madeleine wrote:Utah is always about 5-10 years behind getting over social prohibitions that the left and right coasts get over first.
Wow, if only 5-10 years behind. I suppose that blacks would have had the priesthood decades earlier than 1978.
Martin Luther King - assassinated 1968
Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction -Pope Benedict XVI
My oldest sister, not allowed to have her ears pierced. Don't even ask!
A few years later, my next oldest sister, not allowed to have her ears pierced....until, ok, when she was in high school. It was ok.
Me, I had my ears pierced on my 13th birthday.
My mom, who was the never ever ever pierce your ears leading lady, had her ears pierced when she was in her 60's.
I don't know that it was so much Mormon culture, as American culture. Only "floozies" or "trashie" women had their ears pierced, until the 60s. Utah is always about 5-10 years behind getting over social prohibitions that the left and right coasts get over first. (Also, the ear piercing gun wasn't invented until the 60s.)
I think that was part of it (general American culture), but I also think it had something to do with pierced ears being associated with Mexican Catholics who would often have baby's ears pierced. At the time, it read to me as a marker that "we" aren't "them."
I remember a MIA lesson where a panel of "good looking" Returned Missionaries were invited to come in and tell us what RM's desired and avoided in future mates. No pierced ears was one of the first things out of their mouths. Guys don't like it. They also don't like mini-skirts or too much makeup.
I shudder to remember those types of MIA lessons. So messed up in so many ways.
Anti-Catholicism is always a lively undercurrent in Mormonism. The latest against "illegal immigrants" in Utah is influenced by it. All those brown Catholics! Then when its an illegal immigrant who converts to Mormonism, well hold the phone, get Orin Hatch to delay deportation!
Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction -Pope Benedict XVI
I remember it well. To this day I'm still not sure my mom has ever had her ears pierced. She had clip-ons, but wasn't pierced when I was growing up. And it wasn't just a matter of preference. It was viewed as something Mormon girls just didn't do. Thankfully, that was just in my family due to their Mormon surroundings. My wife's family grew up in a different state, and they didn't have a problem with it. I still remember the very minor scandal it caused for my mom when my wife had my daughter's ears pierced when she was still an infant.
Don't get me wrong, this is utterly meaningless to me, I just don't remember it.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us
- President Ezra Taft Benson
I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
My oldest sister, not allowed to have her ears pierced. Don't even ask!
A few years later, my next oldest sister, not allowed to have her ears pierced....until, ok, when she was in high school. It was ok.
Me, I had my ears pierced on my 13th birthday.
My mom, who was the never ever ever pierce your ears leading lady, had her ears pierced when she was in her 60's.
I don't know that it was so much Mormon culture, as American culture. Only "floozies" or "trashie" women had their ears pierced, until the 60s. Utah is always about 5-10 years behind getting over social prohibitions that the left and right coasts get over first. (Also, the ear piercing gun wasn't invented until the 60s.)
The idea that only trashy woman had their ears pierced sounds like perfervid feminist mythology - one of those things feminists claim were actually existing attitudes but never actually were - except in woman's studies departments.
As to the rest of it, I have no recollection of such attitudes on the west coast, or in Seattle, where I grew up. But let's assume otherwise. So what? And the church never had any doctrine regarding this, save for much later, and that was dealing with over-adorning the body (and aping the surrounding secularist/pagan culture of which we cannot afford to be part, which also means appearing to be a part of)
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us
- President Ezra Taft Benson
I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
Think about this: an entire thread dedicated to feverish criticism of the requirement that priesthood bearers wear white shirts and ties when they pass the sacrament.
Just think about the fundamentally adolescent nature of this entire thread - a group of rebellious, churlish teenagers who have a problem with authority clucking and chirping over the white shirts (symbolic, of course, of purity and of the Atonement itself, which the sacrament represents).
Ever lower, and lower, and lower, go the standards, in the secular city, and the apostates and NOMs want to extend the ever-expanding dumbing down and qualitative decline of all aspects of the culture to the Church itself.
And so it goes.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us
- President Ezra Taft Benson
I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
Droopy wrote:Think about this: an entire thread dedicated to feverish criticism of the requirement that priesthood bearers wear white shirts and ties when they pass the sacrament.
Just think about the fundamentally adolescent nature of this entire thread - a group of rebellious, churlish teenagers who have a problem with authority clucking and chirping over the white shirts (symbolic, of course, of purity and of the Atonement itself, which the sacrament represents).
Ever lower, and lower, and lower, go the standards, in the secular city, and the apostates and NOMs want to extend the ever-expanding dumbing down and qualitative decline of all aspects of the culture to the Church itself.
And so it goes.
I would say it's fundamentally adolescent of the church and its leaders to put such a high premium on what people wear and how they groom themselves. I find the subject fascinating and it has nothing to do with any supposed problem with authority. I just wonder how a religion that started off so intent to change the world turned into one in which wearing the wrong color shirt is taboo.
"It doesn't seem fair, does it Norm--that I should have so much knowledge when there are people in the world that have to go to bed stupid every night." -- Clifford C. Clavin, USPS
"¡No contaban con mi astucia!" -- El Chapulin Colorado
This nation was founded on bucking authority. It's tradition!!!
~Those who benefit from the status quo always attribute inequities to the choices of the underdog.~Ann Crittenden ~The Goddess is not separate from the world-She is the world and all things in it.~
just me wrote:This nation was founded on bucking authority. It's tradition!!!
Mormonism was founded on bucking authority too. We're each entitled to communiques from god, was the notion. But JSJr then realized early on that he could not have power over others that way, so then he declared that god would only speak through him. It was a revolution, having come full circle, 360 degrees, only leaving JSJr atop a religious pile instead of at the bottom of it. Ever since, it's been an anathema to LDS hierarchy that anyone buck authority. So even though Mormonism was founded on bucking authority it has become one of the most ardent proponents against authority-bucking.
Last edited by Guest on Fri Sep 28, 2012 8:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
just me wrote:This nation was founded on bucking authority. It's tradition!!!
That brings up a thought I had: Mormons are seen as uber-patriotic Americans, but there is such a strong authoritarian and conformist strain in the church that is quite foreign to American culture and history. Americans feel free to choose, but Mormons seem free to obey.
As Gordon B. Hinckley put it, “People think in a very critical way before they come into this Church. When they come into this Church they’re expected to conform. And they find happiness in that conformity.”
"It doesn't seem fair, does it Norm--that I should have so much knowledge when there are people in the world that have to go to bed stupid every night." -- Clifford C. Clavin, USPS
"¡No contaban con mi astucia!" -- El Chapulin Colorado
Bob Loblaw wrote:I would say it's fundamentally adolescent of the church and its leaders to put such a high premium on what people wear and how they groom themselves. I find the subject fascinating and it has nothing to do with any supposed problem with authority. I just wonder how a religion that started off so intent to change the world turned into one in which wearing the wrong color shirt is taboo.
When the prophet speaks the dumbing down has been done.
"Any over-ritualized religion since the dawn of time can make its priests say yes, we know, it is rotten, and hard luck, but just do as we say, keep at the ritual, stick it out, give us your money and you'll end up with the angels in heaven for evermore."