Apparently Mormons are now up on arms because the HBO series “Big Love” (about a Mormon polygamist family living in SLC) will depict one of their “sacred” ceremonies in its next episode (read about it here – the Church statement is here). It’s hard to feel bad about their sensibilities. The Mormon Church is one the most intolerant institutions in the world. Until recently, they did not accept blacks into the Church – saying literally
‘No person having the least particle of Negro blood can hold the Priesthood’ (Brigham Young). It does not matter if they are one-sixth Negro or one-hundred and sixth, the curse of no Priesthood is the same.
In the Mormon Church, all men are considered priests – so there is no such a thing for a man as being Mormon without holding the priesthood. Only in the 1970’s, when the IRS threatened to deny them their tax-free status, did the Mormon church start accepting blacks as members.
The Church has also shown its desire to meddle with the private lives and religious beliefs of others by, on the one hand, baptizing as Mormons people who have died (including the Jewish victims of the holocaust), and on the other putting tons of money into Proposition 8 – the California initiative that banned gay marriage. They want to literally get in your bed to judge whom you should sleep with – but they don’t want their rites exposed to the world. Well, too bad.
The rites, real or imagined, of the Catholic religion have been the object of movies and TV programs for ages. As far as I know, Catholics have not protested about this specific aspect. But then again, Catholics, unlike Mormons, are pretty open about the tenets of their faith. I’ve spent quite a lot of time talking to Mormons who tried to convert me – and never once did they mention their belief that if men (never women) were pious and good enough, they would become gods and be given their own planets to rule over. No wonder they don’t want people to know about this. In that they remind me of Scientologists, with their wacky beliefs on Xenu (BTW, you can vote for Xenu to be the name of the new International Space Station’s Node 3 at http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/name_ISS/)
OK, this picture brings no memories of my own. My mother says it was taken 15 minutes after I was born. I was the first of four, and the ones with the hardest labor. My mother broke her water moving a heavy table, I think, and then went to the hospital (was it the Instituto MĂ©dico Platense? Those are the words that come to my mind). There they gave her pitocin, and she proceeded to have a 24-hour-labor, with no anesthesia, until they decided to do a c-section on her. To this day she tells me the story every year on my birthday – clearly it was really traumatic. The two natural births (now called VBACs) that followed, were a breeze in comparison. The other story from those days is that my dad slept with me my first night – and my mom was very worried that he’d squash me. Michaela, my oldest, slept on my breast part of her first night as well. She slept with Mike, her daddy, also.
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