”
June “How backward.”
Theodore: “Boy, Mom – in the olden days I bet you said something like neat, huh didn’t you Mom?”
June: thinking it over between bites of breakfast. “Well, no. I think we said keen.”
Theodore incredulous: “Keen?? They don’t even say that on Dobie Gillis anymore.”
The pilot episode of LitB got involved in one of the most acrimonious censorship confrontations in the history of 1950s TV, though Billingsley herself did not appear in the controversial scene. The boys have secreted a pet alligator into the house and in a scene they hide it in their private bathroom toilet tank. The censors threw a collective cow. In the 1950s sitcom characters did not have bodily function let alone bathrooms with toilets. Connolly and Mosher went head to head with the censors, arguing that it was natural for boys to hide an alligator in a toilet tank and besides, it wasn’t like we were observing a kid on or in front of a toilet using it for obvious purposes. (That had to wait for The Waltons in 1972.) The censors relented; Leave it to Beaver had the first toilet tank on network sitcom TV.
Speaking of the bathroom, LitB was unusual in that the boy’s bathroom figured into plots quite often and appeared on screen regularly. In the second season, after Ward punishes Beaver for a major carnival fling with stolen money, he and Theodore have this unusually frank exchange for 1958, while June looks on with comments after:
Ward: “You had better go up to your bedroom and wait there until Larry comes.”
Theodore: “Yes Sir. But Dad, can I go to the bathroom first?” [a 1958 euphemism for a bodily function need]
Ward: “Yes, of course.”
Theodore: “Thanks. I feel sort of sick.”
It was in complete keeping with Connolly and Mosher’s insistence on reality since a little boy after a major binge at a carnival will have to unload his tummy or BM the first thing when he gets home.
Speaking of Beaver’s first best friend, Larry Mondello (who threw up at Beaver’s house in one episode) — the boys’ friends sometimes treated them shabbily and vise versa, though LitB was one of the first TV series to show boys dancing together multiple times, and its depiction of Beaver’s relationship with his best boy friend "Gilbert Bates" constitutes one of the first bromances in the history of TV boy bonding. Wally’s relationship with Eddie Haskell also constitutes one of the most complex male bonding relationship ever put on TV. “He’s a rat,” Wally observed about Eddie after one of his ghastly escapades, “but he’s my best friend.”
LitB got the psychology of boys nearly always right on the nose. It’s an achievement rarely equaled in American TV where most kids appear as wise guy props for comedy stars to sparkle against.
LitB’s parent characters supported the boys as characters, which is one of only a few instances in American television where the series came from the viewpoint of children, not adults. It also was a good bellweather of real slang in California at that time.
June firmly believed in the three square meal principle cooked mostly from scratch, and without a microwave, though once in the first series she did admit to buying and using TV dinners. The family ate two meals together a day on plates with silverware, which nowadays seems utterly quaint.
In the 234 episodes of the first LitB, the number of time Beaver exhibited interest in girls – “gurls” he pronounced them with the same sort inflection he might use to pronounce something found on the sole of his shoe – we can list on the fingers of both hands. Wally showed interest in girls friends from the first season, though in the first two season his relationship world centered on his boy friends Eddie, Chester, and Tooey – and sports and guy stuff. Hormones hit Beaver in the series’ second to last episode. A number of times in the series Beaver said that he would not marry a girl, and the writers probably meant it to be ironic funny. However, Theodore probably should have stuck with that observation considering that he got divorced at the beginning of the second LitB.
June Cleaver was a stay at home mom and quite domestic. Obsessive compulsive almost. In the last two seasons, she was practically a caricature of herself. It is quite true that a couple of times in the later season, she vacuumed in a good dress and high heals. She wore a string of pearls to hide a rather obvious pit in her throat. In the earlier seasons, she was somewhat sardonic along with the domestic angle. She did wear slacks a few times to do yard work or go camping.
When Beaver let a homeless man into the house, he took a bath in the master bathroom and stole one of Ward’s suits. June held up his old ratty suit by her fingertips and said matter-of- factly, “Apparently Beaver was not entertaining Noel Coward.”
She was terribly self aware and self conscious of what her neighbors would think of her family.
