However, I thought it was super funny that the service that they have chosen to use to publish the visitor log data on the web, Socrata, has a button right at the top of the display that says “Socialize This.”  Almost every other service in the world uses the word “Share” on their links and buttons for posting information to social networks like twitter or facebook.

It’s a Freudian slip from the collective administration subconscious.

That is all.

UPDATE: 4:00pm – Since I took the screenshot they have hidden the button under a menu selection, and in the menu it says “Socialize this Dataset” but if you view it full screen you will still see the “Socialize This” button.

Daniel Bartholomew and I are very excited to introduce you to ScriptureLog.

[We appear to be having some issues with our web host.  We hope to have it resolved soon.  If it doesn't load try it again after a while.]

ScriptureLog

Scripturelog is a free, open source plugin for the popular Wordpress blogging platform that turns Wordpress into a collaborative online LDS scripture study journal.

The plugin installs volumes of scripture into Wordpress as hierarchical, inter-linking pages of books, chapters, and verses. Once the pages are installed, you can use the built-in features of Wordpress by yourself or in collaboration with others to read the scriptures, take notes, and discuss the gospel.

ScriptureLog can be used by a family or a study group to read and comment on the scriptures from a distance. It can be used by a Sunday school, seminary, or school religion class to allow for preparatory or follow up discussion by class members on the scriptures being studied for a class. It can be set up on an local network for private use or hosted publicly.

Go check it out right now at http://scripturelog.com and then come back here.

Features
ScriptureLog benefits from all of the great features of Wordpress. And there are scores of free plugins and themes that can be used to customize the site to your liking: plugins to make the site private, or to require registration; plugins to allow people to subscribe to be notified of comments by email; plugins to allow people to login using Facebook or Open ID; plugins to interface with twitter.

Currently only the Book of Mormon is available. It is organized in a way to help readers understand the textual structure of the book. Though not yet available for download, the code for the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price is substantially complete. However we are still working on an organization that helps illuminate some of the textual structure of these other books, like we have for The Book of Mormon, so we have not made them available quite yet.

Every ScriptureLog page links to the corresponding section at the official LDS Scriptures website.

Because it is open source and built on Wordpress, the plugin is open to innovation by others. Wordpress has a well documented plugin API and we hope that in addition to suggesting patches to the plugin itself, other developers will produce companion plugins to enhance features.

How ScriptureLog Came to Pass

I am not a very good at studying the scriptures. I have often had great aspirations for a better approach to scripture study, but my study nearly always falls far short of my intentions. I’ve experimented with various systems of study over the years, always looking for something better. In some ways, ScriptureLog is an extension of that search.

In September of 2004, ancient history in blogging, when I was still blogging under the pseudonym Ebenezer Orthodoxy, I wrote a post entitled “On the Follies of Scripture Marking.” While scripture marking has its place, my main concern was that it encourages a reductionist compartmentalization of the text and facilitates ritualized reading. In other words we establish visual queues that prompt us to read the verses the same way each time we encounter them and separate them from the surrounding text. I began to explore the idea of a scripture study journal as an alternative to scripture marking. (That post is no longer publicly available, but I may repost it if there is interest.)

In March of 2005, I posted about my attempts to construct a scripture study journal. I purchased a looseleaf edition of the Book of Mormon designed for use in a day planner from Deseret Book and put it in a small three-ring-binder style journal. I could write impressions, thoughts, observations, relationships to other scriptures, and note external references or personal experiences related to the text on the journal pages along with the date and then insert them in between the pages of the Book of Mormon to which they related. I still like this idea a lot, however the pages would rip out of the binder easily and it was too tedious to reinforce them manually, and I stopped using it.

In March of 2006 I registered a scripture related domain name and began working on my own scripture study service that would allow people to use emerging technology trends in tagging and folksonomy to tag scriptures and take notes. I wanted to have free signup, groups, tools for group administration and coordination, etc. But at the time the project was simply too ambitious for me to do in my spare time.

In April of 2007 I tried using Google’s Notebook product as an electronic scripture study journal. I would link to the section of scripture at scriptures.lds.org and write my notes. The notes were available anywhere I had internet access, but they were also outside of the context of the actual text and they were difficult to organize. I stopped using it.

Daniel Bartholomew and I met through LDS Blogging. He had various scripture study projects of his own, but since he is not a programmer he was doing a lot of manual work with HTML tables. We had discussed our mutual interest in ways to improve scripture study and my ambitions for a scripture study website back in 2006, and I had helped him a little with some of his coding projects.

At the end of 2007 he paid me to write a custom program for him that would parse text files containing scriptures and generate thousands of static HTML files based upon customizable templates.

But Dan felt the final result was still not entirely satisfying. He also wanted to ‘go’ open-source and create a model which would allow others to improve the results.

Dan and I were discussing some enhancements he wanted for the program I had written and ideas he had about where he would like to see his project go. Dan had been a big fan of WordPress ever since I had known him and decided WordPress provided an excellent model for what he wanted. He asked me how hard it would be to import the html scripture pages he had been working on into a Wordpress MySql database and I told him it was very possible and had some immediate ideas about how to do it. At that point we both became very excited about the prospects. Dan wanted to pay me to work on it, but after looking into it I was so excited about his idea that I offered to do it for free. I realized that Wordpress offered all of the things I had wanted to do with my own scripture study service: user management, tagging, RSS feeds, plugins, and developer API. Why not use Wordpress as the platform? Dan’s idea was great!

I had seen myself as merely a technical advisor to Dan’s project, but Dan asked me to partner with him on this project and I accepted.

Working full time, finishing my degree at BYU, working on the scripture parser program, and developing and launching my LDS blog portal, NothingWavering.org, kept me from pursuing the Wordpress idea until nearly a year later. On December 23, 2008 I emailed the first version of the plugin to Dan. It still needed a lot of work and with Dan’s continual feedback, ideas, and testing I continued to work on it into 2009.

In March of 2009, I posted an Outline of the Textual Structure of the Book of Mormon to my blog. The outline was an outgrowth of my work on the ScriptureLog Plugin.

So here we are in October, 2009 and it is finally launching.

President Ezra Taft Benson, in his famous sermon on the Book of Mormon said:

“The time is long overdue for a massive flooding of the earth with the Book of Mormon for the many reasons which the Lord has given. In this age of the electronic media and the mass distribution of the printed word, God will hold us accountable if we do not now move the Book of Mormon in a monumental way.”

ScriptureLog represents the culmination of our personal attempts to find ways to better study the scriptures, in particular the Book of Mormon, and we hope that it can contribute to the fulfillment of President Benson’s prophetic vision.

Dan and I enjoy working together and look forward to not only eventually making all the scriptures available for Wordpress, but also to develop ways that we can apply this blog-and-a-book technology to other forms of great literature.

