Hello,

Just reading the religious proclamation [cited below], and I had some additional specifications to add to your institution of marriage, which we seem to suggest is a defining aspect of this timeless culture to which you refer. Since Solomon had 700 wives, I suppose there is Biblical justification for polygamy according to dimensions that I would have thought to have constituted gluttony on the part of the indulgent Hebrew Monarch. Therefore, your proposition that marriage is between a man and a woman needs correction: Marriage consists of a man and as many women as he can acquire. Why God only gave Adam one wife is probably related to physiological concerns that God had for Adam who was already missing a rib. Also, Abraham engaged in a rather peculiar practice in order to bare a descendant. The patriarch committed what I think qualifies as an act of rape, since it was after all a slave that he owned whom he imposed himself upon, in order to get past the inconvenience of having a wife who was barren.

The type of marriage that Christian Fundamentalists often mistake as a transcendental institution was more the byproduct of more recent events occurring during the industrial revolution when the emergent Bourgeoisie invented the modern ideology of sexuality and its correlates, such as the advent of heterosexuality, which they imposed upon the depraved masses in order to maintain the health and vigor of a population that was needed to serve effectively as cogs in the machinery constituting the modes industrial production.

Foucault’s revisionism is hard to accept when one is first exposed to it. However, his research is so thorough and compelling that eventually the student find himself convinced of its veracity.

The Family: A Proclamation to the World

We, the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

In the premortal realm, spirit sons and daughters knew and worshiped God as their Eternal Father and accepted His plan by which His children could obtain a physical body and gain earthly experience to progress toward perfection and ultimately realize his or her divine destiny as an heir of eternal life. The divine plan of happiness enables family relationships to be perpetuated beyond the grave. Sacred ordinances and covenants available in holy temples make it possible for individuals to return to the presence of God and for families to be united eternally.

The first commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve pertained to their potential for parenthood as husband and wife. We declare that God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force. We further declare that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.

We declare the means by which mortal life is created to be divinely appointed. We affirm the sanctity of life and of its importance in God’s eternal plan.

Husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and for their children. “Children are an heritage of the Lord” (Psalms 127:3). Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs, to teach them to love and serve one another, to observe the commandments of God and to be law-abiding citizens wherever they live. Husbands and wives—mothers and fathers—will be held accountable before God for the discharge of these obligations.

The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity. Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed.

We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God. Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.

We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.

This proclamation was read by President Gordon B. Hinckley as part of his message at the General Relief Society Meeting held September 23, 1995, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Tags: marriage, Modernity, religion, Social Change, society
Categories: Commentary, Society, Social Change, Religion
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An Article by:Ben Tanosborn

If only you knew how much we miss your journalistic soft core bellicosity, the political satire and celebrated puns! If only you knew how much more there is to be done to right this ship-nation of ours listing to the right… and ready to sink!  But you know, yes you know… and had no recourse, accepting mortality just like the rest of us.

Today marks a year since you left us escorted by Eirene and Hypatia, as if to honor your fight for peace with intelligence, wit and wisdom.  No better escorts to heaven than the goddess of peace and that woman-scholar killed, not by breast cancer like you, Molly, but by a Christian mob of “fundamentalists”; Hypatia, the first martyr of science, greatest mind of her time, assassinated by religion almost sixteen centuries ago.

Right to the end you advocated peace, and just a few days before your death you wrote that last column fighting to stop the war in Iraq, as you had done non-stop for four years, telling us in that column: “We are the people who run this country.  We are the deciders.  And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war… We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘Stop it, now!’” But unfortunately, dear Molly, too many of us seem to have abdicated our freedoms and decision-making to that man in the White House you called Shrub, a man who rules our lives with an empty “upstairs” and a fossilized heart.

I never met Molly, but deep inside I thought I knew her well.  And I yearned for approval from her on those articles I wrote during the time preceding the Iraq invasion, and over three years afterwards.  All my writing was, needless to say, relegated to “subterranean” print and digital publications, limited to readership living in the catacombs, a maligned “un-American” Left.  Molly’s long-standing professionalism and mastery of the political moment kept her mainstream to the end.  And Americans should feel good about that.

