Family

If we won't acknowledge the very real pain our missionaries cause other families as we proselytize to their doorsteps, we need to stop complaining about our own sadness when someone we love has a faith crisis and leaves the LDS church. It's either okay for people to change their beliefs to match their own circumstances and desires in life, or everyone needs to stick with the religious system they were born into. We can't have it both ways.

As things are currently organized I cannot serve as a Ward Financial Clerk. I can't help prepare a deposit of tithing money. I can't process reimbursement checks. I can't help distribute fast offering funds. I can't help prepare the ward budget.

Bethany Brady Spalding and McArthur Krishna are at it again! Their latest project is focused on equal partnership marriages–In the Image of Our Heavenly Parents: A Couple’s Guide to Creating a More Divine Marriage.

It seems the church wants me to act as a buffer to keep my children in the safe, shallow end. But I would rather train my children to safely navigate the deep end - to be prepared to meet the dangers with skill and confidence.

This is just one small glimpse of the power of an unpaid woman. Tragically, so much of women's magic is lost along the straight-and-narrow path of patriarchy. Gerda Lerner, the champion of "Women's History Day," laments that "what women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected, and ignored," and this has distorted history and religion and governments and families, but this does not mean that women have been doing nothing while they have been ignored by historians, political leaders, and religions. They have always been and continue to be the makers of worlds.

When the instructions for carving out my femininity, written in the language of kindness, eluded her, she substituted cruelty and criticism. When the controls for the oven from which she came proved too complicated to operate, she toughened my dough with impossible expectations.

I never knew my dad's biological mom. She left my grandpa when my dad was two and his little sister one. She was only...

She declares that “In pursuit of liberation, we do not need to pine after the power of our oppressor, we have to long for our own power to be fully realized. We don’t want to steal and dominate someone else’s land, we want agency in reclaiming and establishing our own spaces . . . We don’t want to silence . . . we want to be believed.”