My collection of life included a number of different birds.  I had a parrot, cockatiels, budgerigars, zebra finches, canaries, a rooster and some hens, a bantam rooster and hens,  ducks, homing pigeons, and ring-neck doves.  I didn’t get an allowance and breeding pets, especially doves, and selling them to Utah Valley pet stores was my primary source of income.

Close personal contact with doves, especially in contrast to the other birds I had,  gave me some insights into why the dove has been used as a symbol of peace, and in the scriptures as a sign for the Holy Spirit of God.

Parrots and parakeets have sharp, hooked bills and when they feel threatened or trapped they will squawk and screech, complain and murmur, and give you a painful bite– sometimes drawing blood.

The miniature bantam rooster, bred for cock-fighting, would take offense at my mere presence in the coop.  He would stand between me and the miniature hens, puffing up his feathers and strutting aggressively.  If his absurd show of lilliputian strength didn’t frighten me off, he would attack me viciously, and with surprising effectiveness, by jumping up and kicking me painfully in the shins with the sharp spurs on the backs of his legs.

The other chickens bore their name well.  They would scurry and run, unable to fly for more than a few feet, dodging left and right like tiny female football players avoiding being tackled. But the minute they felt even slightly cornered (in fact or only in their tiny imaginations) they would freeze and assume  a funny cowering position with their wings lifted up slightly, like shoulders in a shrug that said “I give up!  Don’t hurt me.”

The smaller finches and canaries fluttered and jumped all around the cages, never giving up like the chickens, until they were caught.  Some might protest and nibble at your finger, but without the sharp hooks of the parrot, their struggle was completely ineffective.

Which brings me to the doves.  Ring-neck doves have been bred in captivity for between two-thousand and three-thousand years. They are known for their gentle nature.  This is especially apparent when they feel trapped.  Of course, if the doves can fly away they will.  But if they cannot, they don’t scramble like the chickens and then give up all of a sudden; they don’t murmur and complain and bite like the parrots and budgies; they don’t strut and then attack like the bantam rooster;  they simply raise the one wing closest to their perceived assailant in a gesture of peace and submission.  They don’t bite or nip. There is no aggression and no visible panic.  Even after they are in hand they do not complain or bite.

However, if they are protecting their eggs or babies, they will sometimes bite.  I never had a dove bite me to protect itself, only to protect its young.  There is a nobility in the dove that turns its gentleness into gentility.  At least that is my own experience with them.

It is easy to project peace when all is well. But when the master reaches out toward us to examine us and we feel trapped and cornered and scared, how do we respond?  Are we parrots? Are we chickens? Are we fighting cocks?  Or finches?  Or are we doves?

I had a particular pair of doves that were my primary producers.  The male would repeatedly bow to the female, while cooing to her until she would agree to mate with him.  I could count on them to regularly produce two eggs, like clockwork, every six to eight weeks.  The male and female would both take turns incubating the eggs, or even sit on them together, and both would feed and care for the babies once they hatched. I would move the pair of babies into a different cage once I was sure they were feeding themselves, and then sell them to a pet store.

Then suddenly, one day the eggs didn’t hatch.  I carefully removed the eggs, removed the shade from the lamp in my room and held them up to the bulb for candling.  Normally I would be able to see the developing blood veins in the egg in the early stages of development, and later a tiny baby bird through the back-lit eggshell.  But this time there was nothing.  The eggs were unfertilized.

I waited a week and tried again just to be sure, and then disposed of the eggs.  The pair soon had another set of eggs.  I candled them.  Nothing.  Suddenly the birds were not fertile.  I tried various methods of fixing it.  I changed the diet.  I clipped the feathers around their cloacae to make sure that they were able to mate properly.

The eggs were all infertile.  My only source of income was gone.

Finally I turned to prayer.

A question came to me:  Had I paid tithing for the last set of doves I had sold?  Usually I had been diligent about paying a tithe on the money I made from my birds, but I realized that this time I had not.  That Sunday I took one tenth of the price I had charged for the last pair of baby doves with me to church, filled out the tithing donation form, put it in the donation envelope, and gave it to a member of the Bishopric.

A week or two later I carefully removed the newest pair of eggs from the dove’s nest.  I removed the shade from the lamp in my room and held the eggs up to the bulb.  Through the shell I saw the red outlines of veins, branching out from an amorphous  mass inside the egg.  They were alive!

This simple experience will be dismissed or mocked by some.  But for me it was profound.  It is hard to describe the impression it had on my young faith.  I had prayed over lost or sick pets before, and God had answered my prayers.  But suddenly my relationship with God changed.  He had the power over life and death.  He could make a Dove infertile or give barren Hannah, or the virgin Mary, a son.  Ultimately, He had complete control over my ability to prosper, to make money, independent of my effort.  And I had obligations to him.

MP3 Audio

This post will be updated with the earliest available mp3 audio files as they become available. Links to the official MP3s at the church website will be added as they are posted by the church.

Saturday Morning Session MP3s

Saturday Morning Session 1st Hour

Saturday Morning Session 2nd Hour

Complete Saturday Morning Session

President Thomas S. Monson

Elder Richard G. Scott

Vicki F. Matsumori

Elder L. Whitney Clayton

Russell T. Osguthorpe

Elder David A. Bednar

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Saturday Afternoon Session MP3s

Saturday Afternoon Session 1st Hour

Saturday Afternoon Session 2nd Hour

Complete Saturday Afternoon Session

President Henry B. Eyring

Elder Dallin H. Oaks

Elder Robert D. Hales

Elder Jorge F. Zeballos

Elder Tad R. Callister

Elder Kent D. Watson

Elder Neil L. Andersen

President Boyd K. Packer

Priesthood Session

Complete Priesthood Session

Elder M. Russell Ballard

Elder Walter F. Gonzalez

Elder Yoon Hwan Choi

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf

President Henry B. Eyring

President Thomas S. Monson

Sunday Morning Session MP3s

Sunday Morning Session 1st Hour

Sunday Morning Session 2nd Hour

Complete Sunday Morning Session

President Henry B. Eyring

Elder L. Tom Perry

Bishop H. David Burton

Ann M. Dibb

Elder Russell M. Nelson

President Thomas S. Monson

Sunday Afternoon Session MP3s

Sunday Afternoon Session 1st Hour

Sunday Afternoon Session 2nd Hour

Complete Sunday Afternoon Session

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland

Elder Quentin L. Cook

Elder Brent H. Nielson

Elder Dale G. Renlund

Elder Michael T. Ringwood

Elder Joseph W. Sitati

Elder D. Todd Christofferson

President Thomas S. Monson

Streaming Video

Live streaming video of the conference, as well as archived recordings of completed sessions will be available on demand through the official church website as well as through BYU TV and KSL. The video at the official website and through byu.tv has been our primary conference experience for the several years now and we really enjoy it. You can even pause the conference to go to the bathroom and come back without missing a thing.