A study of all the episodes of the series, shows June was stay-at-home, unliberated, apolitical, but not a perfect domestic goddess. She sometimes got short tempered with her sons, she sometimes made mistakes. She struggled with Beaver when he became a teenager in 1963. She was the straight woman for the sons’ adorably funny comments and for her husband’s sardonic observations. Her husband Ward Cleaver, portrayed by the Reverend Hugh Beaumont dispensed sound advise, sardonic humor, and sometimes made big mistakes with his sons. He was man enough to admit it to his sons. Contrary to the October 2010 news reports, he did not smoke a pipe in the series.
In one memorable late episode:
Ward: “I came downstairs to look for my pipe.”
June: “You don’t have a pipe.”
Ward: “I guess that’s why I didn’t find it.”
She got to play straight woman to Ward’s intensely boring work colleague "Fred Rutherford" portrayed by Richard Deacon:
June: “Why, hello Fred. Come right on in here.”
Fred: “Thank you June, but my business is with the Lord of the manner.”
June played straight woman to her son’s boy friends, notably Wally’s unctuous playmate “Eddie Haskell” – always super polite in a passive aggressive sort of way to adults, always teasing and tormenting younger kids. Who can ever forget the inflections Ken Osmond gave such lines as “Good morning, Mrs. Cleaver. Your kitchen is so clean. My mother says it looks as if you never work in it.”
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver. [observing her cooking ] “the meal smells delicious, whatever it is.”
She got to play straight woman to some of Beaver’s guys as well. Stephen Talbot, before he became a distinguished PBS documentary producer, had humorous exchanges and did she and Richard Correll. In his days before he became a sitcom director, he portrayed Beaver’s eager friend “Richard Rickover.”
Beaver to his mother: “This is my friend Richard. He’s a kid.”
At one point after their sons had endured some ghastly misadventure with their boys, June said in complete seriousness:
June: “You know Ward, it would be wonderful if we could select some nice boys to be Wally and Beaver’s friends.”
Ward: without missing a beat: “Yes, and they probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them.”
The second LitB series (1983 - 1989) , sometimes called Still the Beaver and other times entitled the New Leave it to Beaver, featured mature Billingsley, and grown-up Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers again. A widowed grand-matriarch, she became a sort of grandmother nurturer matriarch of the extended family. Both sons and both sets of grandchildren lived within her home’s block. In that series the writers were less careful in the details and the episodes could center on adults as well as kids. June Cleaver wore slack suits sometimes, ate take out Chinese food at her dining room table, and ran for political office in Mayfield, Ohio, becoming a town council member. She nurtured her three grandsons and one granddaughter in a 1980s setting.
It is a testament to the durability of the concept that the Cleavers went through not one but two successful TV sitcoms one in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era and the other in the Reagan administration.
It says a lot about the decline of American family culture that a certain snarkiness always creepsinto media discussions of June Cleaver, the stay at home Mom who always found ways to support her boys, to keep a tidy comfortable home, a refuge from the storms of life, to keep them nurtured and healthy.
Barbara Billingsley, who with June Lockhart and Elizabeth Montgomery were my favorite TV actresses in my childhood, played the role brilliantly. Quality of writing and quality of Barbara Billingsley will always be Leave it to Beaver’s chief strengths.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
PRESIDENT PACKER AND THE SAME GENDER CONTROVERSY: FACTS, SPECULATIONS, ELEPHANTS IN THE LIVING ROOM
In his general conference address given on 3 October 2010, President Boyd K Packer discussed other subjects than same-sex preferences or same-sex marriage. However, most of his address got completely lost in all the controversy over those brief paragraphs. I culled from two Utah newspaper articles the juiciest details of the story. My quotations do take up space, but they deserve attention to the details, for I elaborate on them in this editorial:
I will print the article quotations in Courier font.
From
Joe Pyrah - Daily Herald Daily Herald | Posted: Monday, October 4, 2010 12:00 am
Peggy Fletcher Stack The Salt Lake Tribune October 3, 2010 11:18PM
Same-sex attraction can be overcome and any type of union other than marriage between a man and a woman is morally wrong, an LDS apostle told millions of Mormons on Sunday.
“There are those today who not only tolerate but advocate voting to change laws that would legalize immorality, as if a vote would somehow alter the designs of God’s laws and nature,” Boyd K. Packer, president of the church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles, said in a strongly worded sermon about the dangers of pornography and same-sex marriage. “A law against nature would be impossible to enforce. Do you think a vote to repeal the law of gravity would do any good?”
