[Cross-posted at OT]

The topic of Same-Sex Marriage has bounced around the bloggernacle so much it has taken on a universally-recognized acronym. The topic of gay adoption has received much less attention, and, as far as I know, has elicited little (or no?) specific ecclesiastical counsel (unless one counts Sheri Dew’s controversial speech, which was delivered after her tenure in the Relief Society General Presidency – and which, incidentally, was recently removed from the Meridian website.) I don’t have any eloquent doctrinal arguments or child-welfare statistics to posit, but I do have a story to share, one that I think speaks for itself.

Two little girls, whom I will call Tuyen and Xuan, were both taken into an orphanage in Vietnam shortly after birth. The staff cared for them as best they could, given their limited resources, hygiene was substandard and the babies often slept side-by-side, several to a crib. Around the time of the girls’ first birthday an adoption agency brought a group of several prospective parents to the orphanage. It was a diverse bunch: a single, middle-aged woman, first-time adopters, couples wishing to expand their families. Also included in the group were a devout young Mormon couple (whom I know personally, and who allowed me to post this) and a gay couple. Tuyen went with the Mormon couple, and was later sealed to them in the D.C. temple; Xuan left the orphanage with her two new dads.

Before heading back to the states, however, it took the parents a couple of weeks to submit the health and governmental forms and receive all the bureaucratic approvals required to complete the adoption, so while they waited for forms to be processed the adoptive parents and their new children did lots of sightseeing. Tuyen’s mom and Xuan’s dads turned out to be naturally inclined towards group organization, and took charge of the sightseeing itinerary and shopping trips (it’s a terrible stereotype, I know, the shopaholic woman and the gay guys telling each other how fabulous their purchases are, etc., but that’s how it happened). The Mormons and the gay men became fast friends during the trip, and the friendship continued after they returned to their respective homes. Even though they live several hours apart, the two families still visit each other on occasion to celebrate their girls’ birthdays, their adoption anniversary, and American and Vietnamese holidays.

While I find that friendship in and of itself quite heartwarming (and believe me, I get a lot of mileage out of it when friends or associates categorically accuse Mormons of homophobia), other circumstances lend this story even more poignancy. Shortly after Xuan and Tuyen left Vietnam for America with their new parents, the U.S. government discontinued allowing adoptions from Vietnam. This prohibition remains in place today, largely because of bureaucratic inertia on both sides, and there are no signs of progress. This has created a grave situation for orphanages in Vietnam, as their meager operating budgets relied on adoption fees; the orphanage where Xuan and Tuyen lived has fallen into disrepair and is in desperate need of financial aid. More somber still is the future that the little girls in the orphanage face today if the adoption ban continues as they become children and eventually adolescents; if you follow the news, you probably have an idea of the bleak prospects for an orphaned teenaged girl in Vietnam. I shudder to think, but these are the questions that this situation begs: what if the gay couple hadn’t gone to Vietnam and adopted? What if Tuyen had gone home with the Mormon couple but her friend Xuan had been left behind in the orphanage as the adoption ban had taken effect, and had stayed there as she approached adolescence? Regardless of what you might think about gay adoption as a political issue –and I’m talking about an actual situation and an actual person, so it’s not really a political issue anyway–are there any grounds on which to argue that this happy, healthy little girl would have been better off if her dads hadn’t been able to adopt her?

I read in the Rochester and Democrat and Chronicle this afternoon that prominent businessman and devout Mormon Kay Whitmore passed away last night after a struggle with leukemia. It’s only by chance that I read it in the paper before I heard it over the phone; he happened to be a member of my ward.

I can’t say I knew him very well. When we moved here he and his wife were serving in a singles ward in the next stake over, and they subsequently only attended our ward for a short time before they got restless and left on a mission (their second; previously they had overseen a mission in England) to southern California. They were simply too busy doing good things for me to run into him very often.

