DCP Encourages Email Campaign Against Black Journalist

[_Droopy]

Droopy's reaction is pertinent to some of the points I've been making, which is that the Mopologists (and others in the Church, evidently) won't concede anything on the issue of race. Why not just say, "Yes: the Church has had a history of racism, and it was ugly, and I'm glad that we've made strides in moving away from that?" Instead, you get Droopy fighting back by insisting that everyone would have been just as racist as BY, Mark E. Peterson, and everyone else from bygone times, so this justifies the Church's racism.

Because, as far as cultural trends in the 19th and earlier decades of the 20th century, individual Church member's attitudes were probably similar to those of other Americans from varied backgrounds, and a great deal more liberal than anything in the South.

The Church itself had no particular "racist" doctrines or teachings, the ban being about an ancient lineage through which the priesthood was denied to anyone partaking of the lineage. Skin color was a correlated attribute, not the "reason" for the ban itself. The Egyptians were denied the priesthood for the reason of lineage, but the ancient Egyptians were not black Africans per se, but of a mixed (and as yet, unknown) ancestry, containing black DNA but other as well.

Again, men of other lineage with skin as dark or darker than many black people have always been admitted to the priesthood, which pretty much puts the kibosh on any claims of "racism" as the core understanding of the reason underlying the limitation on priesthood ordination. No white ethnocentrism in history ever made those kinds of fine distinctions.

Instead, you get Droopy fighting back by insisting that everyone would have been just as racist as BY, Mark E. Peterson, and everyone else from bygone times, so this justifies the Church's racism.

Since you're not capable of rational, nuanced argument, this is simply out there for those willing to look calmly and without politically correct emotional inflammation at apologetic arguments as they stand. The fact does remain that virtually all of the fashionable lefty moral grandstanders here and at the MDD board would, had they been born, raised, and enculturated in the 19th and early 20th centuries, have been overwhelmingly likely to have held to the same general prejudices regarding black inferiority as the vast majority of the population.

Looking back at those general social attitudes with great swelling wails of moral outrage, then, is as much a feature of time and place of birth and cultural embeddedness as anything for which moral self congratulation are in order. Our attitudes today are much superior, but that we hold them is a blessing of time and place of birth as much or more than that we, here and now, ourselves, are in some sense inherently morally superior human beings.

What's very interesting to me is the manner in which, invariably, the same fashionable leftists who rail against less than ideal attitudes toward blacks in another era long past are the very same people to rush to the defense of a plethora of contemporary forms of institutional racial discrimination known as Affirmative Action and first to rush to the battlements to defend multicultural ethnocentrism and tribal solidarity.

That's right, its really all an exercise in classical leftist hypocrisy and intellectual double dealing that almost defies rational analysis unless one understands the history and intellectual patrimony of the Left and what really animates in core assumptions and psychology.

[_Droopy]

Yes, you have certainly shown me a thing or two.[/quote]

Someone has to do it, as your parents apparently failed in this regard (though I'm sure they tried with all their might).

Its really not all that much a matter of rocket science, here. Skin color - morphology - is correlated and associated, in some ethinic groups, with the priesthood ban. It was not, and the PofGP does not anywhere mention, black skin as being the cause or reason for the ban.

We can lay all the theological explanations that were proffered by certain GAs aside as they never had the imprimatur of church doctrine and look at the core doctrine as found in the PofGP and corollaries in teh Book of Mormon, and we do not see - especially in the Book of Mormon - "race" or skin color as a cause of anything, but culture and lineage - culture and cultural realities conditioning a people and therefore, a lineage, toward certain cultural traits that create alternating blessings/cursings that travel through generations until the Lord decides otherwise (or a critical mass of that people repents and accepts the gospel).

Everyone, at one time or another, according to our own doctrines and scriptural records, has been under one kind of "ban" or another throughout human history regarding the availability of the gospel and priesthood.

[_Chap]

How did they find out what lineage you came from?

By looking at the color of your skin.

Were there any cases during the last century and a half where an American with African-style dark skin color was judged not to be of the lineage of Cain, and hence admitted to the priesthood?

I think not.

But the priesthood ban is nothing to do with skin color at all.

[_Droopy]

I like the nuance of how the Church wasn't really racist because it was only one specific ethnic group that was denied the priesthood.

Still lacking any degree of critical rigor and philosophical clarity? Not to worry. Its not required in your profession to any great degree in any case (thought a few, here and there, transcend the barriers imposed by legal education and culture).

Again, if any kind of traditional white racism was ever in play in the case of the Church, it would have been broadly applicable, as all other historical examples of such white racism, to all non-Western European peoples, including blacks, Latin Americans, Jews, Asians, and Amerindians. The fact that the priesthood ban was centered only in one non-white minority and not in non-White minorities per se, as has been the case in all examples of white racism in known historical experience, should be indicative to any unbiased, critical mind that something more is in play in historical Mormon thought than just the catch-all moral club of "racism."

[_Droopy]

When he tries to defend the racism,

Begging the question.

he just ends up sounding creepier. What he doesn't seem to realize is that "lineage" was part of race theory too.

LDS doctrine has no "race theory." Roll the dice...