Packer, speaking from his seat because of his frail health, addressed more than 20,000 members gathered in the LDS Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City and millions more watching the faith’s 180th Semiannual General Conference via satellite.
The senior apostle drew on the church’s 1995 declaration, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” to support his view that the power to create offspring “is not an incidental part of the plan of happiness. It is the key — the very key.”
Some argue that “they were pre-set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural,” he said. “Not so! Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember he is our father.”
Alluding to the Utah-based church’s support of laws such as California’s Proposition 8 that would define marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman, Packer said, “Regardless of the opposition, we are determined to stay on course.”
“We cannot change; we will not change,” the senior apostle declared. “We quickly lose our way when we disobey the laws of God. If we do not protect and foster the family, civilization and our liberties must needs perish.”
An LDS Church leader said Sunday that homosexuality is not "inborn."
"Why would our heavenly father do that to anyone?" asked Elder Boyd K. Packer. "Remember, he is our father."
Packer, a member of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, spoke forcefully during the church's general conference about having the ability to choose one's way.
"We can foolishly, blindly give it away, but it cannot be forcefully taken from us," he said of free choice.
He reiterated the church's 1995 The Family: A Proclamation to the World that outlined the belief that marriage is only between a man and woman and that anything else is contrary to the will of God.
Man-made laws, he said, cannot change that.
"A law against nature would be impossible to enforce," he said. "Do you think a vote to repeal the law of gravity would do any good?"
The church strongly backed California's Proposition 8 in 2008 that defined marriage as between a man and woman, as well as Utah's own constitutional amendment in 2004 that says the same. California's Prop 8 has been in court almost since it passed.
Laura Compton, who directs Mormons4Marriage, a group of Latter-day Saints who opposed Proposition 8 and support marriage equality in California and elsewhere, was troubled by Packer’s sermon.
“So many Mormons have worked hard to increase understanding of what homosexuality is and what it means to be faithful,” Compton said in a phone interview from her California home. “Now we have this [anti-gay] message coming from the pulpit in General Conference by the president of the Quorum of the Twelve. It seems like hitting a brick wall. Hopefully, this won’t make people stop and say, ‘It wasn’t worth it.’“
Then, as members repeat and digest Packer’s comments in coming months, Compton worries about its impact on the faithful.
“When we are sitting next to the mom of a gay son or daughter whose best friend just came out, or by the bishop who knows 10 people in the ward affected by homosexuality, how will we reach out and help them?” she wonders. “How are we going to make them feel the love of Christ?”
To some, Packer’s comments seemed like a throwback to earlier LDS statements about same-sex attraction, similar to those made last summer by LDS general authority Bruce Hafen. Hafen, who became an emeritus member of the First Quorum of Seventy on Saturday, was speaking at a conference sponsored by Evergreen International, a nonprofit group that helps Mormons overcome gay behavior and diminish same-sex attraction, according to its website, evergreeninternational.org.
Hafen promised attendees at the Evergreen conference, “If you are faithful, on resurrection morning — and maybe even before then — you will rise with normal attractions for the opposite sex.”
Whenever the devil, whom Hafen referred to as “the adversary,” tries to “convince you that you are hopelessly ‘that way,’ so that acting out your feelings is inevitable, he is lying,” Hafen said. “He is the father of lies.”
RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
Of course, Elder Hafen prefers heterosexuality and got his, so why should he really care, in the long view, what those who prefer homosexuality get?
If a future prophet announced that God declared The World had too many human idiots and changed the commandment to do not multiply, do not have heterosexual-style sex, how many straight men would take comfort from a statement like “If you are faithful, on resurrection morning — and maybe even before then — you will rise with normal attractions for the same sex” ?
Not many, I bet.
Elder Hafen’s comment assumes male-female-hormonal driven sexual activity continues in the afterlife. If gender does exist before earth life and after, I suspect it manifests itself in different ways than it does in Earth life. What exalted omniscient all-powerful beings would be foolish enough to base its reproduction on hormonal-based copulation? State bluntly, all of us, no matter what our sexual preference, may get completely rewired in the next plain of existence.
My question in the previous paragraph is probably no more dopey than President Packer’s question about what God would or would not do to his children. A more interesting question is – what will Satan do or not do for his ex-brothers and sisters?
The outcry against President Packer’s talk developed rather like some sort of ancient Japanese ritual. We knew practically from the start what people – both for and against – would have to say, how and what positions they would take, and at what points in the debate they would move into position. The Church’s position assumes from the start that people will persecute it no matter what it says on the subject, so it took positions of varying degrees of no win.