I did see him about a month ago, however, around the time of his diagnosis, and the circumstances of the meeting speak concisely to his character as citizen and saint: this former CEO of Kodak–the board of which, incidentally, forced him into retirement in 1993 because they wanted to trim more employees from the company than he was willing to fire–was sweeping up the gym floor after the boy scout pancake breakfast.

(Cross-posted at OT)

It probably wasn’t a good time for me to encounter this review, in the most recent Atlantic Monthly, of Oxford University Press’s recent Ronny Howard look like a friggin’ amateur.

(Reading over the previous paragraph, I feel compelled at this point to assert my staunch record of heterosexuality. Former drama geek, to be sure, but I was kidding about the kerchiefs, for hellsakes!)

So, anyway, fast forward 18 years, and here I am in the Young Men’s organization, having a great time working with a great set of kids, but finding it difficult to maintain my (and foster their) enthusiasm for certain aspects of the Scouting program. Attending a court of honor recently, for the first time since my own lackluster scouting days, I found the clumsy ceremoniousness even harder to take seriously (and also a bit unsettling, as it seemed to demand of me a solemnity toward ritual that I normally reserve for priesthood and temple ordinances).

What’s more, the valuable life skills that scouting seeks to teach kids seem to be covered quite comprehensively in the church’s new Duty to God program, for which I have a great deal of enthusiasm. It includes lots of scout-ish stuff—-camping, wilderness survival, first aid, etc.—-but integrates it more fully with personal, family, and spiritual matters. And it presents all of these as straightforward values and goals with real, inherent, and immediate value, uncluttered by all the patches and pomp. It frustrates me that some parents lose countless nights of sleep over whether or not their kid will get his Eagle, when they often don’t even know about the revised Duty to God program. To be sure, the Duty to God pamphlets stress that the program is to be pursued in tandem with Scouts, but it seems to me that it renders the most important aspects of scouting redundant. (And there’s ubiquitous speculation that the new program was designed in part to be able to replace Scouts as the official Young Men’s program if necessary, had recent lawsuits forced the scouting program to change its policies towards homosexuality). Also, I find the Duty to God program more appealing in that it falls into obvious parallel with the Young Womanhood Recognition program.

Is there something to the ceremoniality and ritual of scouts that I just don’t appreciate? Are there crucial things boys will miss out on if they pursue the Duty to God award but neglect scouting? Will my own three little boys be worse off if, when they’re of that age, they do all the Scouty things—hiking, camping, rendering service, setting goals, developing skills—without all the Scouty accoutrements?

(I tell you this much: no boy a mine gonna’ wear no friggin’ kerchief.)

Do not shame or humiliate a man in public. Shaming a man will cause him and his family to be anti-Coalition.

The most important qualifier for all shame is for a third party to witness the act. If you must do something likely to cause shame, remove the person from the view of others.

Shame is given by placing hoods over a detainee’s head. Avoid this practice.

Placing a detainee on the ground or putting a foot on him implies you are God. This is one of the worst things we can do.

(From a cultural sensitivity training pamphlet given to U.S. Marines last September as part of an effort to improve relations between soldiers and Iraqis; republished in the June 2004 issue of Harpers)

I realize I’m treading on volatile terrain here, or at least perhaps bringing up issues that people would just as soon put away, but the Abu Ghraib scandal has forced some moral and ethical issues that compel me to initiate a dialogue. I think I speak for the majority voice in the bloggernacle in expressing disgust at the abuses at Abu Ghraib, even if that disgust may be tempered for some by the general and inevitable ugliness of war. Sure, as some are quick to point out, the atrocities of the enemy sink far below those of the prison guards. But the Americans are supposed to be the good guys; a greater respect for humanity and human dignity is supposed to be what separates the good guys from the bad guys.