Official Streaming Video on lds.org:

General Conference Video in English

General Conference Video in Spanish

General Conference Video in Portuguese

General Conference Video in American Sign Language

BYU.tv:

General Conference Video in English

General Conference Video in Spanish

General Conference Video in Portuguese

KSL:

KSL.com General Conference Video

Podcasts

For a few years the church has provided official audio and video podcasts of the conference sessions. You can subscribe to the podcasts to receive conference on your iPod or in a podcast enabled feed reader like Google Reader. In past years KSL has also provided a podcast.

In my experience, the KSL podcast sessions often become available shortly after each session ends, but they have been very unreliable. The official audio podcast has sometimes been posted remarkably fast after the sessions, but it has also been a little inconsistent. Understandably, the video podcast posts a few days later during the following week.

Official LDS.org Audio Podcast (MP3s of Individual Talks)
Official LDS.org Video Podcast (MP4s of Individual Talks)
KSL Audio Podcast (One MP3 per Session)

Facebook

For the first time this conference NothingWavering.org will be automatically posting links to audio and video of individual conference talks on Facebook. Become a fan of the Nothing Wavering Facebook page and you will see links to conference, as well as to posts from official LDS websites and LDS blogs right in your News Feed where they can be easily shared with friends an family.

Twitter #ldsconf

In recent years, twitter.com has emerged as a powerful online tool for live, real-time commentary. An article on the church’s official tech website described trends in twitter commentary a few General Conferences ago. In more recent conferences, the official twitter page of the @LDSNewsr0om has tweeted the conference as well. If you are a twitter user, you can post your conference comments using the #ldsconf hashtag.

View #ldsconf comments on twitter

Links to the mp3 audio and mp4 video podcast files will be automatically tweeted by NothingWavering.org through @ldsconference.

Video/Twitter Mashup

Bryce Haymond will again have a mashup of the live streaming video of the conference side-by-side with the twitter #ldsconf comments at his Temple Study blog .

LDS Blogs

To find LDS blog commentary on the conference, you can check the LDS Blog Portal at NothiningWavering.org which aggregates blog posts by mainstream and orthodox LDS bloggers as well as content from official LDS websites. You can also check out LDS blog posts specifically tagged with ‘conference’. Nothing Wavering also tweets links to LDS blog posts and official content on twitter @ldsblogs, @ldsbloggers, and @ldsofficial, in addition to the @ldsconference twitter page mentioned above.

Let me know if you have links to any other great conference resources.

Have a wonderful experience!

You think that state run insurance is a good idea.  You’ve seen in work well a fistful of countries.  You want to see it happen in the U.S..  Please consider and provide answers to the following questions:

1. The countries that you cite (France, Germany, Australia, Canada) as examples of successful state run health insurance have at most a population 1/4 the size of the United States. What makes you think that their systems can scale to the population of the U.S.?  Might there be cultural or governmental structure differences between the U.S. and these countries that would prevent their systems from translating correctly to a U.S. system?  Why or why not?

2. Why must state run health insurance be implemented at a national level instead of allowing individual states within the union to implement it at the state level if their own citizens want it?  Why must it be all states or none?  Massachusetts implemented mandatory health insurance with a state funded option for those who could not afford it under Governor Mitt Romney. Why not let it prove itself in state level laboratories? Why must it be national?

3. One astute technologist has observed: “any engineer knows that making large wholesale changes to complex open-loop dynamic systems (like the health care system) is a sure way to take a broken system and make it worse. If you’re a programmer, you’d never program like that. We don’t have to make public policy like that either. Refactoring 18% of the economy with one large bill is just plain nuts.”  Why must the changes to the health care system be implemented all at once right now?  Why not take an incremental approach?

4. Many of the same people who support a state run health insurance system also believe that big oil and other companies manipulated the national government during the Bush Administration to increase their profits by going to war. If big business can manipulate corrupt government in this way, what makes you think that if we give power to the government to control the medical industry that it wont be manipulated as well?  Your preferred party will not be in power forever.  Would you really want the party you disagree with to have the power you are granting?

5. Proponents of a national system often cite the supposed fact that 45 or more millions of people in the U.S. do not have health insurance.  However, a closer look at the numbers show that of those 45 million, there is a 6.4 million under-count of people who failed to report that they were on medicaid, 4.3 million who are eligible for medicaid or SCHIP but have not applied, 9.3 million who are not citizens of the U.S., and 5 million are single and young married adults without kids who choose to be uninsured.   If you believe that the Bush Administration “lied” about weapons of mass destruction in order to get us into the Iraq War, how is claiming 45 million uninsured in order to get us into a national health insurance system not a similar lie?  Are you okay with that?  Why or Why not?

6. Provided that you think that the system will scale, that it must be implemented on a national level and not a state level, that it must be implemented whole-hog and not incrementally,  that it will not be manipulated by corruption to unintended purposes, and that it is not being pushed using desceptive statistics– Upon what constitutional grounds does the national government claim power to run a state controlled insurance system that forces people to have insurance?  Interstate commerce clause? Preamble’s “general welfare” ?  How do you reconcile a national health insurance system with the 10th amendment?  Are there any existing national laws that force someone to purchase a product or service against their will?  What are the chances that the system will be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court?

7. In order to get around the constraints imposed by the Constitution, a national health insurance program will likely have to be technically implemented by the states anyway with the threat of withheld funds from the national government. Many state Governors oppose the plan because they know that they will be the ones who have to implement it by national mandate. This hides some of the real cost by pushing off onto the states to keep it out of the national budget.  Are you okay with that?  Why?

8. Obama points to states where a single company has a complete monopoly on the health insurance industry, but he does not mention that companies are forbidden from competing across state lines by national law.  Would you be in favor of opening up health insurance competition across state lines as a way to bring costs down?  Why or why not?

9. In order to regulate health insurance on a national level, the government is going to have unprecedented access to your health care records and expenditures.  If you were against the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping because of Constitutional privacy concerns, why do you not have similar concerns about the national governments invasion of private health information and profiling?

10.  The IRS will probably be the entity to audit health expenditure information on a national basis.  Considering the existing bureaucratic nightmare that is paying taxes, why do you trust the IRS to manage your health information?

11.  Part of the problem with the current system is that insurance plans do not move with the individual from job to job, or across state lines.  These are restrictions imposed or encouraged by the federal government.  Would you be in favor of eliminating these restrictions?  Why or why not?

I’m going to be out of the country for the next 12 days and wont have time to respond to comments during that time.  Take your time to consider the questions and provide some detailed answers and I will see what you have to say when I get back.

When my grandfather passed away last year our family held a viewing at the local meetinghouse.  Among the cousins, some of the young parents and their children ended up in the nursery room.  As the kids played, one of the dolls caught my attention.  The scowling face glared fiercely with a look much too mature for its little body.  It was the ugliest doll I had ever seen!  I wish that I had a picture of it.

