Where Are Our Priorities?

Subtitle: Yet Another Sex Post

This is heavily inspired by this video, which I am assigning as required viewing:

I have been on a "police procedural" TV kick.  Despite the violence (both actual and suggested), these shows somehow increase my faith in humanity: There are people out there who devote their lives to catching killers and saving lives.  It is a nice reminder to not take the police, the FBI, etc. for granted.

That being said,  the amount of violence does disturb me on some level—and sometimes how little it disturbs me actually disturbs me more.  People killing and torturing each other is normal fare for TV, but language and sex are censored, at least far more than violence is.  (I admit that the violence that is on day-time and prime time TV could be worse—after all there are subscription-only channels that have more violent content).  But out of those three—swearing, sex, and violence—which one seems to be the worst for society? 

Certain swear words (like racial slurs) can represent hate, true; but those aren't the kind of words that I'm talking about getting censored.  When does sex hurt anyone?  The case I can think of is rape—but that crosses over into violence. 

The out-of-whack priorities particularly struck me yesterday when watching some episodes of Criminal Minds that had been recorded in the afternoon.  All of the swears had been edited out (we're talking words like 'ass').  But they could still go into detail about murder. 

I see this even inside of the church.  Sources like For the Strength of Youth do caution against viewing anything that is vulgar, pornographic, or violent.  But in other cases, I see the threat of violence taken less seriously.  Regarding standards that members of the church have, I hear things like not drinking coffee, not spending money on Sundays, not swearing, and not having pre-marital sex.  But I don't think I've ever heard "not getting into fights" or even "not being hateful."  How many times was I lectured to in youth about not having sex?  More times than I can remember.  But I don't remember hearing about not physically hurting someone—I'm guessing it was mentioned, but it wasn't memorable enough for me to recall; on the other hand, the principle of not having sex was severely stressed and mentioned often.  Pornography is a frequently-mentioned issue too.  It would be one thing if it was stressed that pornography that was violent or that subjugated women was (especially) dangerous, but that isn't the case.  It's pornography in general that is bad because of the sexual component alone.

This just doesn't make sense, especially relating to the belief that, even if it is next to, extra-marital sex isn't as bad on the sin scale as murder.  Judging by the movies that are popular with LDS YSA, I can see that movies with a certain amount of violence are tolerated, but a movie that showed a bare bottom or had a sex scene would be totally off limits.  Why is sex more taboo than murder, especially when murder is considered worse?

You could say that youth and young adults are more likely to engage in sexual activity than murder, which is probably true.  But let's extend violence to hate, which causes it.  Personally, I'd much rather have a teenager fornicating than calling a gay classmate a f--.  A large component of the chastity talks were preventing sin by controlling the factors (like thoughts) that lead up to them.  But factors that lead to violence—like intolerance, hate, judgment, and self-righteousness—are not stressed very much in my experience.  BYU wards usually have a chastity talk at the beginning of the semester, but where is the anti-intolerance talk?  

I think it's a huge reflection of our society—violence is just far more acceptable than sex for some reason.  I can offer guesses for why that is, like the fact that the U.S. has a huge Puritan influence and the Puritans were tight-lipped about sex but saw no problem putting people in the stocks to be ridiculed.  I don't know the exact reason why our society has its priorities so out of whack.  What I do know is that this needs to change.

A bigger fool

Innumerable times I have heard a quote mentioned in church that is attributed to one Brigham Young: 

He who takes offense when none is intended is a fool; he who takes offense when offense is intended is a bigger fool.

An Ensign article from 1974 mentions that Mr. Young apparently said this, but when I Google the quote, the top result says that Confucius said it.  Eh...Confucius, Brigham Young—basically the same person, right?  I always get them confused, personally.

Anyway, at least twice in the last couple of years I've been accused of being "offended."  I say "accused" because it seems that, because of this quote that's tossed around, being offended is seen as foolish—not valid or warranted.  In both of these situations that I can easily recall, the person who believed I was offended was a church authority figure who had said some arguably offensive things (example: Drew Barrymore did things like end up in rehab and flash David Letterman because she was raised by gay fathers).  One did say, I think, something like, "I'm sorry if I've offended you" (in what I perceived to be a not-very-sincere voice), but the other only said, "I've clearly offended you," to which I said, "I'm not offended," because I was offended by his assumption that I was offended!  (Insert emoticon here.)

The reason I get offended by the word "offended" is because it seems dismissive of pain and hurt to me.  It seems to put the blame on the person that's offended (because, after all, s/he is being a fool) and let the offender off the hook.  Seriously, within this paradigm, someone who gets offended seems stupider than the person who was possibly intentionally offensive.  

Often, being offended is a reason given for why people leave the church.  Lessons about apostasy usually include two stories about people who got offended: Symonds Ryder and two women who shared a cow.  Ryder got mad because his name got misspelled on a document, which to him meant that the church wasn't true, because God wouldn't let his name be spelled wrong or something.  The two women who shared a cow somehow disagreed over who got what amount of cream or something.  Perhaps you can tell by my flippant attitude that I don't respect these stories as sources of offense very much.  These are petty examples that discredit people's valid, painful reasons to be offended.  Someone who was sexually abused by his/her bishop could be called "offended."  That is not like being upset over a misspelled name. 

True, people get offended over silly things, petty things, things they should forgive.  But the term "offended" seems to lump all sorts of cases of varying degrees of severity together.

Of course, this whole post could be dismissed as the angry ramblings of another "offended" person.  Don't care.  I demand my offense to be recognized as valid.

Sarcasm will make me friends!

The letters in the opinion section of the Daily Universe can make me so mad.  Why do I keep reading them?  Not reading them doesn't make the people who write them go away.

I just browsed the opinion section on the Universe website, and some of the letters included there are saying that:

• People around campus should smile more
• People shouldn't leave before the closing hymn and prayer during the Priesthood conference session
• Let's not pick on the way girls dress; instead, let's pick on the guys!!
• People should abstain from facebook and texting as a fast
•  People should walk in the crosswalks
• The people in the author's ward should stop hassling him to come to FHE

I understand that these could be considered valid concerns or ideas; a main problem I find with them though is that they carry the attitude that "if I think this is a good idea, then everyone should think it's a good idea."  Do you think it would help you to take a break from facebook?  Great, do that, and I hope it does help, but you don't need to tell other people that they should do it too.  You want people to smile more?  Stop picking on them and pointing out what they're doing wrong.  Maybe someone isn't smiling because s/he isn't happy; why don't you work on thinking of the why part of why people don't smile?  I hate the letters to the editor about the way girls dress, but I hate the ones from girls about guys almost as much; it's not right to criticize someone for something and then turn around and do a similar thing to them.  The ones from the guys are demeaning to girls, but the ones from girls make us girls look bad too.

The one about Priesthood session had a good reason for not leaving the session early: the noise bothers people still in attendance.  But you can still leave early and not make noise.  This letter has a self-righteous attitude and includes things like this:

Maybe it’s the traffic (waiting 2-3 minutes to get out of a church parking lot is brutal, I know), maybe by some amazing coincidence all of those brethren had to be at work right after the session. Whatever the reason, it’s disrespectful to the brethren sitting around you, the leaders you just heard from, and the choir that prepared a closing hymn to seal the spirit of the meeting.

Shame on you for disrespecting leaders!  Sarcasm will make me friends!

As for the FHE letter, the DU opinion section is not the proper forum.  The author should just talk to his FHE group leaders about it instead of letting them read it in the paper.

Yes, here I am saying what people should do.  But at least I'm not writing into the paper about it.