Sweet Jesus, I can't stand David Gregory. He was unbearable during the election and I have sworn off MTP since he was announced as host. Obama could stop nuclear proliferation, bring peace to the Middle East, and balance the budget all in his first year in office and Gregory's question would be: "Don't you think this is bad news for Obama because now he's just raised expectations too high for himself?"

Dunno, swore off MTP years and years ago. Rather have Wolf yell at me for 3 hours. Or watch Battlestar Galactica (NOT the 70s version, I'm still under 30) re-runs on SciFi. It's more fun to think about what Admiral Adama would do.

Lest we forget

Could Gregory have gotten his nose any further up into the turdblossom?

"That said, I don't think that there really is a racial element to Reid's refusals"

Maybe not, but the dude is incredibly tone deaf when it comes to race. Remember when he said Scalia was OK, but not Clarence Thomas, because Scalia was at least smart?

I have grown to despise Reid for his total capitulation to the rightwing agenda and failing to push back on any of their talking points over the last two years.

Oh, and David Gregory is totally a DICK.

Yeah, Mormons finally "caved" to pressure and dropped polygamy...

When the US government threw all their leaders in jail, denied Mormons voting rights, and was about to confiscate all of the Church's property - essentially bankrupting the whole thing. To avoid total annihilation of their religious community, and gain statehood, yes, they eventually dropped the practice.

Maybe that seems sordid to you now. But think about what statehood meant. It meant a degree of autonomy and self-governance, without outsiders dictating terms and threatening us. Considering that the early history of Mormonism was one never-ending cycle of our women raped, our men beaten and imprisoned, our property stolen, our people killed, and relentless bigotry and fearmongering marshalled against us, I think the impulse to gain some self-governance and autonomy was probably quite sensible.

So if you call that "caving," then fine. We caved. I imagine most normal people would under those circumstances.

As for the whole civil rights thing, liberals are completely deluding themselves if they think that protests against the LDS Church had much at all to do with the LDS Church's extension of Priesthood benefits to all worthy males, regardless of race.

The ban was revoked in the mid-1970s. By that point, most of the intense criticism of the LDS Church in the public sphere had died out and was basically non-existent. There was intense criticism throughout the 1960s, where the LDS authorities basically ignored the criticism and carried on as usual. By the time the ban was revoked, people had pretty-much written us off as a bad job and moved on. There was little or no criticism of the LDS Church the year the ban was lifted. Nor had there been for a long time.

The real reasons that the ban was lifted had nothing to do with outside forces. It was almost entirely an internal Church matter. A lot of missionary work was going on in places like Brazil, Mexico, and other South and Central American locations. In places like that, racial makeup was so mixed, that enforcing a doctrine prohibiting priesthood participation on racial grounds was nearly impossible. Even die-hard LDS leaders in favor of the ban started to see that it was fast becoming unworkable.

Secondly, there was a lot of movement among certain members of LDS leadership in favor of getting the ban lifted completely independent of any protest - in fact, the soul-searching was happening before anyone was protesting over it at all. This soul searching was based on our own scriptures - many of which call God "no respecter of persons" and call for equality. But it took a while to gain steam, and even when the ban was announced there were still a few die-hard holdouts in top LDS leadership.

Personally, I'm glad the ban was lifted. My mother almost left the LDS Church over the fact that the ban existed and I've inherited more than a few of her views on the matter. Many Church members were pushing for change from within as well.

The change was almost entirely an internal affair. I think the attempt to re-cast the narrative as "outside pressure beating down resistance of a bigoted religious practice" is largely a self-congratulatory attempt by old-school liberals to convince themselves that outmoded, reactionary 1960s protest models are actually still relevant and useful.

Don't kid yourselves guys. Those protest models have been deader than George W. Bush's legacy for decades now.