I sometimes contemplate what might have happened if the LDS Church had in 1939 opened the priesthood to all worthy males, decided to attempt among southern blacks a major missionary program starting in 1944, and decided to take the lead in the Civil Rights movement starting in 1947. Churches, after all, did take leading roles in that movement then. Southern Conservatives and Southern racial bigots would have condemned the LDS church as acting in a highly unChristian way encouraging the culuredz to get uppity. It might have become the darling of northern liberalism.
When the Church decries dishonesty and stealing, do organizations of thieves descend on church headquarters with petitions talking about the creation of a hurtful environment?
BLAME GOD AGAIN
Someone either in the First Presidency office or in public communications went about cleaning up President Packer’s text to make it less . . . certain? . . . . offensive? . . . less something.
Someone cut President Packer’s question “Why would heavenly father do that?” Apparently we should not contemplate what The All Mighty will or will not do for us and to us.
Why would Heavenly Father give people schizophrenia or defective hearts? The compare-contrast is not quite on the same level, but it is a good question anyway. It helps illustrate that we do not know if disease and mental illness come through genetic influence set by Heavenly Father, or if Satan can set genetic influences, or if someone else entirely set these genetic influences way back in time.
How many mental health activists would insist society should encourage people born with schizophrenia to stay schizophrenic and take it to the limit? How many would encourage children born with heart malformations or brain malformations or kidney malformations or bowel malformations to live with the conditions and encourage them? Some in Deaf Culture, interestingly enough, find cochlear implants offensive, demeaning and controversial to people who do not know any better than to prefer not hearing. This general conference address controversy illustrates the power of sex in human lives: people with same gender attraction cling to it strongly even when it means a living a life surrounded by bigotry, hatefulness, and childlessness.
ELEPHANTS IN THE LIVING ROOM
Elephants sit about in this particular rhetorical living room and most will not acknowledge them or deal with them. Let me scatter caution to the breeze and at least acknowledge them.
Nowadays, people, even Orthodox people, select only parts of the Old Testament to quote and believe.
The Old Testament punishes man-man sexual activity by death. However, the Old Testament also punishes by death unmarried sex between unmarried men and women as well. The Old Testament uses death to punish all sorts of non-sexual activity. The Old Testament did not punish sex between masters and slaves.
Heterosexuals ruined marriage, not homosexuals. Heterosexuals developed polygamy, mistresses, la casa grande and la casa bonita, treating women like possessions, institutionalizing violence in marriage.
Although it has not lead the way, the heterosexual LDS Church played its part in the decline of heterosexual marriage.
The LDS Church introduced polygamy to the United States. It still practices polygamy to the extent that Temple sealers will seal a mortal man to a mortal second wife after his first wife has died, thus creating a polygamist situation among them in the spirit world afterlife. It also played an historic role in the liberalization of divorce. Of the first six LDS Church presidents, all practiced polygamy, and no fewer than 4 obtained divorces from some of their plural wives. Today, if an adulterous man’s leaders think he is fully repentant, that man can now obtain a sealing to a woman with whom he committed an adulterous relationship.
Thinking of ourselves as heterosexual or homosexual is inaccurate and counterproductive for us to do. Sexual activity preferences do not somehow predict everything about one’s personality and activity. Sex is only one – sometimes boring – aspect of life in a life full of aspects. A person should state preference in a factual way: I prefer sexual activity with women or I prefer sexual activity with men or I like both in bed.
In the 21st century and beyond, people not only can change, people will change.
With advances in genetic repairs, genetic engineering, and hormonal therapy, medical science will be able to change homosexuals into heterosexuals.
That said, the reverse is also true. This is an important point to consider in a place like China where men out number women.
With advances in genetic repairs, genetic engineering, and hormonal therapy, medical science will be able to change heterosexuals into homosexuals.
From the 21st century onward, sexual preference will be just another piece of the human puzzle that medical science will tinker for political purposes.
It is true that the LDS Church in theory condemns and punishes unmarried male-female sexual transgression the same it punishes unmarried same-gender sex activity. However, when typical LDS leaders punish guys involved in unmarried sexual involvement with women, their attitudes typically tend toward “boys will be boys.” Furthermore, many fathers dismiss their sons’ sexual exploits because too many of them live vicariously through their sons to spice up their boring lives.