Let’s face it, there are some bizarre and scary old toys out there, lurking in LDS nursery closets and cupboards.

Just last Sunday I discovered this crazy thing in our ward nursery:

It’s Charles Dodgson’s rendition of doctor Moreau’s combination of the letter ‘A’ with Mr. Happy Bug, wearing the circus tent from Something Wicked This Way Comes and some fashionable blue leg irons welded to some Christmas bells!  All I can say is “Brilliant use of negative space.” (Points to anyone who can tell me why it is a brilliant use of negative space).  Now all we need to do is melt some clocks over it.  I wonder if it is part of a series?

Have you run into any scary or weird toys in your church nursery?  I’m sure you have.  So here is an assignment for this Sunday.  Take your camera or your camera phone to nursery and take a picture of the craziest, ugliest, scariest toy you find.  Then email them to toys at sixteensmallstones dot org along with your city, state, and any comments.  The best ones (or worst ones!) will be added as updates to this post.

History is a testament to the nearly limitless incapacity of the human misunderstanding.  And while each generation reserves a regular chuckle for the naiveté of its ancestors, it is often just as blind to its own errors.

I believe that our minds are not only limited by lack of experience and information.  They are fundamentally limited by mortality.  Our two eyes can only extrapolate three dimensions, though with some effort we can conceive of a tesseract even if we cannot visualize it in its true form.  We can only perceive colors of light within about 380 to 750 nanometer wavelengths, and as a result plants and flowers that exhibit intricate ultraviolet patterns and designs appear to us quite plain and ordinary to our limited vision.  Technology allows us discover their patterns by translating the ultraviolet into our visible spectrum, but we are incapable of actually seeing them as they really are.

Reality is not circumscribed by your or my ability to comprehend, conceive of, or perceive it.

Just because you cannot see how your neighbor’s sub-prime mortgage can affect the value of your own home does not mean that it cannot.  Just because you cannot conceive of how same-sex marriage could possibly threaten the institution of the family does not mean that it cannot do so.

So it is especially arrogant to presume to circumscribe God and his church with the incapacities of human misunderstanding.  Just because you cannot conceive of a way in which God can have exhaustive knowledge of the future while simultaneously allowing mankind to have true free will does not mean that it is not possible for him to do so.  Just because you cannot see how a good God can allow so much suffering in the world, doesn’t mean that God is not good.  Just because the priesthood restrictions before 1978 don’t make sense to me doesn’t mean that they were not God’s will.  It just means I cannot comprehend it.

Now don’t misunderstand me.  I am not advocating for irrationality.  I am not saying that reality is not rational.  It just means that our ability to apprehend reality through purely rational means is inherently limited by nature.

As members of the LDS church, our knowledge of God by necessity comes through authorized revelation. We have a prophet.  If we only follow the prophet when the information he receives can be reconciled with our reason then there is no need for a prophet at all because reason alone would suffice.

So, until we receive additional information from the proper authority, we should probably refrain from relying on our human misunderstandings as our own special versions of Hyum Page’s seer stone to suggest publicly which doctrines should be accepted or abandoned by the church, or to correct her direction.  Either the watchmen are indeed on a tower that permits them to see beyond where we are able, or they are not.  And I believe that they are.

April 2009

October 20008

April 2008

Last fall I broke the news that the church was considering allowing members to watch the Priesthood Session live this year by using the planned LDS Account login functionality.  The LDS Account system was finalized and released earlier this year and rolled out to a number of church websites.

Making the audio and video available after the Conference Report Ensign magazine has been publish may represent a new policy for Priesthood session media.

We’ll see if the church makes an official statement.

(Hat tip to reader David S for the tip)

In the April 2009 General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Elder L. Tom Perry, who is one of the Twelve Apostles of the church, spoke about the responsibility of every member of the church to facilitate the missionary effort to teach the Restored Gospel.  He urged us to step up “to do a job that is rightfully ours and for which we are better suited” than the missionaries. He urged us to open our mouths
to our friends and family. (Read the whole address: “Bring Souls Unto Me“, April 2009)

A few months prior to his conference address, Elder Perry presided over our stake conference.  I had the opportunity to attend the priesthood leadership training meeting where he introduced us in more detail to the church’s vision for member driven missionary work and reactivation.   Without creating any new manuals, establishing any new organizations , or requiring any additional meetings, he told us that the church intended to radically alter the work of building up the church through missionary work.

He then introduced us to a ward mission process by which wards and stakes will prayerfully identify teaching opportunities for the full-time missionaries.  Lessons to both less active members and non members will be treated as equally important. Increasingly, members will be expected to drive the work forward by sharing the Gospel.

The church has known for many years that the most effective missionary system is driven by member referrals, but officially shifting the responsibility for finding new people to teach onto the stakes and wards, and holding them accountable for it, is an important, fundamental change.

My Revolutionary Proposal

Elder Perry’s words reminded me of an idea I had at the end of my own mission that dovetails perfectly with this new effort.  Since his presentation I haven’t been able to get it off my mind.  The more I think about it, the more I think that it needs to happen.  Here it is:

Sacrament Meeting Invitations

Yes, I think that Sacrament Meeting Invitations could revolutionize the member missionary effort. Here’s how:

It requires a simple, but fundamental shift in how we treat Sacrament Meeting speaking assignments.

Most weeks, the bishop of the ward asks a number of members of the congregation to speak on assigned topics.  The church could establish a policy that all sacrament meeting speaking assignments be made with the ward’s missionary responsibility in mind.  When the bishop or his counselor asks a member to speak on Sunday, he would also hand them a number of invitations with a challenge to give the invitations to friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, or other acquaintances who are not members of the church, or to those who are less active members of the church.  The invitations could read:

Come hear me preach a brief sermon at my church on Sunday ______________________.

I will be speaking about ____________________________________.

The service begins at __________________ and lasts about 70 minutes.

Our congregation meetinghouse is located at ____________________________________.

Sunday best dress is usual but not required.

Hope to see you there,

The bishop would fill in the date, topic, time, and address, and the speaker would sign the invitation.  Similar invitations could be made for those performing musical numbers.

This is a very small change, requiring little additional effort or resources, and leveraging existing practices and organization, but it’s implications have potential to be revolutionary!

1. Personal and Less Awkward

Real or imagined, inviting someone to church feels awkward. It often doesn’t feel socially comfortable or even appropriate to invite someone to church without an antecedent that indicates some kind of existing interest or disposition.  So we wait around forever for the topic to come up and the right opportunity to make the leap.

But inviting people to come to hear you speak in church is different.  It’s about you, not just the church. It’s like inviting people to come hear your band play, or attend a baby shower or your daughter’s dance recital, or to come to a barbecue at your house.  There is no reason to wait for conversational queues that might indicate interest or disposition.  If they can’t make it or aren’t interested that’s fine.

