"Crushingly Cruel"

A shocking new speech has plunged Mormons into another furious battle over gay rights and the church’s future.

BY HALEY SWENSON


On Aug. 23, Jeffrey R. Holland, Brigham Young University’s former president and a senior apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, gave an inflammatory speech to BYU faculty and staff. In it, he urged faculty to take up metaphorical muskets to defend the faith. He called on them to be both builders of knowledge and defenders of the institution—the church—that determines whether the university exists and the faculty get funding to do their jobs, a fact he reminded them of multiple times in the speech. His words were unmistakably a call to arms: Holland used the word “fire” 10 times, “musket” eight times, and made multiple references to “friendly fire,” “wounds,” and “scarring.” In particular, he called for “more musket fire” from BYU’s faculty to defend Mormonism’s official position on the inferiority and social dangers of same-sex relationships and marriages.

Though the speech was directed at the faculty of BYU, it has shocked Mormons and ex-Mormons far beyond the university in its aggressive tone toward the LGBT community. Just two years ago, the church received much public praise for rescinding a 2015 policy, controversial among Mormons at the time, that declared the minor children of gay people could not be baptized into or join the church as members—at least not until they were 18 years old, and only then if they would denounce their parents’ marriage and condemn their sexuality. Given how contentious the question of gay rights has been among Mormons since the church threw its whole weight behind California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 in 2008, the post-2019 period has been one of welcome relative quiet from the church. That is, until Monday.

I’ve spent my whole life dodging Mormon “bullets” aimed toward non-traditional families. I have Mormon pioneer blood in every one of my eight great grandparents’ lines on my family tree. I grew up in a mostly inactive but still technically Mormon family (my parents and I had all been blessed and baptized into the Mormon church as kids, but we attended services only sporadically). Now, after 15 years living out of state, I’ve recently given Utah another chance. I came back in 2020, with my wife in tow, and we’ve settled here with the intention of someday having our own kids. I took the relatively positive, pro-LGBT developments of the past few years as encouraging signs we were making the right decision. In the 18 months since we moved here from Washington, D.C., Holland’s speech was the first time I truly worried that my future kids might attend public school with peers who would be taught about the evils of being gay, week in and week out at church. Just like I did.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/09/mormon-lds-church-gay-rights-controversy-byu-speech.html

Biden urges Congress to pass his infrastructure proposals

Majority of US Voters Favor $3.5 Trillion Build Back Better Bill: Poll

Underscoring what critics call the out-of-touch nature of Republican and right-wing Democrats' opposition to the Build Back Better bill supported by the Biden administration and progressive U.S. lawmakers, new polling published Wednesday confirmed that a majority of likely American voters favor the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package.

The Invest in America and Data for Progress survey (pdf) of 1,201 likely U.S. voters, conducted from August 27 to August 30, found that 61% of all respondents supported the $3.5 trillion spending proposal. Among Democratic voters, support for the measure soared to 83%, while 58% of Indpendent and third-party voters, and 40% of Republicans, backed the bill.

Some of the bill's individual provisions saw even higher support among survey respondents, including long-term care (80%), power grid modernization (74%), and updating K-12 schools (71%). Even the bill's more controversial components enjoyed majority support, including a pathway to citizenship for migrants (61%) and free community college (59%).

(Snip)

While Republicans and right-wing Democrats including Sens. Joe Manchin (W-Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) have balked at the bill's $3.5 trillion price tag, the survey found that a majority of all queried voters do not want to cut provisions from the proposed budget. For example, 75% want long-term care to remain in the package, while 69% and 64% respectively say that power grid modernization and updating K-12 schools should not be removed.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/09/01/majority-us-voters-favor-35-trillion-build-back-better-bill-poll?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_campaign=echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1630541576

Ilhan Omar holds an in-person town hall (The Hill)