One picture to emerge from the scandal, the one of the hooded prisoner standing on a box with his fingers attached to wires (which, he was told, would deliver a shock if he fell off the box), has already become a symbol for the abuse. Despite the foul, immoral, sexually degrading (and in some cases sexually abusive) acts depicted in several of the other pictures, I found the picture of the prisoner on the box the most disturbing. At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it; it wasn’t so much the actual story behind the photo, but the image’s formal properties: feet together on a pedestal, robe generously draped, arms away from the body, palms facing upward, head titled slightly. A few days later it hit me, as I accompanied the young men in my ward on a trip to one of the Church’s visitor’s centers to watch a movie. Before taking us into the theater, the supervising missionary ushered us into the small rotunda housing a replica of the Christus statue; a repulsive shiver ran up my spine when I realized the unconscious sacrilege I had been committing in reading the familiar posture of the statue in front of me into the grotesque form of the abuse photo. The latter contains nothing redeeming; it represents a compounding of crimes: the alleged crimes of the prisoner, and the documented crimes of his captors. Still, the superimposition of the two formally similar but contextually contrasting images indelibly suggested to me a familiar scripture—or, perhaps, its inversion. Usually, when we read of Jesus talking about the “least of these,” we think of seeing Him in the face of the poor and needy to whom we render service. Are we compelled likewise to see Him in our enemies, even those who may have blood on their hands–and to see self-indulgent malice against them as malice against Him? In the minds of the Arab world, the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were committing the ultimate sacrilege: playing God. Not to buy wholesale into the Crusader mentality that has sometimes characterized this administration, but to what extent are we compelled, as the good guys, to do the opposite: what is our obligation to the least of the “least of these”–our enemies?

Gordon’s recent thread at Times and Seasons on corporate social responsibility and institutional philanthropy got me thinking about a charity for which I feel a strange combination of enthusiasm and suspicion: the Hunger Site. In case you’ve not familiar with the site, here’s how it works. Arriving at the main page, you click on a button that says “Give Free Food. Click Here.” Once you click through, another screen appears featuring ads for a number of sponsors. By simply allowing yourself to be exposed to a screen full of advertisements, you donate the equivalent of 1.1 cups of staple food for hunger relief (through Mercy Corps and America’s Second Harvest).

On the one hand, something seems wrong with this–or at least, this seems on the initial gut-reaction level to manifest something wrong with society. I mean, if the sheer abstract possibility that I might buy something can be exchanged for the equivalent of one meal for a starving person, the world is an obscenely inequitable place. (Incidentally, though I have probably visited the site nearly 1000 times, I have only clicked through to a sponsor’s site perhaps on a dozen occasions, and I’ve never made a purchase.) Also, it’s apparently a for-profit site; so, it’s my eyeballs for three seconds minus overhead and profit margin that equals 1.1 cups of food.

On the other hand, this past Saturday visitors to the Hunger Site and its sister sites, the Breast Cancer Site, the Child Health Site, the Rainforest Site, and the Animal Rescue Site, respectively, supplied 85,779 cups of staple food for the hungry; funded 2.3 mammograms for underprivileged women; helped 834.3 children (720.8 doses of vitamin A for disease prevention, 103.4 infant emergency oral rehydration kits, 9.2 maternal AIDS tests, 0.8 eye surgeries or prostheses); protected 547,040 square feet of endangered rainforest; and bought food for 52,194 animals in shelters–all at no cost to any of the visitors to their site.

It seems odd to be leveraging my status as a glassy-eyed, internet surfin’, DSL-usin’, credit-card-havin’ consumer to help the needy. And it certainly doesn’t give me the kind of satisfaction that would make me less inclined than I otherwise would be to take advantage of any subsequent opportunity to perform an act of charity– one requiring some discernible effort or sacrifice on my part. But at the same time I can’t figure out how the results above could be construed as anything other than praiseworthy and of good report. So, I continue clicking daily.

Okay, imagine this scenario: the lesson is on the word of wisdom, and the teacher begins by reading the pertinent scriptures, then taking comments from the gallery. “I have a strong testimony of the Word of Wisdom,” says one member, “but a beer or two in the evening really helps me unwind.” A sister chimes in: “And red wine is actually good for your heart; I don’t see the harm in having a glass with dinner.” A general consensus emerges among the class that there are numerous circumstances in which it is okay–laudable, in fact–to break the Word of Wisdom. Curiously, the entire class seems to be completely oblivious to the fact that they have more or less rejected outright the entire point of the lesson.