Starting in mid-2003, at just about the time Saddam’s TV-famous statue was toppled – lassoed down from a pedestal in Baghdad before a rent-a-crowd from Saddam City – I started sending Molly copies of many of my columns, mainly those which dealt with the war.  I felt that I was probably sending those copies straight to a cyber basket where tens of thousands of emails to Miss Ivins weekly found their way… like snowflakes reaching the warm ground, and deleting themselves.  Or so I thought!

It was in mid-February 2004 when I received an email from this great lady, brief and to the point, without the slightest Texas twang.  “Ben,” it said “stop wasting precious time sending me copies of your columns.  I read all your articles as soon as the ink dries.”  I was dumbfounded; staring at what was the most precious valentine I’ve ever received.

Personally, dear Molly, I’ll really be missing in the next few weeks and months your take on the upcoming elections, your critical political eye, and the truth that would emanate from the pounding of your fingers over the keyboard.  Musical sounds of satire to my ears, and the ears of many in the nation not plugged by the waspish-wax of the Right.

But your criticism wasn’t directed at the Right, or the Left for that matter.  You were a truly equal opportunity satirist, and always called them as you saw them, yielding only to two things: truth and compassion, or what many would call, love for humanity.  I wonder did anyone ever fool you in this masquerade of American politics?  I have my doubts.  I will never forget your keen perception of political reality as you de-iced the real Bill Clinton which ended with the statement: “Besides, no one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal.”  Do we realize how many fools we have around, particularly in the media?

There was another Mary Tyler [Moore] who for decades was America’s TV sweetheart.  You, Molly, were our Mary Tyler in political journalism, although we called you Molly instead of Mary.  Saint Molly… pray for us, and intercede with the Almighty to bring us peace in Iraq, Afghanistan; also our minds and our hearts.

Tags: Ben Tanosborn, government, Modernity, politics, religion, society
Categories: Commentary, government, Politics, Religion, Ben Tanosborn
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The crux of the thesis developed in this essay is extensible to most aspects of the behavioral sciences and the research practices they implement in order to generate their generalizations and specifications regarding human behavior and how it can be manipulated. Essentially, what is argued here comes down to the following: Every time we answer a survey or participate in qualitative interviews where we assume the role of a subject, from whom information is extracted during the course of the ensuing dialogue, we are contributing to the development of techniques, qualifying as social engineering technologies; or, as Foucault would have it, Biopower. In other words, we are aiding the very people who are involved - although, in most occasions, unwittingly- in fostering the technologies required to regulate the existing social structure by forging interdictive techniques utilized for purposes of restoring behaviors that are in sycn with the way things stand currently; a state of affairs that relatively few of us have a stake in preserving. With that said, the following essay is, for all practical purposes, a summation of some of the insights offered by Foucualt’s geneology and the understanding of power he develops in opposition to its preemptive understanding, as it has assumed form in the more conventional sociological ideology introduced by Weber.

I believe the best way of revolting against the sexual identities that have been implanted into our bodies, such as homosexual, heterosexual and so forth, by the various medical community disciplines, such as psychiatrists, psychologists, demographers, and sociologists of the family, is to stop talking about sex as if it is a behavior serving as an indicator of some underlying psychic condition that, in turn, marks some deep and character defining identity; subsequently, coming to dominate the way we think about ourselves as well as the way - and these two dynamics are, of course, related to one another - others perceive us. All of this creates the context in which our actions; our abilities and penchants; our propensities; are interpreted. Consequentially, the ongoing undergoing of disciplinary treatment results in a condition where we come to defined ourselves in a modality that reflects the dispositions deposited in the discourse of disciplinarian institutions, which span through out all spheres of Modern society.

Essentially, what we can learn from Foucault - and what might be the most significant insight provided by Foucault - is the discourse we engage in regarding sex and the behaviors that we attempt to come to terms with by emitting descriptions of ourselves - consisting mostly of our private urges - and the associated behaviors and experiences that we have been taught to consider relevant to our sexual demeanors are not contributing to our sexual liberation; rather, the act of divulging intimacies of our selves, serves merely to proliferate the knowledge of disciplinarians who devise technologies - usually guised in the form of health-care - used to classify us and define us, as well as, to identify what courses of intervention enacted upon us can be used to normalize our conduct in society, so our existences conform to the established behavioral protocol, dictating the appropriate way for us to act.

