The Gospel According to Jeffrey

Liam Hoare has a new post on Hackeryblog , wherein he asks several questions of Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, regarding his faith. Unfortunately, it’s obvious that Mr. Hoare knows little to nothing about the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ and, instead of taking five minutes to do some research, has decided to learn about it from the new  The Book of Mormon musical from the creators of South Park , presumably on the grounds that they portray everything else so accurately. ;-) Anyway, the point is that I’d like to take a few minutes to answer his questions. Hopefully Mitt won’t mind. :-) Hoare asks: Do you believe that the current President of the LDS Church Thomas S. Monson speaks directly to God? First of all, there’s no such thing as “the LDS Church.” Mitt Romney is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If you’d like a shorter version of that name, “the Church of Jesus Christ” will do. If you’d like more information on this, please check out

If you missed my last post, check it out . Otherwise, here’s Part II. :-) I’m now going to conclude my thoughts by pointing out something I’ve spoken of, many times before: the issue of how men are treated in the Church. I don’t claim to know how things were done in the 1980s or the 1880s or whatever other era, but I can certainly say that in the almost 20 years I’ve been a member of the Church, men have been treated like crap. This past Sunday would be a perfect example. Last Sunday, Anna and I attended the  Auburn Hills Ward  in the Wichita, Kansas Stake. Following the youth speaker, the second speaker was a single mother in her mid-30s, whose topic was womanhood. The crux of her talk—which point she kept revisiting—was, “I don’t claim to know what’s it’s like to be a man, but being a woman is really hard.” The implication, of course, was that women’s roles are so difficult to balance that merely filling them at all is enough to warrant praise. Following her remarks, the final

Warning: this is a long post, and it actually kind of devolves into a rant, for a while. If you’re a first-time reader, don’t worry; I’m usually not this bad. ;-) So I saw an interesting post, this morning, on a Latter-day Saint blog called  Times and Seasons . The post, entitled Women and Meetings , cited a recent professional conference the author attended, in which speaker  Dr. Bruce D. Perry  stated that “The IQ of group decision-making goes up in direct proportion to the number of women participating in the group.” The blogger’s question, therefore, was what the reader thinks of this claim, and specifically its implications for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Recent changes making the Ward Council (with three women) rather than the PEC (with zero women) the primary group decision-making body at the LDS congregational level improves the quality of decisions made at the local level. The absence of women in the senior councils of the LDS Church at the institutio