It is true that the LDS Church treats unmarried people who prefer opposite sex attraction and those unmarried who prefer same sex attraction the same. The Church insists they must be celibate.
This position is impossible: celibacy is not LDS doctrine or culture. It is not human cultural norms, either. If anything, Catholicism showws the world the limits and problems of celibacy in a hormonal based human population. Furthermore, heterosexual singles have the possibility of an acceptable sanctioned married sexual life. Others do not.
So in practical reality what does this mean?
I hate to end an essay with a question. At this stage in this discussion, I think it is best to do so and leave the discussion here for us to contemplate.
drs
I will print the article quotations in Courier font.
From
Joe Pyrah - Daily Herald Daily Herald | Posted: Monday, October 4, 2010 12:00 am
Peggy Fletcher Stack The Salt Lake Tribune October 3, 2010 11:18PM
Same-sex attraction can be overcome and any type of union other than marriage between a man and a woman is morally wrong, an LDS apostle told millions of Mormons on Sunday.
“There are those today who not only tolerate but advocate voting to change laws that would legalize immorality, as if a vote would somehow alter the designs of God’s laws and nature,” Boyd K. Packer, president of the church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles, said in a strongly worded sermon about the dangers of pornography and same-sex marriage. “A law against nature would be impossible to enforce. Do you think a vote to repeal the law of gravity would do any good?”
Packer, speaking from his seat because of his frail health, addressed more than 20,000 members gathered in the LDS Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City and millions more watching the faith’s 180th Semiannual General Conference via satellite.
The senior apostle drew on the church’s 1995 declaration, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” to support his view that the power to create offspring “is not an incidental part of the plan of happiness. It is the key — the very key.”
Some argue that “they were pre-set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural,” he said. “Not so! Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember he is our father.”
Alluding to the Utah-based church’s support of laws such as California’s Proposition 8 that would define marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman, Packer said, “Regardless of the opposition, we are determined to stay on course.”
“We cannot change; we will not change,” the senior apostle declared. “We quickly lose our way when we disobey the laws of God. If we do not protect and foster the family, civilization and our liberties must needs perish.”
An LDS Church leader said Sunday that homosexuality is not "inborn."
"Why would our heavenly father do that to anyone?" asked Elder Boyd K. Packer. "Remember, he is our father."
Packer, a member of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, spoke forcefully during the church's general conference about having the ability to choose one's way.
"We can foolishly, blindly give it away, but it cannot be forcefully taken from us," he said of free choice.
He reiterated the church's 1995 The Family: A Proclamation to the World that outlined the belief that marriage is only between a man and woman and that anything else is contrary to the will of God.
Man-made laws, he said, cannot change that.
"A law against nature would be impossible to enforce," he said. "Do you think a vote to repeal the law of gravity would do any good?"
The church strongly backed California's Proposition 8 in 2008 that defined marriage as between a man and woman, as well as Utah's own constitutional amendment in 2004 that says the same. California's Prop 8 has been in court almost since it passed.
Laura Compton, who directs Mormons4Marriage, a group of Latter-day Saints who opposed Proposition 8 and support marriage equality in California and elsewhere, was troubled by Packer’s sermon.
“So many Mormons have worked hard to increase understanding of what homosexuality is and what it means to be faithful,” Compton said in a phone interview from her California home. “Now we have this [anti-gay] message coming from the pulpit in General Conference by the president of the Quorum of the Twelve. It seems like hitting a brick wall. Hopefully, this won’t make people stop and say, ‘It wasn’t worth it.’“
Then, as members repeat and digest Packer’s comments in coming months, Compton worries about its impact on the faithful.
“When we are sitting next to the mom of a gay son or daughter whose best friend just came out, or by the bishop who knows 10 people in the ward affected by homosexuality, how will we reach out and help them?” she wonders. “How are we going to make them feel the love of Christ?”
To some, Packer’s comments seemed like a throwback to earlier LDS statements about same-sex attraction, similar to those made last summer by LDS general authority Bruce Hafen. Hafen, who became an emeritus member of the First Quorum of Seventy on Saturday, was speaking at a conference sponsored by Evergreen International, a nonprofit group that helps Mormons overcome gay behavior and diminish same-sex attraction, according to its website, evergreeninternational.org.
Hafen promised attendees at the Evergreen conference, “If you are faithful, on resurrection morning — and maybe even before then — you will rise with normal attractions for the opposite sex.”
