Best Referral Yet

Gotta love this.

Browsing my referrals tonight, I see that I got one from a link I hadn't seen before:

feministmormonhousewives.org

No shit. So I bopped over, and I had to hunt around a bit, but then I saw the link--it's under the "sideblog" heading, and it says simply "Mandatory Adoption (some profanity)."

Some profanity? Jesus H. Christ bleeding to death at Mountain Meadow, if that's what the Feminist Mormon Housewives consider "some profanity," I am personally scared of what they might actually consider obscene.

But seriously--I'm surfing the blog and finding these women pretty damn fascinating. If only because they're calling me out on my big old stereotypes without even knowing they're doing it. I mean, even if I didn't get most of my knowledge of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints from Jon Krakauer, I think I'd still be in the majority if I said that I don't usually associate "Feminist" with either "Mormon" or "Housewife," but certainly not with "Mormon Housewives."

What I really like about surfing their blog, however, is the combination of deep faith in their spirituality and deep scorn for sexism--which kinda makes my head want to explode because compared to the Southern Baptist Convention, even the mainstream LDS is pretty much a big goddamn patriarchy-party.

As I understand it, anyway--like I said, my familiarity with LDS is limited.

At any rate, what I found kind of humbling about my visit to their blog (which is why this post is about neither voyeurism ["Hey! Look at the freaky FeministMormanHousewives!"] nor condescension ["Oh, look at the cute Mormon housewives trying to be Feminists!"] but admiration) is something that always makes me think of my dear friend, the pro-choice/ anti-abortion Roman Catholic who taught me a lot about what Christian Charity really means in one short comment.

I was in the middle of my dissertation, and I'd been spending the week learning everything I could about the US firearms industry, and I shared with her one of my favorite tidbits--that the skyrocketing murder rates of the 1990s were largely due to the skyrocketing firearms homicide rates among African-American males ages 18-25, and that these, in turn, were largely due to the nasty combination of 1) dramatic changes in the illegal drug economy, and 2) the conscious and deeply cynical decision by firearms manufacturers that since they had largely maxed out their traditional market of middle-aged white men, they could sell a lot more product if they specifically targeted the poor, urban, African-American male youth market--which they did, developing marketing strategies and even new products specifically to appeal to the kind of people who then went around blowing the living fuck out of each other (and plenty of innocent standers-by) in drive-by shootings, armed robberies, and macho pissing contests gone awry.

Yes, you read that right--the firearms manufacturers armed thousands of young, poor, urban African-American males as the crack boom swept over American cities and turned playgrounds into war zones. That's kinda like, oh, I dunno, Hewlett Packard, Dupont, Eastman Kodak, and Bechtel selling WMD materials to Saddam Fucking Hussein.

But I digress.

No, what I always think of is how my friend, who has both an inspiringly gentle soul and an almost frighteningly fierce moral clarity, widened her eyes in shock and said, in genuine horror, not "Oh, how could they?!?" or "Lord, what people will do for greed," or even "What a bunch of goddamn fucktards!" (which is about what I would have said), but:

"I fear for those poor men's souls."

Which, to this day, always humbles me. Her first reaction was horror at what these men had done to their own souls out of greed, racism, classism, and Isis only knows what all else. As awful as the deed was, and as tragic and brutal as the results were, her first thought was of compassion and pity for the poor bastards who had sunk so low as to have done such a thing to their fellow human beings. I'm sure there's a great Bible verse that could go right here about profiting the world for a mess of potash or somesuch, but I'm not the guy who can come up with that shit without breaking stride.

I'll leave that to the feminist Mormon housewives.