2. A Physical Reminder

Because the invitation is physical it is easier to give.  Instead of having to strike up a conversation that leads to an invitation, you can simply pass out invitation cards.  If you are especially shy you can simply leave them taped to the door, mail them, or leave them on a colleague’s desk.  When being delivered in person, you can simply say “Hey, I’m giving a sermon at my church on Sunday and wanted to give you an invitation,” and hand them the card.  The physical invitation then stays with whomever you have invited as a reminder.  It will sit on their desk, their coffee table, the passenger seat of their car, or be stuck to the fridge.  It has all the information needed to attend and sets expectations for dress and duration.

3. Time Dependent

The invitations benefit from a specific deadline.  Currently, a goal to invite others to church is too open ended.  Artificially imposed deadlines aside, you can always put it off until another day because there is a meeting every Sunday.  But you speak on a specific date.  It is a real deadline.  The time sensitivity helps people to overcome the tendency to put off the invitation.  It also puts a deadline on those who are invited because if they don’t come, they will miss your sermon.

4. Outward facing

Inviting non-members to hear you speak changes the focus of sacrament meeting talks from inward facing to outward.  If there is a chance your non-member friends or family will come to hear what you have to say, it matters more.  A sacrament meeting talk becomes an opportunity to share your testimony of the gospel with your friends and inspires more thought and preparation.  Are you using words that your friends will understand?  Do you need to explain some things that members take for granted? Consequentially Sacrament meetings will become more visitor-oriented.

5. Self-Reinforcing

Every time you remember that you need to be preparing your talk, you will also remember that you need to extend the invitations.  Every time you see the person you have invited, it will remind you that you need to be preparing your talk.  The invitations and the talk preparation feed back into each other.

6. A Positive Conversation Starter

Instead of the invitation being the culmination of a conversation, the invitation initiates and facilitates conversations about the gospel and the church that may have not happened otherwise. People will be curious or even surprised that you will be preaching a sermon. Instead of passively waiting for discussions initiated by others about dietary restrictions , temple ceremonies, or whatever negative thing they may have heard about the church, the invitations actively lead to discussion of some of the most appealing and interesting aspects of the church: participatory membership and the lay ministry.  A conversation about how the congregation is run by the members and the sermons given by the members themselves provides a positive, memorable introduction to the church that is likely different from their own experiences with other churches and will inspire curiosity that will reinforce the invitation.  It also helps people understand that our meetings are open to visitors.

7. Youth Experience

Many congregations have a teen-aged member speak.  Youth speakers would benefit from real missionary opportunities on a regular basis.  And it will be easier for them than to invite their friends than before, even though it does add some stress to what for some teens is already a difficult assignment.

8. Unique

The invitations take advantage of the participatory nature of the church.  There are few other churches that could consistently replicate this kind of program on a large scale.  Latter-day Saints will come to be associated with invitations and member sermons.

9. Low Tech

While technology could certainly be used to augment and simplify the invitations system, it isn’t required.  It would be nice if the church graphic designers produced attractive invitations, like pass-along-cards, that were properly branded, and distributed to each ward and branch.  Or perhaps the church software developers can add a section to the new stake and unit websites that would generate attractive invitations on the fly for printing and email-able invitations.  But realistically the proposal can be implemented with a simple PDF that can be printed and filled out.  Or a printed invitation template that can be photocopied. (A simple PDF template can be downloaded at the end of this article)

10. Hunting and Fishing

Currently, inviting people to church is like hunting.  The missionaries pray about and identify a member family that they will invite to prayerful identify a couple of friends or family members to invite to church or a meet the missionaries .  They identify a couple of people who may be “ready” or “prepared” and approach them with some trepidation.  They aim for a specific target.  Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail.

Sacrament meeting invitations are more like fishing.  You cast your net wide and see how many people you bring in.  Some slip through, but you get a lot more yield.  While bishops should still seek inspiration in making speaking assignments, and speakers should still seek inspiration concerning to whom invitations should be given, realistically you could invite everyone to your workplace with the hope that a couple might come.

We need both hunting and fishing approaches to grow the church.

11. Easily Implemented Locally

While I would like to see this proposal implemented as a standard policy church-wide, it is simple enough that individual Stake and District Presidents, Bishops and Branch Presidents could fairly easily implement it in their own congregations at any time, if they felt that the Spirit guided them to do so.  Even individual members could print out and distribute invitations on their own initiative when asked to speak in church.  I’ve put together a simple prototype invitation form as a writable PDF that can be downloaded and used.

12. Potential Reach

Up to three members of each ward and branch would be inviting others to church two or three weeks out of the month.  Even if there are only 26 Sundays with speaking assignments, with 28,109 wards and branches, if each speaker invited only 1 person, that is potentially 730,000 people being invited to church every every year.  If each speaker invited just 3 people, that would be nearly 2 MILLION people invited every year.  Of course, as the church grows that number increases.  And contrasted with missionary cold-call door-knocking, street contacting, and English classes, these invitations are far more likely to be effective because they are personal.

Of course, the weakness of the proposal and the key difficulty is the follow up.

The speaker should make sure he or she thanks any visitors for coming.  The ward mission leader, the bishop, and the missionaries should be available immediately after the meeting for the speaker to introduce his or her visiting friends. Hopefully, as visitors become more of a focus for the sacrament meetings, members of the congregation would keep their eye out for visitors and introduce themselves and avoid monopolizing the time of the Bishop or Missionaries until later.  The leaders and members should be careful not to be pushy, these are after all people who came to church driven primary by their relationship with the speaker and not because they are necessarily interested in joining the church.  They should be invited to return the next week, and made aware that the missionaries are available to answer questions.  Of course, following the Spirit is the most important.

Perhaps those who come to hear their friends speak will never come back again, but they will have had a significant exposure to the church that will influence them and their perceptions of Mormons for the rest of the lives.  And more importantly, they will have had an opportunity to hear our testimonies and feel the Holy Spirit touching their hearts.

I really believe that this proposal has great potential to truly revolutionize the church.  I would like to get the feedback from a few people who try it, or Bishops who want to give it a try in their wards.  Let me know what you think.

Download LDS Sacrament Meeting Invitations:

Editable PDF: LDSSpeakingInvitationsForm.pdf

Static PDF: LDSSpeakingInvitations.pdf

Word Doc: LDSSpeakingInvitations.doc

OpenOffice: LDSSpeakingInvitations.odt

UPDATE:  Please be aware of the official church guidelines for how local units are to properly use and display the name of the church and the official church logo.  I have updated the invitation documents above to conform with the guidelines.  If you downloaded them previously please download the updated versions.

To set things up, let me share my personal experience with the economic crisis.

Depression

In January 2009 I found myself sitting in a conference room of the company I had worked for during the last four years listening to the chairman of the board of directors explain that the company was running out of money and that they were replacing the company founder and president with a new, hand-picked CEO.

