The Gospel According to Jeffrey

It’s time again for everyone’s favorite game show, Respond to Michael ! Seriously, though, I want to begin this entry by explaining that I really do respect Michael Crook. We’ve disagreed before , and I’m sure we will again. However, the guy’s got a good head on his shoulders and makes a lot of good points. My issue is generally not with his positions so much as the abrasion with which they tend to be presented. That being said, Michael’s latest post, entitled No Victims They , has made a rather interesting claim: that homosexuality cannot be innate because “our Heavenly Father would force such a sick, foul, and obscene desire on any of his children.” While I recognize that Brother Crook is mostly paraphrasing and expanding upon President Boyd K. Packer ’s instructions regarding pornography in the Church’s 180th Semiannual General Conference (which I commented on , at the time), I think he’s taking things a little farther than even President Packer intended. So for th...

“They take the daughters of Ishmael to wife.” I suppose we’ll deal with this in more detail when I get to 1 Nephi 7, but I think it bears mentioning that Nephi found this tiny little detail—his marriage—important enough to mention in his headnote. With very few exceptions, women are never mentioned in the scriptures unless they are essential to the story or chronology. So by even mentioning it, we can see that Nephi views his marriage as a major event in his life and history. So what can we learn from this? Although Nephi’s parting commandment to his brother Jacob did allow him to “touch… lightly [upon] the history of this people” ( Jacob 1:2 ), the commandment that Nephi had himself received from God (ostensibly just before writing the headnote!) was that he “should make these plates, for the special purpose that there should be an account engraven of the ministry of [his] people” ( 1 Nephi 9:3 ). Furthermore, he states that: “the things which are pleasing unto the world I do n...