Supreme Court Decision on Same-Sex Marriage

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made this statement on Friday, June 26, after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision that same-sex marriages are legal:

"The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints acknowledges that following today's ruling by the Supreme Court, same-sex marriages are now legal in the United States. The Court's decision does not alter the Lord's doctrine that marriage is a union between a man and a woman ordained by God. While showing respect for those who think differently, the Church will continue to teach and promote marriage between a man and a woman as a central part of our doctrine and practice."

Also, Elder D. Todd Christofferson told a Salt Lake City TV station that Mormons who support gay marriage, mentioning their support through various social media, will not be in danger of losing their church membership or temple privileges.

He said members would have trouble with the church "only for 'supporting organizations that promote opposition or positions in opposition to the church’s.,'" according to an article by Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune, published online by the Religion News Service.

The article quoted Elder Christofferson further as saying, “Our approach in all of this, as (Mormon founder) Joseph Smith said, is persuasion. You can’t use the priesthood and the authority of the church to dictate. You can’t compel, you can’t coerce. It has to be persuasion, gentleness and love unfeigned, as the words in the scripture.”

Homed in SLC

Dear Madame L,

I saw a clip from the Daily Show with a hilarious story about Salt Lake City's solution to the problem of homelessness. Why haven't other cities done something like this?

Sincerely,

Not Homeless


Dear Homed,

Thanks for the tip. I found an article in the Salt Lake Tribune about the Daily Show clip and the issue of homelessness. The article begins, "Utah all too often is a punchline for Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. That wasn't the case Wednesday night."

I was able to watch the clip on the Daily Show's own website, but couldn't find a YouTube version of it to include here. You maybe be able to find it on Hulu.

From the Tribune:

Lloyd Pendleton, the director of the Utah Homeless Task Force. It focused on Utah's housing-first approach to end chronic homelessness, which stresses finding housing for a person so that medical issues, substance problems and employment can be dealt with.

Hasan Minhaj served as The Daily Show's "reporter" on the story, and he concluded the segment by saying, "So if you see a homeless person, don't feel bad. Know they can get a second shot at life. All they have to do is live in Utah."

San Francisco's SFGate online service reported last year:

What Salt Lake City did was simple: It created attractive housing that street people actually longed to live in, provided the new residents with plenty of on-site counseling to help them with problems such as drug abuse and unemployment, and put one person in charge who could get government and nonprofit agencies to work together.

I live near a large city in Oregon, where many women, including myself, are afraid to walk too early or late on the streets because of the aggressive and sometimes insane homeless people who accost pedestrians.

In fact, in that city, early one recent morning, I sat in a famous bookstore (rhymes with "Howell's" and starts with the same letter as the name of the city) with a cup of hot cocoa, and watched the homeless people wake themselves up from doorways and street corners as a city vehicle drove by. On the side of the vehicle was the proud motto, "[City Name], The City That Works." Certainly something about the city works, and certainly some people in the city work. But to say that [City Name] "works," as in, solves problem and helps its residents, is grossly inaccurate.

Then when I visited Salt Lake City recently, just as the Daily Show's Hasan Minhaj reported, I saw no homeless people on the streets. I walked into a huge bookstore in the very center of the city, bought a couple of books, and walked out again without anyone getting in my face and asking me for money. It was amazing!

Oh, I know there are still problems in Salt Lake City. In fact, the Salt Lake Tribune can be trusted to continue to point them out, as in this article.  And that's good. That's what a newspaper is supposed to do.

And the city is doing what it's supposed to do: continuing to work on the problem of homelessness, because city leaders care about the people who are homeless instead of caring about presenting a false image of a "city that works."

Fiction Friday: June 26, 2015: Smash (Again)

This fun graphic novel for all ages was written by Chris Bolton and illustrated by his brother Kyle. I got it because I attended a workshop led by Chris Bolton, who is about the nicest guy ever, and from what he said I figured I would learn a lot about formatting a graphic novel.

I already reviewed this book, but here's another recommendation:

So yesterday, the kids got in a big fight over who got to read Smash.  Saiph had finished it, but then Rigel read it and loved it and had only like 10 pages left to go, and Saiph admitted that he hadn't read it from beginning to end, he'd started reading somewhere in the middle and like it but it didn't completely make sense to him.  Rigel insisted that he had to read it from the beginning because it was SO GOOD and it would make more sense to him.  So then Saiph started reading again but Rigel wanted to finish the last 10 pages and it turned into a physical fight over the book.  Then this morning, Rigel came to me and said, "Can you write to Grandma and ask her if there's a sequel for Smash?"  I said that I didn't think there was but I'd ask.  And now you have a good sense of what kind of graphic novels they love!