Only six months earlier the company had been on top of the world: honored with prestigious awards and accolades and a three-year sales growth of 620 percent.

As if the mood wasn’t somber enough, the chairman then went on to explain that the economy was in a very bad way, and that it wasn’t just a cyclical recession, but it was going to be a depression.  He expected that many, many companies would fail but that those companies that survived the depression would be wildly successful afterward.

Now, from any board chairman this kind of talk would be alarming, but from our chairman, Mark H. Willes, it was downright horrifying.  You see, Willes had been president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1977 to 1980.  He had been President and CEO of of General Mills, Inc., President and CEO of The Times Mirror Company, director of Black and Decker, and a somewhat controversial publisher of the L.A. Times.

In other words, he was very, very well connected to insiders across a large number of industries. He had been involved with recessions from various angles for nearly four decades.  He said that neither he nor his associates had never seen anything like what was happening in the economy in their lives.

Within a month or two of our meeting, Mark was named as the new President and CEO of the Deseret Management Corporation by the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Deseret Management Corporation oversees all of the church’s for-profit commercial enterprises.

Within three months of the depressing company meeting with Willes, my award winning company had dwindled from layoffs and resignations.  I was fortunate to find employment with a more stable company.

Now, experts will certainly argue with Willes about whether the current economic crisis actually constitutes a depression.  In fact, a good number believe that the economy is already well on its way to recovery from a severe recession. Others disagree and are predicting that the supposed recovery is superficial and will not last.

I have no idea who is right.  Though, as I watch increasing numbers of friends lose their jobs, I am not very optimistic.  But regardless of whether this is an actual depression, everyone seems to agree that it is among the worst economic crises we’ve had in a very long time.

The Causes of the Economic Crisis

In order to draw my analogy, it is important to first look at how this economic crisis came about.  As usual, even experts disagree about some of the roots of the crisis, and like the Great Depression, I am sure that they will be arguing about them for decades to come.  However, most of the explanations I have seen point to the Housing Market Bubble , Subprime Mortgages and Mortgage Backed Securities as the crux of the crisis.

Perhaps the most layman-accessible explanation I have seen is an 12 minute video entitled “The Crisis of Credit Visualized” by Jonathan Jarvis.

I encourage you to watch the video.

Now, one thing that I should point out is that the video puts the blame for subprime mortgages squarely on the lenders and investors without mentioning that government programs intended to promote home ownership among lower income, minority families as a form of social engineering created artificial incentives for lenders to lend to subprime applicants.

It also neglects the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act passed by the Republican controlled 106th Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1999 which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which had prohibited individual institutions from acting as both an investment bank and commercial bank, or as both a bank and an insurer; prohibitions that had been enacted specifically to prevent the kind of circumstance they believed led to the Great Depression.

The key point here is that the the credit crisis was incubating for a long time before it actually hit.  Laws and policies enacted nearly a decade ago, if not more, did not bear fruit until this last year.

A decade ago  I was newly married and worried more about school, work, and family problems than obscure shifts in banking law and social initiatives being made by the Clinton administration and my Republican representatives in Congress.  I would have never believed that the bad subprime lending practices of lenders and the greed of investment bankers far away from my simple, honest attempt to make a living could damage my own job and threaten the value of my home.

And that is why the subprime credit crisis provides a good analogy for the potential dangers of redefining marriage.

An Analogy

Over and over again I hear supporters of same-sex marriage ask derisively how a same-sex marriage could possibly destroy anyone else’s marriage.  More recently they point to Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage has been legal since May 2004, and declare triumphantly that the societal meltdown prophesied by opponents has not materialized.

But as the subprime mortgage crisis demonstrates, in complex systems seemingly small policy changes, and millions of individual decisions, can over a longer time-scale cause disastrous results for even those who were not involved in the bad decisions, even if things look peachy in the interim.  Five years ago we might have asked derisivly “How can my neighbor’s subprime mortgage hurt my mortagage?”  And now we know how.

Redefining marriage to include same-sex couples is analogous to redefining lending guidelines to offer mortgages to applicants who under previous definitions would not qualify.  We are creating subprime marriages.

The motivation for changing the definition is also similar.  Home ownership is a stabilizing institution.  Government programs sought to lower the standards for mortgage qualifications in order to encourage the stabilizing influence of home ownership among lower-income families and minorities.  Plus everyone wants the benefits of home ownership, and the government and businesses wanted the increased revenue by lending and taxing people who were previously not eligible.

But by lowering the standards they set up a system that in the long term destabilized the entire housing market.

Likewise, marriage is a stabilizing institution.  Some same-sex marriage proponents argue that by allowing homosexuals to marry they will stabilize relationships that are at the present notoriously unstable.  They want the benefits of marriage. Who doesn’t?  But just like home ownership, but even more so, marriage is a long term investment.  It is an investment in the next generation of citizens consisting of the children raised by marriages, and by proxy an investment in society.  By redefining marriage, we potentially destabilize the entire system in the long term, even if things look peachy in the interim.

Of course, same-sex marriage is only one type of subprime marriage.  For decades now we have been investing in other forms of subprime marriages as we grow increasingly tollerant of pornography, infidelity, abuse, and divorce.  In many ways same-sex marriage is as much a result of these existing subprime marriages.

To look at five years of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and declare triumphantly that there are no deleterious consequences is like declaring in 2005, at the height of the housing bubble, that extending homeownership to people who were previously inelligibe and breaking down the barriers to banking, the whole country has benefitted across the board.  It’s short term thinking.

The possible effects of subprime marriage may not be felt for decades, or even two or three generations.

While I empathize a great deal with same-sex couples and their desire to redefine marriage and claim its benefits, like subprime mortgages, in the long run investing in subprime marriage is a bad investment with the potential to be amplified through the complexity of society with disasterous long-term results that affect everyone.

This weekend, April 4th and 5th, 2009, is the annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints where the modern Apostles and Prophets of Jesus Christ will speak. Every Conference I post links to MP3 audio and other Internet resources as they become available.

MP3 Audio

This post will be updated with the earliest available mp3 audio files I can find as soon as they become available. If necessary, the links will be replaced by links to the official MP3s at the church website as they are posted.

