Time to Think

My wife and I went out to dinner last night with a former student of mine and her husband, who himself recently retired as a professor of biology at a university in Texas.  They have been in the MTC lately and will soon begin eighteen months as a Church service couple in Egypt.  She was a participant in an intensive Arabic program that I led, quite poorly, for BYU in Jerusalem back in the first half of (gulp!) 1993.  We were joined by another student in that program, along with his wife and two of his children.  He has had a fascinating career in international business, with residencies in more countries all over the world than I can name right now off the top of my head.  Until a few years ago, he was the president of the Church’s Cairo Egypt Branch.  Needless to say, the conversation was fascinating, with lots of good information and pointers and discussions about life in Cairo and about the state of the Church there.  Good food, good company.  It doesn’t get much better in this life.

In the words of the apostle John, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children [umm, as it were] walk in truth” (3 John 1:4).

Yesterday, I posted a fairly large number of links about transgenderism that I had been saving up for future sharing.  Doing so brought a considerable amount of obfuscatory irrelevance from one commenter who refused to read the links, but also drew some excellent suggestions from other people here for further reading and viewing.  I’m very grateful for their recommendations, and I share them with you here:

Hannah Barnes, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children

Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

Jamie Reed, “I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle. There are more than 100 pediatric gender clinics across the U.S. I worked at one. What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling.”

The Trans Train — a 58-minute Swedish documentary, available for free on YouTube

The writer Jesse Singal was also suggested, but I don’t yet have a specific reference for him.

This seems to me an urgently important issue for the public to be informed about.  There are strong social and ideological tides at work right now, backed by powerful social, political, and media elites.  But I fear that they and we may be acting like lemmings rushing toward a cliff.

And here, in a rather brighter mood, are four somewhat amusing additional links that are more or less related to the issue of transgenderism.  However, you should be warned that the fourth of these contains language that, umm, is not appropriate for either the lips or the ears of good Latter-day Saints:

“Even Hell’s Kitchen?”

“Bud Light Doesn’t Seem to Understand Its Own Consumers”

“Budweiser Clydesdale Events Canceled as Bud Light Boycott Grows”

“The Top Ten Reactions to Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney Campaign”

In the spirit of full disclosure here, I think that I need to publicly declare that I myself will be drinking no Bud Light whatever for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes the always-urgent search for angles of attack against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints runs into obstacles.  It seems that this one won’t be quite as effective as some critics plainly wished:

“Arizona Supreme Court upholds Latter-day Saint priest-penitent privilege in sex abuse case: Court rules that the confidential spiritual confession made to a Latter-day Saint bishop was protected by Arizona law”

Here’s some very useful background:

“Perspective: Eliminating the clergy exemption can have unintended consequences: Studies on mandatory reporting show these laws don’t always work as intended”

“Mandatory Reporting Isn’t the Solution: It’s increasingly common to hear people point towards laws compelling reporting as the answer to our child abuse crisis. Yet the research doesn’t back this up – highlighting a number of complications that need more attention.”

And here’s a prior blog entry on the topic, with further references:

“Should a member of the clergy report sex abuse of the penitent? A look inside the priest-penitent privilege”

I’m being accused over at the Peterson Obsession Board of having deleted a lengthy exchange, including ten or fifteen posts in which I supposedly assaulted this blog’s stunningly dogmatic resident atheist commenter, “gemli, as “stupid” and “ignorant.”  Presumably, I deleted it because I found it somehow embarrassing.  Now, it’s absolutely the case that I believe gemli to be — by conscious choice — remarkably and determinedly ignorant of the subjects on which he presumes to comment here, but I have never called him “stupid” and I don’t believe him to be so.  Much more importantly, I remember no such exchange and I’m quite confident that I’ve never deleted any of gemli’s comments nor ever deleted a lengthy exchange of comments here, whether with gemli or with anybody else.  The accusation was leveled by an individual who routinely invents malicious fictions about me (some of them quite elaborate) for his eagerly credulous audience.  As is commonly the case with him, it’s flatly false.

I share with you links to three recent entries from the Neville-Neville Land blog.  It is sadly evident that Jonathan Neville intends to continue his war of misrepresentation and calumny against those who don’t share his views on the geography of the Book of Mormon.  Accordingly, Neville-Neville Land will continue to chronicle Mr. Neville’s war:

“The story of Neville-Neville Land, as told to Robert Boylan”

“My response to a thoughtful comment by Greg McIver”

“Jonathan Neville misrepresents Jack Welch, Stephen Smoot, and BYU Studies Quarterly”