Someone Explain the Mormon Argument Against Same Sex Marriage to me, Please

If there is one thing I do not understand, it is Mormons using the argument that gay marriage might open the door for polygamists to practice their lifestyle freely. Now, I know the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (see, I even have it hyphenated correctly) has not practiced polygamy openly since the 1890 manifesto, even though it took a little bit longer for this rule to be strictly enforced, but anyone who has attended a Mormon church for long enough knows that the men at least are hoping for the return of polygamy.

I now stating this on the blog of an Ex-Mormon is literally preaching to the choir The few readers I have left after my long hiatus know that Doctrine and Covenants Section 132 commands faithful members to practice celestial marriage and informs Emma Hale Smith that if she does not accept it, she will be destroyed.

If we leave the study of scripture aside for the moment, we can go back to Mormon history. The recent raid on the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas brought the problem of polygam to light again, and while the church put press statements out to establish the lack of connection between the two groups, they are both Restorationist movements and claim the same history up to the year 1890. The polygamy of Brigham Young's time may have been slightly kinder, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never repudiated the doctrine of polygamy and still allows a spiritual form to take place. Many members are simply waiting until the time is right again when they will be allowed to take multiple wives.

If polygamy will be practiced in the celestial kingdom and will be practiced on the Earth again when the time is right, the church should not oppose any movement that will allow this lifestyle to return among its members, unless it intends to repudiate its own doctrine. (The prophet *can* do this at any time. There is no standard like the Council of Trent and Vatican II where official Roman Catholic doctrine was established.)

The opposition to gay marriage from the church has nothing to do with allowing the practice of polygamy, but is rather rooted in the growing conservative trends among the general authorities than in looking at what might be in the long-term goals of the church. Of course, maybe I'm being too cynical. It just might be about the coupling of a man and a woman being necessary to create new spirit children or to bring new potential Mormons into this world.

Installing Linux Drivers: More fun than a Root Canal

If you are a technical person who has never experienced the thrill of trying to get a wireless networking card that is not supported by Linux working on an aging laptop which more or less chokes on the more operating systems, I cannot begin to describe the kind of treat you are missing. I'd might consider moving up a root canal should I ever schedule one to have to avoid going through this process again, although the easiest thing to do would have been to buy a networking card that had native Linux support.

The true tech geek knows that there is no fun in this process, because at least in theory it should be a matter of finding the correct package manager, using synaptic or typing in sudo apt-get install . In practice, what often happens is that the source code of these modules are given, they do not compile correctly, and the person involved has to be a master C programmer and a master hacker to get the drivers compiled from the source code.

Now, at least you have a picture of why Windows is still the number one desktop operating system for the PC, although to be fair, Ubuntu takes most of the common frustrations encountered when using Linux out of the process. Assuming your hardware is supported, all you have to do is pop the CD and you should be up and running.

Belkin does not feel the same way about the necessity to provide drivers for common operating systems that I do. Belkin only wants to provide drivers for commercially backed operating systems. This caused a problem, but it is not insurmountable, assuming the user can load Ndiswrapper correctly. Well, I did, but wanting the computer to run faster, I tried installing the newer version from the CD. This did not work as well as I had hoped.

Now I'm back to the original starting point, installing the older version of Ubuntu and getting ready to make sure I have the Windows drivers to use with the operating system. Gods, how I miss the days when I found frustrating things like this fun.

Notes: I know have the network card and Debian Etch on the sytem. It's working as I'd like it to for the most part.