Whenever the devil, whom Hafen referred to as “the adversary,” tries to “convince you that you are hopelessly ‘that way,’ so that acting out your feelings is inevitable, he is lying,” Hafen said. “He is the father of lies.”
RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
Of course, Elder Hafen prefers heterosexuality and got his, so why should he really care, in the long view, what those who prefer homosexuality get?
If a future prophet announced that God declared The World had too many human idiots and changed the commandment to do not multiply, do not have heterosexual-style sex, how many straight men would take comfort from a statement like “If you are faithful, on resurrection morning — and maybe even before then — you will rise with normal attractions for the same sex” ?
Not many, I bet.
Elder Hafen’s comment assumes male-female-hormonal driven sexual activity continues in the afterlife. If gender does exist before earth life and after, I suspect it manifests itself in different ways than it does in Earth life. What exalted omniscient all-powerful beings would be foolish enough to base its reproduction on hormonal-based copulation? State bluntly, all of us, no matter what our sexual preference, may get completely rewired in the next plain of existence.
My question in the previous paragraph is probably no more dopey than President Packer’s question about what God would or would not do to his children. A more interesting question is – what will Satan do or not do for his ex-brothers and sisters?
The outcry against President Packer’s talk developed rather like some sort of ancient Japanese ritual. We knew practically from the start what people – both for and against – would have to say, how and what positions they would take, and at what points in the debate they would move into position. The Church’s position assumes from the start that people will persecute it no matter what it says on the subject, so it took positions of varying degrees of no win.
I sometimes contemplate what might have happened if the LDS Church had in 1939 opened the priesthood to all worthy males, decided to attempt among southern blacks a major missionary program starting in 1944, and decided to take the lead in the Civil Rights movement starting in 1947. Churches, after all, did take leading roles in that movement then. Southern Conservatives and Southern racial bigots would have condemned the LDS church as acting in a highly unChristian way encouraging the culuredz to get uppity. It might have become the darling of northern liberalism.
When the Church decries dishonesty and stealing, do organizations of thieves descend on church headquarters with petitions talking about the creation of a hurtful environment?
BLAME GOD AGAIN
Someone either in the First Presidency office or in public communications went about cleaning up President Packer’s text to make it less . . . certain? . . . . offensive? . . . less something.
Someone cut President Packer’s question “Why would heavenly father do that?” Apparently we should not contemplate what The All Mighty will or will not do for us and to us.
Why would Heavenly Father give people schizophrenia or defective hearts? The compare-contrast is not quite on the same level, but it is a good question anyway. It helps illustrate that we do not know if disease and mental illness come through genetic influence set by Heavenly Father, or if Satan can set genetic influences, or if someone else entirely set these genetic influences way back in time.
How many mental health activists would insist society should encourage people born with schizophrenia to stay schizophrenic and take it to the limit? How many would encourage children born with heart malformations or brain malformations or kidney malformations or bowel malformations to live with the conditions and encourage them? Some in Deaf Culture, interestingly enough, find cochlear implants offensive, demeaning and controversial to people who do not know any better than to prefer not hearing. This general conference address controversy illustrates the power of sex in human lives: people with same gender attraction cling to it strongly even when it means a living a life surrounded by bigotry, hatefulness, and childlessness.
ELEPHANTS IN THE LIVING ROOM
Elephants sit about in this particular rhetorical living room and most will not acknowledge them or deal with them. Let me scatter caution to the breeze and at least acknowledge them.
Nowadays, people, even Orthodox people, select only parts of the Old Testament to quote and believe.
The Old Testament punishes man-man sexual activity by death. However, the Old Testament also punishes by death unmarried sex between unmarried men and women as well. The Old Testament uses death to punish all sorts of non-sexual activity. The Old Testament did not punish sex between masters and slaves.
Heterosexuals ruined marriage, not homosexuals. Heterosexuals developed polygamy, mistresses, la casa grande and la casa bonita, treating women like possessions, institutionalizing violence in marriage.
Although it has not lead the way, the heterosexual LDS Church played its part in the decline of heterosexual marriage.
The LDS Church introduced polygamy to the United States. It still practices polygamy to the extent that Temple sealers will seal a mortal man to a mortal second wife after his first wife has died, thus creating a polygamist situation among them in the spirit world afterlife. It also played an historic role in the liberalization of divorce. Of the first six LDS Church presidents, all practiced polygamy, and no fewer than 4 obtained divorces from some of their plural wives. Today, if an adulterous man’s leaders think he is fully repentant, that man can now obtain a sealing to a woman with whom he committed an adulterous relationship.