Indeed, words like "heritage" have long been code for racist sentiments, so much so that the word heritage was used in that sense to make fun of a racist populist politician who was a member of the KKK in the film "O, Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Let's try to stay on the subject and within logically relevant points having to do with LDS concepts and ideas and not movies.

I prefer the LDS teaching in which people are held accountable for their own actions, not punished for some distant ancestor's deed. It is a bizarre, convoluted theology indeed that connects unfathomable and unattested decisions in the pre-mortal existence with the descendants of a mythological character in the Bible in order to keep people who bear the DNA of an ancestor from Africa from holding the LDS priesthood. It is, in fact, so completely absurd and downright ugly, that it should be thrown in the fires of Mount Doom and allowed to slip under the tectonic plates.

OK, so you don't understand the LDS doctrine involved here and don't care. I can accept that, but a critically serious and informed basis for your critcisms would be in order.

[_Buffalo]

I like the nuance of how the Church wasn't really racist because it was only one specific ethnic group that was denied the priesthood.

Still lacking any degree of critical rigor and philosophical clarity? Not to worry. Its not required in your profession to any great degree in any case (thought a few, here and there, transcend the barriers imposed by legal education and culture).

Again, if any kind of traditional white racism was ever in play in the case of the Church, it would have been broadly applicable, as all other historical examples of such white racism, to all non-Western European peoples, including blacks, Latin Americans, Jews, Asians, and Amerindians. The fact that the priesthood ban was centered only in one non-white minority and not in non-White minorities per se, as has been the case in all examples of white racism in known historical experience, should be indicative to any unbiased, critical mind that something more is in play in historical Mormon thought than just the catch-all moral club of "racism."

And thus, Droopy proves once and for all that Southern slavery wasn't a racist institution, since Latin Americans, Jews, Asians, and Amerindians weren't slaves in the South.

[_Droopy]

What Romney said may not have been wrong, but what was said was similar to the point above and said in a way that lumped ethnic identity in with poverty and abuse.

Are you here actually claiming, with face straight, that poverty and social pathology are not disproportionally represented in certain ethnic/sociocultural demographic groups?

If you don't find that to be problematic, search your soul.

I do find certain empirical facts problematic, but probably not for the reasons you probably find them problematic.

The point is, statistics about single parent homes are used in elections to appeal to people who think that all of the problems in the world are caused by a culture shift away from something vaguely defined as "traditional values".

The vast majority of present social pathologies, and especially their pervasive and deep embeddedness in the culture, are a direct result of the destruction and delegitimization of the family, marriage, mothehood and fatherhood, gospel oriented and derived sexual mores, and Judeo-Christian moral/social values per se, yes.

But the real causes underlying the statistical results are complex.

As Thomas Sowell has so eloquently pointed out, when a liberal starts talking about how "complex" the causes of social pathology among various groups really are, hold on to your frontal lobes because the obfuscation and self serving linguistic laying of barbed wire have begun, much of which is an exercise in shielding his own philosophy from its key role in the destruction and dissolution of civil society, something he knows, at some level, to be the case, but dare not allow full expression in conscious awareness.

[_Droopy]

How did they find out what lineage you came from?

By looking at the color of your skin.

Yeah, right. If that were the case, then a great many Pacific Islanders would not now be members. One had to be Negro - have a black African ancestry, not just have dark skin.

You've just demonstrated the salience of my own point. Thanks.

Were there any cases during the last century and a half where an American with African-style dark skin color was judged not to be of the lineage of Cain

African style skin?

Give this up, Chap, and, you know, move along...

[_Droopy]

And thus, Droopy proves once and for all that Southern slavery wasn't a racist institution, since Latin Americans, Jews, Asians, and Amerindians weren't slaves in the South.

Actually, a very strong argument can be made that it wasn't a "racist" institution in the modern sense of the term "racist," but primarily an economic institution held over from about 6,000 years of old world cultural tradition that was transplanted to North America. The concept of "racism" as we now understand it is, to a great degree, a post-civil war intellectual concept.

In any case, I highly doubt Southerners of that era were hot to trot about going to church with Indians, Mexicans, Jews, Catholics, or Chinese coolies.

And why I'm even responding to this troll I'm not at all sure.

[_Chap]

How did they find out what lineage you came from?

By looking at the color of your skin.

Yeah, right. If that were the case, then a great many Pacific Islanders would not now be members. One had to be Negro - have a black African ancestry, not just have dark skin.

You've just demonstrated the salience of my own point. Thanks.

Were there any cases during the last century and a half where an American with African-style dark skin color was judged not to be of the lineage of Cain

African style skin?

Give this up, Chap, and, you know, move along...

Africa is the most genetically diverse area of the world. The idea that identifying someone as a 'Negro' by the fact that they looked dark-skinned in the manner that descendants of African slaves in America usually look (unlike, for instance, dark South Asians) identified a lineage is ridiculous.

Let's be straightforward here. The word 'racism' is normally used in US political and social discourse to characterize statements of the (fortunately increasingly less common form):

'You <N-word>s can't use this restroom/have this job/attend this church"

Saying, as the LDS church did

'You <N-word>s can't be admitted to the LDS priesthood"

is as racist as it gets. If racism means anything, that is racist. If you want to stop using the word altogether, suggest another descriptor for the processes that have systematically discriminated against American descendants of African slaves (however educated, talented or virtuous they may have been), and we can consider using that instead.