Salon.com "But I'm a good Mormon wife"

[_DarkHelmet]

From the article

I called up a neighbor with a husband like mine and cried. But instead of empathy, she offered questions that stunned me into silence. Was Sean addicted to pornography? Watching R-rated movies? What sin had brought him to this terrible place?

My tears stopped. Her questions were so off-base that they seemed absurd. She was sincere, and trying to help, but she believed what the Church teaches — that a man would only leave because he’s disobeying the commandments. She couldn’t understand this was a rational inquiry. She saw everything as the result of sin.

This I believe is one of the major factors that cause personal relationships to be damaged. This is what the church has programmed people to believe. That it cannot be the result of rational inquiry, that it all comes from sin, or the need to rationalize sin.

Even BC Space believes this. Therefore, it must be official doctrine.

[_Stormy Waters]

A Mormon response to this piece has been published in the Washington Post.

She doesn't directly address any of the concerns raised in the original article. Rather she takes this approach.

If a person looks at faith like a string of Christmas lights, they demand that “light” leap from one point to another along a single string of connections. If one junction along the string is flawed, then the whole string is dysfunctional. Or, if the whole string is functional, then every single junction must be perfect.

Here’s the problem with the Christmas-light view of religion: it’s too easily manufactured and too easily broken...

The other side of the the Christmas-light perspective also makes it easy to discredit an entire faith tradition. All you have to do is knock out a single light, and kaplooey-the whole tradition is dysfunctional, bogus, and unworthy of the loyalty of intelligent people.

So polyandry, and the Book of Abraham... just broken bulbs that we can ignore.

[_Drifting]

This is what the Church teaches its young men about what are the important things to look for in a spouse...

“We recommend that people marry those who are of the same racial background generally, and of somewhat the same economic and social and educational background (some of those are not an absolute necessity, but preferred), and above all, the same religious background, without question” (“Marriage and Divorce,” in 1976 Devotional Speeches of the Year [Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1977], p. 144).

I think it is clear that the Church teaches adults to love the religion first and the spouse second.