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I was reading In Sacred Loneliness yesterday and it said something about a High Councilmember in Winter Quarters being accused of being unworthy on account of being a Eunuch. It makes me wonder. What qualifies an individual as being male for the purposes of priesthood? If a man is deprived of male genitalia through an accident and then joins the church – can they be ordained?
While the church has a policy against ordaining transgender people, there is no prohibition on impotence, or ordination due to accidental genital damage. If someone has testicular cancer, for example, that wouldn’t preclude him from being ordained. Thank you GT, I admittedly have not done much to research the accusation at winter quarters. It may just have been that people of that day were products of their time… the same as the rest of us. At some point they quit doing jock checks. 😆 :clap: hawkgrrrl wrote:
At some point they quit doing jock checks.
hawkgrrrl for the WIN.
Roy, I can’t speak to what happened at Winter Quarters, because I haven’t heard that specific situation, but certainly having babies was a big part of 19th century Mormonism. I heard of a story that may answer some of your questions. Several years back I blogged about a strange case of a couple who had two children, then joined the LDS Church, but the husband had some sort of accident so he could no longer father children. It’s a strange story because it indicates how disposable some Mormons thought marriage was. Many counseled the woman to divorce him and get another husband so she could have more children because this could affect her exaltation. (seriously?!?!?!) The couple decided to ask Brigham Young what he thought they should do.
Quote:Writing to Brigham Young for advice, she expressed her desire to remain with her husband if that course would not hinder her eternal reward. In a letter dated March 5, 1857, Young proposed a novel solution, one of the few possible in that age before the advent of modern reproductive medicine: “If I was imperfect and had a good wife I would call on some good bror. to help me that we might have increase, that a man [her husband] of this character will have a place in the Temple, receive his endowments and in eternity will be as tho nothing had happened to him in time.”76 According to Young, her husband’s sterility would not bar him from the most important temple ordinances, and his eternal reward would not be adversely affected. As for having additional children, Mary Ann could be married in a civil ceremony to another man who would father her children. By being sealed for eternity to Edmund, Mary Ann as well as all her children, would belong to him.
The couple eventually accepted the plan, but only reluctantly. Edmund and Mary Ann were sealed for eternity on April 20, 1857, but only after the “each had seen a vision” did they accept President Young’s unusual suggestion. After they accepted the plan, he gave them a paper listing three polygamous men he considered worthy to participate. They chose Frederick Cox. He, too, at first refused to participate in the plan but also became convinced that “the plan was divinely inspired.” One of the sons of this union later wrote of his birth: “It took three visions and a religion to reconcile others to my coming.”77 On January 9, 1858, Brigham Young celebrated the marriage of Mary Ann Darrow Richardson and Frederick Cox in a religious ceremony that did not seal the couple. From this union, two sons were born: Charles on October 13, 1858, and Sullivan on January 26, 1861.
Family legend indicates that Brigham Young granted the Richardsons a temporary separation or a civil divorce and that Edmund lived some distance from Manti during his wife’s second marriage. He may have spent some time away, but one year after the first son was born, he returned and took his wife to be sealed again for eternity in the Endowment House. Moreover, as indicated on the 1860 Manti census, he was again reunited with his wife about eight months before the second son was born.79
Not long thereafter the Richardsons moved to another town. For about twenty years Cox did not see his sons. When he did, he shook their hands heartily, looked at them and listened to them unceasingly during their visit, but never mentioned the relationship between them.80
So, it seems to me that Brigham Young would have been very liberal in modern reproductive techniques like artificial insemination, cloning, stem cell research, surrogate motherhood, and many of the current technologies we have available today. Even after I read this story of the Richardsons, I shake my head in amazement at some of the Saints early practices. If you want to read the whole post, see
https://mormonheretic.org/2009/11/08/surrogate-parenthoodtypes-of-polygamist-marriages-daynes-part-3/ Yep, I think it safe to say that they were far less conservative about sex than we are, ironically. Quote:It sounds like a setup for one day saying “We’re not ‘giving’ women the priesthood. They’ve actually had it all along.We’re just making it official.” And thus doctrine gets turns into “early Church culture” once again.
I call this the Dorothy Defense for female ordination, like when Glenda the Good Witch tells Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz that she had the ability to go home all along. If I’m Dorothy, after being attacked by Flying Monkeys, having my friends tortured, and the pee scared out of me by some fake wizard, I would punch that broad right in the mouth.
I think that defense is the result of the church being married to the idea that doctrine is immutable. I think the history of the church shows otherwise and it’s a silly attitude. I believe the only thing the scriptures actually say is immutable is a certain “immutable covenant” mentioned in D&C. I don’t remember the exact context. It might apply to all covenants.
hawkgrrrl wrote:
I call this the Dorothy Defense for female ordination, like when Glenda the Good Witch tells Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz that she had the ability to go home all along. If I’m Dorothy, after being attacked by Flying Monkeys, having my friends tortured, and the pee scared out of me by some fake wizard, I would punch that broad right in the mouth.
:clap: Was there not a prophetess in the Old Testament? Deborah right? There’s a prophetess named Hulda during the time of Jeremiah at the end of King Josiah’s reign. Yeah, I keep telling the kids, whenever this comes up, that it’s just a matter of time; it will happen. If people aren’t ready for it and changing the policy would hurt more people than it helps (because people are not perfect and are in many ways products of the culture in which they’re raised, for better or worse), that maybe that’s good enough justification for slow change. But I really can only conclude at this point that it is just because of our patriarchal culture that women don’t currently hold the Priesthood, and that if we were all more spiritually-guided rather than culturally-guided, the policy would change right now. (Although, on a personal level, I don’t feel a need to wait for policy change as far as my own family goes. I could comfortably give a laying-on-of-hands blessing to a member of my family today and invoke God’s power and feel no guilt or blasphemy.) In the Catholic BIble, there’s a woman named Jael who cuts off an enemy’s head–kind of a female war hero.
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