Thinking of ourselves as heterosexual or homosexual is inaccurate and counterproductive for us to do. Sexual activity preferences do not somehow predict everything about one’s personality and activity. Sex is only one – sometimes boring – aspect of life in a life full of aspects. A person should state preference in a factual way: I prefer sexual activity with women or I prefer sexual activity with men or I like both in bed.
In the 21st century and beyond, people not only can change, people will change.
With advances in genetic repairs, genetic engineering, and hormonal therapy, medical science will be able to change homosexuals into heterosexuals.
That said, the reverse is also true. This is an important point to consider in a place like China where men out number women.
With advances in genetic repairs, genetic engineering, and hormonal therapy, medical science will be able to change heterosexuals into homosexuals.
From the 21st century onward, sexual preference will be just another piece of the human puzzle that medical science will tinker for political purposes.
It is true that the LDS Church in theory condemns and punishes unmarried male-female sexual transgression the same it punishes unmarried same-gender sex activity. However, when typical LDS leaders punish guys involved in unmarried sexual involvement with women, their attitudes typically tend toward “boys will be boys.” Furthermore, many fathers dismiss their sons’ sexual exploits because too many of them live vicariously through their sons to spice up their boring lives.
It is true that the LDS Church treats unmarried people who prefer opposite sex attraction and those unmarried who prefer same sex attraction the same. The Church insists they must be celibate.
This position is impossible: celibacy is not LDS doctrine or culture. It is not human cultural norms, either. If anything, Catholicism showws the world the limits and problems of celibacy in a hormonal based human population. Furthermore, heterosexual singles have the possibility of an acceptable sanctioned married sexual life. Others do not.
So in practical reality what does this mean?
I hate to end an essay with a question. At this stage in this discussion, I think it is best to do so and leave the discussion here for us to contemplate.
drs
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
REVIEWS OF "THE BOOK OF MAMMON: A BOOK ABOUT A BOOK ABOUT THE CORPORATION THAT OWNS THE MORMONS"
Here are two book reviews posted on the Internet by people other than me. They review a newish book that has gone on my wish list for Christmas:
The Book of Mammon: A Book About A Book About The Corporation That Owns The Mormons
by Daymon M Smith
1
So, the book is an accidental satire? Sort of. It poses practical and metaphysical conundrums, meditates on the moral dilemmas avoided, embraced, and stumbled upon, when God and Mammon are made to synergize. A compelling, light-hearted but serious memoir, fictional ethnography, and, yes, even apocalypse, this book crosses genres, fact, fancy, and everything between.
With this key it opens the doors to Mormon corporate offices, the most secret of spaces, and invites you inside. Come. See the author "work" as a media evaluator with the Mormon Church's corporate arm. At the Church Office Building (it's actual name) spiritual ambitions speak through quarterly evaluations, mission statements, digital personas, and website designs. Look! There is no conspiracy, although as at any office, there's lots of unintentionally humorous, fatuous banality. Here employees chant "cultural beliefs" composed by Human Resources and test whether a new DVD hits your "spiritual hot buttons." See us market food storage to religious consumers. Read a stack of documents never before published which declare and depict the "best practices" of the corporation, from smuggling underwear into banana republics to marketing strategies for the Book of Mormon. The author, a cultural anthropologist, provides insight into a place where men argue about DVD scripts and the color of book bindings, while children starve. Woven through his constant surprise at encountering religion fed through the pomposities of corporate-speak, you'll find revelations of the financial "waste" and this-world investment strategies of this wealthiest of religions. And understand the internal power struggles and culture of the same. See corporatized religion battle spirituality, art, welfare and people. Come with me and have a look around. (This text refers to the New Faith-Promoting Book of Mammon.)
2
I just added a new book to my wish list: The Book of Mammon by Daymon Smith, an LDS anthropologist. Smith recounts his experiences working at the Church Office Building where religious concerns are uncomfortably wedded to corporate ones. As a Mormon, he is concerned that his church is increasingly led more by profit (mammon) than a prophet.