Saturday Morning Session MP3s

Saturday Morning Session 1st Hour

Saturday Morning Session 2nd Hour

Complete Saturday Morning Session

President Thomas S. Monson

Elder Robert D. Hales

Margaret S. Lifferth

Michael A. Neider

Elder Allan F. Packer

Elder D. Todd Christofferson

President Henry B. Eyring

Saturday Afternoon Session MP3s

Saturday Afternoon 1st Hour

Saturday Afternoon 2nd Hour

Complete Saturday Afternoon Session

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Presented by Robert W. Cantwell

Presented by Brook P. Hales

Elder M. Russell Ballard

Elder Quentin L. Cook

Elder Kevin W. Pearson

Elder Rafael E. Pino

Elder Richard G. Scott

Elder Russell M. Nelson

Sunday Morning Session MP3s

Sunday Morning Session 1st Hour

Sunday Morning Session 2nd Hour

Complete Sunday Morning Session

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Elder Neil L. Andersen

Elder Steven E. Snow

Barbara Thompson

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland

President Thomas S. Monson

Sunday Afternoon Session MP3s

Sunday Afternoon Session 1st Hour

Sunday Afternoon Session 2nd Hour

Complete Sunday Afternoon Session

Elder Dallin H. Oaks

Elder David A. Bednar

Elder Gary E. Stevenson

Elder José A. Teixeira

Elder F. Michael Watson

Elder L. Tom Perry

President Thomas S. Monson

Streaming Video

Live streaming video of the conference, as well as archived recordings of completed sessions will be available on demand through the official church website as well as through BYU TV and KSL.  Our family has been watching the conference through the official website and through byu.tv for the last several years and it has been great.  You can even pause the conference to go to the bathroom and come back without missing a thing.

Official Streaming Video on lds.org:

General Conference Video in English

General Conference Video in Spanish

General Conference Video in Portugues

General Conference Video in American Sign Language

BYU.tv:

General Conference Video in English

General Conference Video in Spanish

General Conference Video in Portuguese

KSL:

KSL.com General Conference Video

Podcasts

For the last couple of years, the church has provided official audio and video podcasts of the conference sessions. You can subscribe to the podcasts to receive conference on your iPod or in a podcast enabled feed reader like Google Reader. In past years KSL has also provided a podcast.

In my experience, the KSL podcast sessions often become available shortly after each session ends, but they have been very unreliable.  The official audio podcast has sometimes been posted remarkably fast after the sessions, but it has also been a little inconsistent. Understandably, the video podcast posts a few days later during the following week.

Official LDS.org Audio Podcast (MP3s of Individual Talks)
Official LDS.org Video Podcast (MP4s of Individual Talks)
KSL Audio Podcast (One MP3 per Session)

Twitter #ldsconf

Over the last couple of years, twitter.com has emerged as a powerful online tool for live, real-time commentary.  An article on the church’s official tech website described trends in twitter commentary during the last General Conference. This year, the official twitter page of the @LDSNewsr0om will be twittering the conference as well.  If you are a twitter user, you can post your conference comments using the #ldsconf hashtag.

View #ldsconf comments on twitter

An archive of #ldsconf comments will be available @LDSConf.

Links to the mp3 audio and mp4 video podcast files will be automatically tweeted through NothingWavering.org through @ldsconference.

Video/Twitter Mashup

Bryce Haymond will have a mashup of the live streaming video of the conference side-by-side with the twitter #ldsconf comments at his Temple Study blog .

LDS Blogs

To find LDS blog commentary on the conference, you can check the LDS Blog Portal at NothiningWavering.org which aggregates blog posts by mainstream and orthodox LDS bloggers as well as content from official LDS websites.  You can also check out LDS blog posts specifically tagged with ‘conference’. Nothing Wavering also tweets links to LDS blog posts and official content on twitter @ldsblogs, @ldsbloggers, and @ldsofficial, in addtion to the @ldsconference twitter page mentioned above.

Let me know if you have links to any other great conference resources.

Enjoy!

Book-of-Mormon-Outline.pdf

I compiled the outline as a way to help me understand the Book of Mormon better by identifying some of the organizational boundaries, voices, and structure of the text.

The chapter boundaries of the original 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon were different than our modern version and it was not divided into verses.  Apostle Orson Pratt divided the book into new chapters and added the verse divisions in the 1838 Liverpool edition of the book. One objective of the outline was to easily see the different boundaries between the chapters both in the original translation and our modern version.

The Book of Mormon itself is translated from multiple different sets of records which create natural boundaries in the structure between source materials and authors. Some of these divisions and groups are identified by headings in the original text itself, which I have colored blue. The original translation did not identify the range of chapters over which the headings extended, but in the 1920 edition of the Book of Mormon, text was added to identify which chapters comprised each section identified by the headings.

In addition to the headings from the original record, based on my own reading I have added my own sections with their own headings and boundaries, colored green, whenever possible using words from the actual text.

Many of the boundaries I have made organize chapters of the text where the primary voice changes from the principal author or editor of the plates (Nephi, Mormon, Moroni) to one of their sources for an extensive section, or when the editors (Mormon for the Large Plates of Nephi and Moroni for the Plates of Ether) interrupt their narrative to offer extensive editorial commentary. Additionally, I have marked a few sections where the author makes a significant shift in focus extending for multiple chapters, notably Nephi when he recounts his dream.

The outline is not comprehensive, and there are a few places where making the original chapter boundaries match up with the 1920 chapter ranges doesn’t quite work out. Also there are numerous places where the
editors voice is so intermixed with the speakers, for instance in Alma chapters 9 through 13, that I have not tried to group them under individual headings other than the original heading from the text.

This effort has certainly helped me understand and appreciate the Book of Mormon far more than I did previous to this effort, and building the outline has strengthened my testimony that the Book is true and was translated by the gift and power of the Holy Spirit.

This is my first version so if you find any errors or typos please let me know and I will make corrected versions of the outline available.

Please feel free to copy and distribute it if you find it useful.

We don’t do traditional T.V. in our home.  We have a television, but it isn’t hooked up to cable.  It isn’t even connected with traditional broadcast television channels.  It doesn’t have any channels; not a single one.  And it has been that way for the entire ten years we’ve been married.

Instead, we have a DVD player and a VCR.  We own some DVDs and VHS tapes, but not a lot.  In the past, we have actively chosen what we will watch by renting it from the local library or blockbuster.  If friends recommended a certain television show, we would wait for it to come out on DVD and then rent it.

Increasingly, however, our video entrainment is coming through the internet through sites like Netflix.com and Hulu.com.

Last year I discovered that Hulu included the excellent LDS Film Saints and Soldiers among the feature films available to watch for free on their website.  A few months ago I noticed that it was listed among the most popular films for the day, and have been watching its popularity ever since.

Saints and Soldiers is currently the 2nd most popular feature film of all time on Hulu (behind the Jim Carey movie Liar Liar).  It is also the 4th most popular film this month,  the 7th most popular film this week,  and the 12th most popular film today.

It has been consistently on the  first page of the list most popular films on Hulu for months and has 512 reviews. It is also listed among the highest rated feature films on the site.

While there are quite a few LDS themed films that I would not recommend, I wonder if the producers of some of the better LDS movies have considered trying to get their movies on Hulu to be watched for free with advertsing?  It seems like a great way to make their works available to a wider audience, both LDS and Non-LDS.

In any case, if you haven’t seen Saints and Soldiers, I highly recommend it, with the warning that it is quite violent and rated PG-13 for content that some familes might find objectionable.  You can watch it for free on Hulu over a broadband internet connection:

Saints and Soldiers (1 hour 30 minutes)

“Expect evangelicalism to look more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. Emphasis will shift from doctrine to relevance, motivation, and personal success – resulting in churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith.”

