When I was in 4th grade, we moved to Toms River, NJ. The summer between 4th and 5th grade, I was trying to find friends in the neighborhood since I hadn’t lived there very long, and none of the friends I had met in elementary school lived in my neighborhood.
Our neighborhood was a strange amalgam of ethnicities and religious beliefs with proximity being the only real glue that held us together. The French family across the street (fundamentalist-leaning Evangelicals) had daughters near my age. Their father was abusive, and the unmistakable yelling and crashing sounds were audible from the street. If they noticed a neighbor approaching while they were being beaten, everyone would lay on the ground and pretend nobody was home. On many occasions, I rang the bell repeatedly while listening to their mother’s hushed whispers to stay on the ground below sight of the window until I went away. Our next door neighbors were rowdy good-natured Italian Catholics who skinny-dipped in their above ground pool. Their 26-year old son had raped their daughter a few years earlier, and rather than press charges, they imprisoned him in their basement. He would sometimes order pizza to be delivered to his basement window. If I was really lonely, I could always talk to their son Carmine through his window. There was another girl a few years older than me who lived down the street, but she smoked pot and cigarettes and there were never any adults in the home, all of which made me nervous. Plus, she was post-puberty, and I was not; she mostly wanted to talk about boys. I wanted a friend who would ride bikes, go on adventures (but in the neighborhood), climb trees, or swing on the rope over the sandpits behind the school. The sandpits were a vast landscape of dunes, trees, discarded shopping carts, and other treasures. Later, when I read the Lovely Bones, I imagined the shifting sandpits as a great place to dump a body.
I have often said that the gender roles described in the Proclamation are unnecessary because either they are descriptive (meaning people naturally behave this way, so who cares) or prescriptive (meaning, people should behave this way, but if it’s not natural to them, they won’t anyway and you can’t make them). This perspective neutralizes the power of gender roles whichever way you look at it. But what if gender roles can’t be neutral? What if telling a group of people that their kind behave a certain way actually changes behavior from its natural course? Is this influence ameliorative or detrimental? As a social experiment, what are its fruits? 
This week, Bryce Cook published a new comprehensive essay on the church’s stance toward LGBT members. Bryce Cook is a founding member of ALL (Arizona LDS LGBT) Friends & Family and a co-director of the annual “ALL Are Alike Unto God” Conference held every April in Mesa, Arizona. He is married to Sara Spencer Cook and together they have six children, two of whom are gay. Since their oldest son came out publicly in 2012, Bryce and Sara have become public allies for LGBT people in and out of the church.
In a discussion about the election results, one of my friends asked why so many white women voted for Trump if he is so sexist. My intuitive response was “Because they are married to white men.” It was a guess that had a certain ring of truthiness to it, but I wasn’t entirely sure I could articulate why. What I meant by it is that, sexism aside, many Trump voters felt that the Republican platform will mean a better economic future for them, that they feel the Democrats have reduced their financial prospects, and that white men in particular feel held back and disenfranchised. If their wives are financially dependent on them (whether secondary income or no income), we shouldn’t be too surprised that they agreed with their husbands. [1] But to vote for Trump, even out of self-interest, voters in 2016 also had to overlook the misogyny of their candidate. To me, that was where the more interesting story was.
Before we were married I told my husband that when we had children, I wanted to stay home with them. It never really occurred to me that I would do otherwise. I like to think that I was not particularly brainwashed into this decision by my Mormon upbringing. I don’t know. As a youth, I rebelled pretty strongly against the cultural, sometimes pseudo-doctrinal message that women belonged in the home. From a young age, I assumed that I would have a career. I didn’t want to have kids, probably because my mother had five children for whom she was the full-time caregiver, and I saw firsthand how difficult it was for her. I didn’t assume that I could do it better. I assumed it would probably kill me. 
Is Early Morning Seminary worth it? This is a question I ask myself every year. At the kickoff for seminary, the seminary director explains each year that the reason we do Early Morning Seminary is to teach the kids they can do hard things. That’s the same reason we were told we do manufactured Trek reenactments, too. But is doing hard things a good justification in and of itself to do something? I have seen fairly severe impacts to my kids as they’ve gone through 4 years of seminary. The sleep deprivation at a crucial growing period when they are supposed to be achieving grades that enable them to get a good college education seems like a high price to pay for daily religious education from amateur volunteers. 
Angry? You bet. Tyler Glenn’s latest song and video boil with rage. Glenn, a gay man and former missionary, was embraced by the church for his advocacy in building the inclusivity bridge. That is, until the LDS church’s November 5th policy change regarding homosexuals—a change that codified those in same-gender marriages as apostates, required their excommunication, and forbade the baptism of their children under certain conditions. The policy change hit him hard, like a gut punch, he says. Feeling himself betrayed, denigrated, and literally dismissed over his sexual orientation, Glenn took a hard look at less-visited areas of Mormonism and decided he could no longer believe. The release of “Trash” depicts a stunning reversal of attitude toward his faith heritage. 
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