The Book of Mammon reads like an entertaining and informative exposé of the LDS Church’s corporate practices, from the banal to the unusual. It has been receiving rave reviews. C. L. Hanson over at Letters from a broad wrote a review of the book that has further piqued my interest. Informed by the book, she points out an insightful irony:
According to Daymon’s tale, working at the COB has all of the crazy office politics you’d expect at an ordinary fortune-500 corporation. There’s a big difference, though, and it’s not just the church devotionals on company time or opening meetings with prayer. The problem is that they have absolutely no motivation to figure out whether their products are useful to their consumers. Mormons pay 10% of their income per year to the corporation (in order to be eligible for the saving ordinances in the temple), and the corporation gives back manuals, magazines, films, scriptures, garments, etc. — but the direct market feedback that comes from consumers selecting the goods they purchase is completely cut off.
As I’ve said before the private sector and the public sector each have their strengths and weaknesses. In economics, it’s not a question of choosing which one is “right” and which one is “wrong” — it’s a question of optimizing your strategy by using the best of both. The COB has the worst of both because it has the advantages of neither: there’s no market incentive to produce good products, and there’s no public oversight either.
(The biggest irony is how ferociously right-wing the Mormons are, yet they give so much money to a corporation that functions just like the very worst stereotypes of the Soviet government economic system.)
The Book of Mammon: A Book About A Book About The Corporation That Owns The Mormons
by Daymon M Smith
1
So, the book is an accidental satire? Sort of. It poses practical and metaphysical conundrums, meditates on the moral dilemmas avoided, embraced, and stumbled upon, when God and Mammon are made to synergize. A compelling, light-hearted but serious memoir, fictional ethnography, and, yes, even apocalypse, this book crosses genres, fact, fancy, and everything between.
With this key it opens the doors to Mormon corporate offices, the most secret of spaces, and invites you inside. Come. See the author "work" as a media evaluator with the Mormon Church's corporate arm. At the Church Office Building (it's actual name) spiritual ambitions speak through quarterly evaluations, mission statements, digital personas, and website designs. Look! There is no conspiracy, although as at any office, there's lots of unintentionally humorous, fatuous banality. Here employees chant "cultural beliefs" composed by Human Resources and test whether a new DVD hits your "spiritual hot buttons." See us market food storage to religious consumers. Read a stack of documents never before published which declare and depict the "best practices" of the corporation, from smuggling underwear into banana republics to marketing strategies for the Book of Mormon. The author, a cultural anthropologist, provides insight into a place where men argue about DVD scripts and the color of book bindings, while children starve. Woven through his constant surprise at encountering religion fed through the pomposities of corporate-speak, you'll find revelations of the financial "waste" and this-world investment strategies of this wealthiest of religions. And understand the internal power struggles and culture of the same. See corporatized religion battle spirituality, art, welfare and people. Come with me and have a look around. (This text refers to the New Faith-Promoting Book of Mammon.)
2
I just added a new book to my wish list: The Book of Mammon by Daymon Smith, an LDS anthropologist. Smith recounts his experiences working at the Church Office Building where religious concerns are uncomfortably wedded to corporate ones. As a Mormon, he is concerned that his church is increasingly led more by profit (mammon) than a prophet.
The Book of Mammon reads like an entertaining and informative exposé of the LDS Church’s corporate practices, from the banal to the unusual. It has been receiving rave reviews. C. L. Hanson over at Letters from a broad wrote a review of the book that has further piqued my interest. Informed by the book, she points out an insightful irony:
According to Daymon’s tale, working at the COB has all of the crazy office politics you’d expect at an ordinary fortune-500 corporation. There’s a big difference, though, and it’s not just the church devotionals on company time or opening meetings with prayer. The problem is that they have absolutely no motivation to figure out whether their products are useful to their consumers. Mormons pay 10% of their income per year to the corporation (in order to be eligible for the saving ordinances in the temple), and the corporation gives back manuals, magazines, films, scriptures, garments, etc. — but the direct market feedback that comes from consumers selecting the goods they purchase is completely cut off.
As I’ve said before the private sector and the public sector each have their strengths and weaknesses. In economics, it’s not a question of choosing which one is “right” and which one is “wrong” — it’s a question of optimizing your strategy by using the best of both. The COB has the worst of both because it has the advantages of neither: there’s no market incentive to produce good products, and there’s no public oversight either.
(The biggest irony is how ferociously right-wing the Mormons are, yet they give so much money to a corporation that functions just like the very worst stereotypes of the Soviet government economic system.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