Of course, this would be inconceivable in any ward I’ve ever lived in. But a few members of our current ward, bless their hearts, seems prone to this sort of thing, though not regarding anything so clearly yes-I-do/no-I-don’t as the Word of Wisdom. Rather, this tendency emerges any time the subjects of service and charity come up. My wife came out of Relief Society absolutely fuming today, after a lesson on service surreptitiously became a lesson on self-service. The teacher started with the question “Why do we serve others?” Many answers that followed betrayed a kind of “market” approach to the gospel, one that boiled down every action to a transaction. The members who offered these ideas did not seem to notice how centered on self their answers were (because they didn’t have me conveniently adding italics in the pertinent places): We serve because we get blessings, we serve because it helps us grow, etc. Finally, my deep-thinking but normally soft-spoken wife piped up and pointed out the obvious but overlooked: “I think God asks us serve because there are lots of his other children that he loves just as much as he loves us, and they need our help, and he wants them to get it.” Nonetheless, as the class progressed, the comments continually seemed to emphasize the many things that legitimately limit the time and effort we spend helping others: family, work, keeping ones life “in order,” etc., and hardly touched upon the merits of extending our service beyond the realm of the convenient. The same thing happened not long ago in a class I was in, when a discussion of King Benjamin’s admonitions to give to the poor circumscribed a trajectory exactly opposite of that stated in the scriptural passages supposedly under consideration: the general consensus of the class, it seemed, was that one takes care of one’s own, that charity takes a low position in one’s budget, and that alms-giving encourages sloth.

This is particularly bothersome considering the fact that, regardless of the sharp downward pull my family’s meager income exerts on the curve, our ward is, by and large, extremely well-off. Nonetheless, when the First Presidency extended a challenge to our stake a few years ago to raise funds for a special project, our ward came up shamefully short of its share, and many members even complained publicly to the Stake President (whose reputation as a bleeding heart liberal democrat perhaps lent the whole affair a “tax and spend” aura in their minds) for his audacity in asking them to donate. Sisters organizing a humanitarian service project, in which members were asked to purchase items for newborn kits for around $6, met similar resistance from some members.

I can’t help but draw a connection between this mentality and dominant political attitudes. It’s like the old joke (which I mentioned in a comment to something somewhere on another blog, so apologies for the repeat): When a democrat sees a half -glass of water, s/he says “That glass is half full.” When a republican sees a half-glass of water, s/he says “Who the hell drank half my water?!” Some members ask me outright, as they might well ask you, how one can be LDS and be in the same political party as “the abortionists” and “the gays,” etc. I have a much harder time reconciling the theme of selflessness that permeates the scriptures (ancient and modern) with the general sense of entitlement that characterizes the republican mentality.

Is it fair for me to extend this observation beyond matters of monetary resources? It seems to me that it is this same what’s-in-it-for-me mentality that pervades spiritual discussions as well: good deeds are legal tender for blessings; people in need are a kind of divine commodity, an opportunity for furthering one’s own progress; obedience means a contractual obligation on the part of Deity to return the favor. The concept of giving without the thought of something in return seems to go neglected by many members. God’s own recursive formula for joy, in which his happiness depends on ours, and ours depends on passing it along, gets short shrift.

(I should mention that, thankfully, the cases above are counterbalanced by a number of ward members who give of their time and resources to a fault. There are certain members–and I wish I could say that I’m one of them–who show up at every move, take dinner after every baby born, volunteer first to step in someone’s absence, send a load of newborn kits or school kits to Humanitarian Services every month, and generally give til it hurts. Service disrupts their lives, to the point that it is enmeshed with it–which, I suspect, is probably the point at which it registers with the heavens.)