Socrates wrote:Dr. Peterson, does "soaking" (coitus interruptus) carry a different sin denotation (and punishment) in Mormon theology/penitence than if there was ejaculation by the male while in the vagina?
Once there is penetration of the vagina, that is enough for coitus for rape. Is it different for Mormons in non-rape situations? Has fornication not occurred without ejaculation?
If not, why then did you need to probe?
He needed to probe because he needed to know whether the person in question (or couple in question---I've missed the details here) was working with some kind of technical definition of the "law of chastity" which, in their mind, allowed for something like coitus interruptus before marriage. Or in other words, he needed to know whether or not someone else thought coitus interruptus was less sinful than full coitus, when it isn't.
This kind of scenario is really quite common among young people from conservative religious backgrounds. When I was 16, I had a devout Catholic friend (she was a freshman in college) who asked me about whether or not I thought oral sex was okay before marriage. I honestly didn't know what to tell her. I'd never thought of the question, and the leaders at the Nazarene and Presbyterian churches I'd attended throughout my teens had never discussed it with the youth. We all knew sex before marriage was bad, but we seldom discussed what else counted as "too far"---and I partially blame youth leaders for this, because I think they were too embarrassed to discuss it with us. My friend did indeed go on to have all kinds of non-vaginal sex with her boyfriend, and this was a young woman with a riveting testimony of how she had said "no" to sex with her former boyfriend at her senior prom because she believed it was wrong.
There was a study some number of years ago (snippet on it here) showing that religious teens who pledge virginity until marriage engage in oral sex and anal sex more often than other teens. That's probably because they refuse to carry condoms as that would be like premeditating the sin, then they wind up skipping vaginal to avoid pregnancy. But it's also likely that they don't think anal sex or oral sex count as "sex before marriage."
I have serious dislike for the LDS system of ecclesiastical interviews. You couldn't pay me enough money to sit alone in a room with a man or men and let them ask me about my sexual history or my pregnancy history, and if my daughter is still attending the LDS church when she hits the age for those interviews to start, her bishops had better get used to having a chaperone in the room. I know from personal experience that LDS bishops can and do ask questions that are inappropriate and go beyond the scope of what their calling asks them to do.
That said, with the system being what it is, I don't see the scandal in an LDS bishop trying to determine whether or not someone thinks coitus interruptus counts as breaking the law of chastity. It's entirely plausible that a bishop would need to ask that according to the expectations of his calling. If anyone wants to attack the system, fine, but I'm against attacking the people who are merely doing what the system asks them to do.
Or in short, I guess I'm just not seeing the scandal here.