…

“I believe the coming evangelical collapse will not result in a second reformation, though it may result in benefits for many churches and the beginnings of new churches.”

…

“We can rejoice that in the ruins, new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born. I expect to see a vital and growing house church movement. This cannot help but be good for an evangelicalism that has made buildings, numbers, and paid staff its drugs for half a century.”

“We need new evangelicalism that learns from the past and listens more carefully to what God says about being His people in the midst of a powerful, idolatrous culture.”

This article is a distillation of a more thorough series of posts on the Evangelical Collapse on his blog, where he clarifies that:

“I clearly said that evangelicalism was going to suffer a collapse, not at all meaning it would die. I said that HALF of evangelicals would be something else within 2-3 generations/10-20 years.”

Spencer’s is careful to state that he is not a prophet and that his prognostications  may be wrong.  But if he is right, the shifting religious landscape may be a great opportunity for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

According to recent statistics about religion in America by the Pew Forum, 26% of Americans identify themselves as Evangelical.  If, as he predicts, 50% of evangelicals will be something else in the next 10 – 20 years, that’s approximately 39,000,000 people who will be something other than Evangelical over the next two decades.

Spencer believes that a number will go to Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox church.

We should make sure that they all have the opportunity to consider the Church of Jesus Christ during their religious flux.  The terrible calumnies about the church widely believed among evangelicals will still be hard to overcome, but while they are re-evaluating their own beliefs, they may be more open than in the past.

On the one had we have democracy which is the rule of the majority. The government derives its just powers from the people.  So a government has to be fundamentally democratic to wield any power justly.  A government that foists the desires of a minority over the majority would be an unjust oligarchy, and tyranny of the minority.

However, the founders were also very suspicious of pure democracy because more often than not it devolved into a tyranny of the majority, where the majority unjustly tramples the rights of the minority.

So while keeping the government fundamentally democratic, they structured the government with a series of checks and balances based on distributing democracy to competing scopes that would prevent the states with large populations from tyrannical rule over the states with small populations, while still allowing government action to be derived justly from the people.  They called this a Democratic Republic.

In the case of Prop 8 the majority has ruled to uphold traditional marriage norms through democratic vote.

Those who favor same-sex marriage lost at the ballot box and view this as an act of tyranny of the majority, so they have turned to the courts to try to overthrow it.

Those who favor traditional marriage view the court case as an act of oligarchy, a usurpation of the democracy from which the government derives its powers.

Now we come to the arguments made by the lawyers before the California Supreme Court.

The proponents of same-sex marriage appear to be making the tyranny of the majority argument– that their rights are trampled by the majority.  But they are fail to explain how the government can justly foist their view upon a majority who disagree.  Unless you have a norm for judging the justice or injustice of democratic action, how can you distinguish between just democracy and unjust democratic tyranny? It can’t simply be that any democratic action you disagree with is tyranny.  If arguments of the proponents of same-sex marriage were to win, then our government would soon lose its legitimacy because it’s powers could no longer be clearly derived from the people.

On the other hand, Ken Starr, representing the Proponents of traditional marriage, argues that rights are defined by the majority and the majority can revoke and bequeath all rights.  This is not an argument for just democracy but for democratic tyranny.  He argues that our rights are derived from the majority of the people.  If the argument by the proponents of traditional marriage were to win, our government would quickly devolve into an unjust tyranny where the rights of a minority could be revoked by the will of a strong majority.  Again, unless you have an external norm by which the justice of a democratic vote can be evaluated, you cannot assume that all democratic actions are just.  This would open the door to the revocation of rights from any unpopular minority by a motivated majority. (Which, while they may desire when it comes to same-sex marriage, they may no be so keen for when it comes to the redistribution of wealth.)

Heads we lose; tails we lose.  Either argument results in unjust government.

The correct argument for both sides lies in the recognition of the source from where both our rights, and the powers we delegate to government originate.  The founding document of our nation, the Declaration of Independence, explains it:

We are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.  Among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The justice of our government must be measured against the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.

Laws and constitutional amendments may be enacted through proper means, and still be unjust when measured against the Natural Law.

My rights don’t come from the government and they don’t come from the democratic will of the people.  They come from God.  Unless there is a source, external to both government and man, to which we can turn to claim our rights in the face of tyranny and injustice, how can anyone justifiably fight  either?

Proponents of same-sex marriage declare that laws and amendments that allow only for traditional marriage are unjust.  But upon what grounds?  Rights? Can they rest on the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God or the rights with which we are endued by our Creator without undermining the very justness of their same-sex relationships?  Can they declare the actions of the voters of California an unjust abridgment of their rights while refusing to identify a consistent standard by which that injustice is measured? They need to give a clear standard by which we can all judge the justice of same-sex marriage and the justice of prohibiting simultaneously both polygamy and adult incest.

Even if they are justified in their complaint, are their methods justified?

If the only way to throw off the yolk of injustice is to overthrow the checks and balances of the Republic and remove government power from its just foundation on the will of the people, then isn’t it better to submit to and endure an unjust law until it can be changed through patient, proper, constitutional means than to expose us to the huge danger that such an overthrow would bring?

This was just the situation that the nation faced with the issue of slavery before the Civil War.  The fugitive slave laws were legal and judged constitutional.  But they were contrary to the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God, and so they were unjust laws.

Many abolitionists took the view that such unjust laws could and should be defied.  In their minds, any law that contradicted the Natural Law was not a real law.

By the same standard, modern conservatives decry abortion laws.  It may be legal, but the law is unjust as measured by the Natural Law.

Abraham Lincoln spoke about those Abolitionists and their defiance of unjust law in his famous speech to at the Young Men’s Lyceum:

When I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the laws, let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws, nor that grievances may not arise, for the redress of which, no legal provisions have been made.–I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say, that, although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed….

There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law. In any case that arises, as for instance, the promulgation of abolitionism, one of two positions is necessarily true; that is, the thing is right within itself, and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all good citizens; or, it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in neither case, is the interposition of mob law, either necessary, justifiable, or excusable.

Either same-sex marriage is right within itself, and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all good citizens; or, it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments.  The same can be said for Abortion.

That should be the argument being made.  Right in itself or wrong.

Laws contrary to right and wrong should be endured until they can be changed through normal, democratic-republican, constitutional means.

We should reject both the oligarchy of the same-sex marriage faction, and the rights come from the tyranny of the majority of the traditional marriage lawyers, and work to produce a just government, measured against the laws of Nature and Nature’s God and the self-evident rights with which every individual was endowed by the Creator.

My personal opinion is that while homosexuals do have a number of  just grievances that we should listen to and address in the most just way possible, the redefinition of marriage is wrong in itself and should be properly prohibited by law.