If we attempt to reduce the ideology of which the preponderance of practitioners embody when correcting the social behaviors of those deemed to possess pathological perversions, we can probably use the following characterization quite felicitously: Individuals should be productive members of society, which entails working; sometimes having a family, according to the definition of a healthy family life developed by disciplinarians; we should avoid circumstances where we become dependencies of the state, such as welfare recipients; we should be prone to avoid criminal conduct; ect.; all of which can be understood - within the context of disciplinarian praxes - as the production of productive citizens.

However, such an existential transformation of our Selves into the standardized forms endorsed and implemented by disciplinarians, is by no means constitutive of a promotion of our own interests. Instead, we are simply re-tailored to conform with the expectations that have been developed and naturalized - into the realm of social knowledge that is taken-for-granted and rarely questioned - concerning the proper comportment of individuals belonging to society, which does not necessarily account for our own exploitations within the systemization of social relations comprising the society to which we contribute through our labors, (a term that expands to include most every aspect of our material beings; even child rearing and raising).

By means of our externalized expressions pertaining to, as subject matter, own behaviors and fetishes within the contours of the probing procedures that have been developed by practitioners of the behavioral sciences, we - inadvertently - contribute to our own regulation; a condition fostered by our own cooperation in the disciplinarian knowledge construction practices of those who make it their business to modify and, ‘correct,’ as well as appropriate the way we conduct our own businesses. In short, this compulsion to reveal the intimacies our of the private lives - a propensity that is undoubtedly, according to Foucault, a vestige of our Christian confessional tradition - is by no means an expression of a liberationist ideology; instead, it is symptomatic of our own cultural conditioning, which render us amenable to our own training by others; disciplinarians who seek to produce productive citizens.

Let us, after decades of subjugation by disciplinarian regimes such as psychology, acknowledge that sex is not the manifestation of a drive emanating from the invisible posit referred to as the psyche; rather, let us accept that the uses of our bodies to incite pleasures reflective of purely hedonistic calculations. There is no hidden logic to our sexual activities that needs to be teased out of us and rendered a spectacle for the appropriate quasi-health-care, behavioral specialists, who might treat us in order to correct what deviates from the established and entrenched normativity, which is associated in almost all respects to the Modern advent of Sexuality. How we should act as mothers and fathers - how we should conduct our sexual activities; not asking for compensation; nor providing compensation - the appropriate age we should be prior to inciting certain pleasures of the body through our own device or the devices of others - what sex should symbolically represent; and what it should not - and how much of our interests and pursuits should be driven by our sexual appetites - are all matters we can answer for ourselves without the interdiction of behavioral scientists, who implicitly premise all of their conclusions upon normative assumptions that represent values belonging to a social order to which they attempt to integrate the human objects of their practices.

However, to conclude that our indoctrination into the preemptive order of things is in our own interests speaks more of the interests that are vested in the way things stand now: An order that exploits some for the profit of others; an order that thrives off of the replication of the values with which we have been implanted - in order to be disposed toward a deferential posture in relation to the extant social structure - and those we are expected to instill in our children, in order to ensure progeny that will assume the same deferential attitude toward the complex of stratifications that organize our labors into a system of material production that benefit some while depriving others. Further this is a social structure that systematically identifies those who deviate from its prescriptions defining, ‘healthy behaviors;’ subsequently, labeling non-conformists with the encumbering baggage of social identities that are negatively interpreted and valued, according to the cultural codes that guide disciplinarians as they strive to identify social pathologies worthy of interdiction. This social intervention occurs in manifold forms, of which some salient examples come to mind: The dosing of children with Ritalin in order to adjust their modify and control their behaviors; The incursions made by social workers into the family affairs to private individuals, enforcing protocols for appropriate family interactions that the social workers deem as the, ‘Right,’ way to act. The positioning of these disciplinarian institutions in civil society makes them all the more deleterious to our personal sovereignty, because they fall outside the scope of our avenues for participating in policy formation; even though the activities conducted by the tribes of disciplinarians certainly have political consequences.

Therefore, there is nothing Authentic - a term meant to entail the connotative properties with which Heidegger endowed it - resulting from our introspective examinations of Self, in order to supply the data that become the property of behavioral scientists; to those who correct us and makes us conforming and docile; to those who make us deferential to the exploitation of our very selves.

Russell Cole

Tags: foucault, higher consciousness, labor, Modernity, psychology, sexaulity, workplace
Categories: Commentary
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