CC 115-116: Ceasing to Discriminate

2 Comments on “CC 115-116: Ceasing to Discriminate”

1. 
   Duke of Earl Grey Says:
   April 14, 2019 at 12:11 am

   Keeping up the drinking game may be a challenge, but hopefully it can be done. What I think all of our drinking words have had in common, up to this point, is not just that they were signatures of Old Joe’s prophetic style, but that they were essentially filler words, a churchy alternative to “Uh…”, which gave him a moment to collect his thoughts before he continued. If “Behold” didn’t cut it, he could always throw in a “verily” or two.

   After hearing these two revelations, I was going to nominate “Lo!” as a drinking word, since Joe 3.0 seems to be using it several times in the same filler-word fashion. Eyeballing ahead, though, I don’t think it gets used much after this, as Joseph Smith III further hones his own prophetic voice, instead of imitating his father’s. And later church presidents seem to speak even less in the voice of God. Yeah, I don’t know. The phrase “my servant” seems to get a lot of play going forward, so that’s another possibility?

   In other ward business, if you are calling Gottfried the Hirsute as a General Authority to the show, I heartily raise my right arm to the square to sustain him. All in favor, by the same sign…

   And lastly, as is the most solemn duty of a General Authority to the show, I must condescendingly offer a petty and pedantic correction, concerning the Utah timeline. While the Brighamites, upon their arrival in 1847 into what is now Utah, had indeed left the United States and entered Mexico, that was no longer the situation by the 1860s. Mexico had ceded that area to the US in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War, and Utah Territory was established in 1850, with none other than Brigham Young appointed as first territorial governor. While he did get to have a lot of fun virtually unattended in the sandbox for a while, it didn’t last.

   I thought it was kind of funny when Marie suggested that if we knew of President Buchanan at all, it was probably for his sexual orientation, because I think most Mormons know him best as the president who sent federal troops to Utah in 1857 to install a non-Mormon governor, and to quell Mormon “rebellion”. (In personal retaliation against Buchanan, the LDS church didn’t let him get baptized for the dead until 1932.)

   Although Brigham was removed as governor, you’re right that he was largely ignored and able to “heel-click”. Federal forces still had a presence in Utah during most of the Civil War, and Congress passed an anti-polygamy bill in 1862, but it wasn’t enforced at that time. Lincoln had more than enough on his plate, and told a visiting Utah reporter a farming anecdote about a log that was “too hard to split, too wet to burn, and too heavy too move, so we plowed around it. That’s what I intend to do with the Mormons. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone, I will let him alone.”

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2. 
   My Book of Mormon Says:
   April 19, 2019 at 7:38 pm

   You are my very favorite pedant. 🙂

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