You can also read a little about Smash on Amazon, where I found the answer to Rigel's question, which is that the writer IS working on a sequel right now! But it probably won't be published for a few months from now. Here's the whole paragraph from Amazon:

Chris A. Bolton has written comics, short stories, stage plays, sketch comedy, and screenplays. He wrote and directed several short films and an acclaimed web series called "Wage Slaves." His first published book is the all-ages graphic novel SMASH: TRIAL BY FIRE (Candlewick Press, 2013), illustrated by his brother, Kyle. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he's hard at work writing SMASH Book 2.

Better yet, you can go to the Smash Comic Web site to get the latest installments in the new book! 

Weird Expression of the Week: Interpretive JIggery-Pokery

Many thanks to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for this expression, which he used in his dissenting opinion in the court's decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act.

He also called the Obama administration's arguments in the case "pure applesauce."

He wrote, "Today’s interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of. Who would ever have dreamt that ‘Exchange established by the State’ means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government?"

And he said the court is essentially rewriting the ACA, so " We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”

Fine by me, buddy, long as people can get affordable health insurance, call it whatever you want.

Weird Word of the Week: Higgler

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a higgler is a peddler (or, as the OED people spell it, a pedlar), a person who travels from place to place selling small goods.

Here's a great image of a peddler from the Library of Congress website.

(If you go to this page, you'll find a black-and-white drawing made for you to print out for your children to color.) 


For more "weird-and-wonderful-words," check out the OED's own list.

Solving the Mystery of the Kinderhook Plates

Dear Madame L,

Have you heard of the Kinderhook Plates? These thin metal plates were supposedly found in a mound with other Native American artifacts, and brought to Joseph Smith for translation.And Joseph Smith supposedly translated them.

A few years later, the guy who made these metal plates by engraving on them with acid said it was a hoax. So, if Joseph Smith was a real prophet, how could he claim to translate some writings that were just faked?

Sincerely,

Just Wondering


Dear Wondering,

Thanks for telling me about this. I had not heard of the Kinderhook Plates, so I looked them up in some reliable online sources in order to answer your question.

All the details you mention in your question are correct---except for one: Joseph Smith did not "translate" these plates the way the hoaxers thought he would, and not the way his detractors have said he did.

Facsimile of the Kinderhook Plates, from Aug. 1981 Ensign magazine

As you will recall, Joseph translated the Book of Abraham papyri through the power and gift of God. He apparently used the Urim and Thummim to help with the translation, as LDS scholar H. Donl Peterson notes:

In the historical documents currently possessed by the Church, Joseph Smith never described fully the actual process he used in translating ancient documents. ...  He did, in several instances, refer to the book of Abraham as a translation (HC 4:543, 548); and when the installments of the book of Abraham were published in the Millennial Star, it was described as being "translated by Joseph Smith" (July 1842, p. 34). Both Wilford Woodruff (in his journal) and Parley P. Pratt (in the July 1842 Millennial Star ) maintained that the translation was done by means of the Urim and Thummim...  

And, as he translated, he made what has come to be called the JS GAEL, or the Joseph Smith  Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language.

Shortly after the  Kinderhook Plates were "discovered" on April 23, 1843, they were brought to Joseph so he could translate them. But there is no indication in the historical record that he actually did translate them in the same way that he translated the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham.

In fact, Parley P. Pratt and William Clayton reported different details about the plates and the other supposed artifacts found with them and wrote different versions of Joseph's supposed "translation."

From the August 1981 Ensign magazine: 

It seems, then, that there was considerable talk about the plates in Nauvoo—and apparently as much misinformation and hearsay was current among people as there was fact. Pratt heard of a discovery in Pike County; Clayton said Adams County. Clayton said that the find was made six feet underground; Pratt, fifteen. Elder Pratt spoke of a cement vase—an item mentioned in no other account. Clayton mentioned a skeleton nine feet tall—also unmentioned in any other account. Clayton said that the plates gave a history of an Egyptian; Pratt mentioned a Jaredite.

It's unclear whether Joseph ever made a translation, even an off-the-cuff comparison of a character from the plates with a character in his GAEL. If he did, it appears that he only compared one character that was repeated prominently on the top of many of the plates with a character he was familiar with from the Book of Abraham---was not and has never claimed by reputable scholars to be a "translation" in the sense of the ancient scriptures he actually did translate.

(For more on the possibility that he even made a comparison of any characters, see this fascinating 2011 speech by LDS historian Don Bradley.)

Some anti-Mormons have suggested that when one of the journal-writers close to Joseph wrote, "President Joseph has translated a portion," that means they saw Joseph make a translation that was as valid as his translations of true ancient scriptures. I suggest, though, that these journal-writers they were being as accurate in that case as when they wrote about the plates' discovery. 

There was popular discussion and a lot of hearsay about the plates at that time. Importantly, the plates were taken away from Nauvoo before Joseph could have actually taken a careful look at them, and he was martyred a year after they were "discovered."

Pratt wrote in a letter to a friend on May 7, 1843, "A large number of Citizens have seen them and compared the characters with those on the Egyptian papyrus which is now in this city.”  Thus it appears that it was not the Prophet Joseph Smith who tried to "translate" the plates at all.

One of the hoaxers, Wilbur Fugate, wrote to an anti-Mormon in Salt Lake City that he and the other creator of the plates had made up the whole story in order to trick the Mormons. In doing so, he admitted to having falsely signed a certificate as to the authenticity of the plates and their discovery; in other words, he admitted to having been a liar and a deceiver.

He also claimed to have sent the plates to an antiquarian, who said "...that there were no such Hyeroglyphics known, and if there ever had been, they had long since passed away."

He added, "Then Smith began his translation.” This is another lie: the plates were never returned to Nauvoo after supposedly being sent away, and Joseph died a martyr the following year.

As important is the fact that that neither Joseph nor any of the Saints in Nauvoo tried to keep these plates or buy them, as they had done with the Book of Abraham papyri, even though the owner of the plates, Robert Wiley, wanted to sell them and indeed tried to sell them to "The National Institute" and various antiquarian societies.

If you want more information about the Kinderhook Plates, this article in the Aug. 1981 Ensign magazine gives a thorough and scholarly chronology of the plates' discovery and travels, with historical details from letters, journals, and newspaper reports of the time.

If you want to know more about Joseph Smith the Prophet, please read this brilliant speech by William E. Berrett, which I would like to just go ahead and paste into this post, because he has studied the life and accomplishments of Joseph Smith. He shows how Joseph went from uneducated ignorance of even the English language to learning Egyptian and modern languages. He shows with specific examples Joseph Smith's zeal for learning, his faith, his love for the people, his leadership skills, and his humility. He shows Joseph's faults and flaws, his acknowledgement of those faults and flaws, and his continual efforts to overcome them.

He shows us the Prophet, a man --- but yet called of God to lead and serve, to restore the gospel in its fullness to the Earth. He concludes:

Yes, here was an unusual man, in whom were combined five great elements: intelligence, a zeal for learning, an unusual faith in God, a power of introspection, a love of people. In combination they made him a fit instrument in the hands of God to restore the Church in these latter days, qualities which, if we possess and cultivate, give us the elements whereby we, too, may become useful.

As Joseph Smith rode from Nauvoo toward Carthage, he met Stephen Markham and was asked, “Joseph, where are you going?” Joseph’s answer rings down the ages: “I am going like a lamb to the slaughter, but I am calm as a summer’s morning. I have a conscience void of offense toward God and all men.” Would that all of us could say that!

Of all Americans, probably Joseph Smith has left us the most writings that look into the recesses of a man’s heart. In the six great volumes that we sometimes refer to as The History of the Church and sometimes as The Documentary History, we see into the inmost recesses of his mind. I have said, and repeat here, “I believe that I know him better than I have known any man in this life save my own father.” By it I mean I know how he would react to every temptation. I know what his counsel would be to me in almost every situation in which I might find myself. He is a great companion. I recommend him to you.

I bear you my solemn witness that I know that he is a prophet of the living God, and that the Church of which we are members, founded by him, is directed by Jesus Christ. May the Lord bless you with like testimony, I pray in the name of the Master. Amen.

I also recommend him, the Prophet Joseph Smith, to you.

The Habitual Be

Dear Readers,

Check out this article on the habitual be, a grammatical construction we've been hearing a lot lately.

Here's the definition:

If you are speaking so-called white English, “Mara be walking the dog” means the same thing as “Mara is walking the dog.” If you are communicating in AAE, “Mara be walking the dog” says that Mara customarily walks the dog—that dog-walking has some definitional sway over her daily existence. It doesn’t guarantee that she is out walking the dog at this moment.

And one more clarifying bit, from that same article:

In that 2005 University of Maryland at Baltimore study, groups of black and white children were shown images from Sesame Street. In the crucial picture, a sick Cookie Monster languished in bed without any cookies, while Elmo stood nearby eating a cookie. “Who is eating cookies?” Jackson asked her test subjects, and all of them indicated Elmo. “Who be eating cookies?” Jackson then asked. The white kids replied that it was Elmo, while the black kids pointed to Cookie Monster. After all, it is the existential state of Cookie Monster to be eating cookies, while Elmo just happened to be earing a cookie at that moment. Cookie Monster, to those conversant in AAE, be eating cookies, whether he is eating cookies or not. The kids in Jackson’s experiment picked up on the subtle difference when they were as young as five or six.  

Love and cookies,

Madame L, who be having opinions about everything

Photo by Cristina Quicler/AFP/Getty Images