As many of us at M* have been writing for years, Harry Reid is a good latter-day Saint who is an embarrassment as a politician.

With any luck, Bro. Reid will soon be just another senator from Nevada and not the majority leader, and his many gaffes will be confined to the Nevada press, rather than the national scene. And we can all hope that in 2016 he will retire and do something more productive (perhaps become a senior missionary?). Most pundits are predicting the Senate will soon be taken back by the Republicans.

But in case Bro. Reid is inclined to think he still has a reason to be involved in the dirty world of politics, I would like to remind him of his worst gaffes, and I would ask M* readers to chime in.

Bro. Reid’s single most horrifying gaffe, in my opinion, is his completely unsubstantiated charge that Mitt Romney did not pay any taxes for 10 years. This ridiculous claim, in the middle of the 2012 contest, was part of a coordinated and incredibly slimy campaign by the Democrats against any honorable man (and a very flawed candidate, as I wrote here). I predict that Bro. Reid will repent about this very low moment in his life, either in the coming years or in the afterlife.

But this is not all. Bro. Reid went on to say that Mitt Romney, a former bishop and stake president, had “sullied” Mormonism. This coming from the man who once said Barack Obama could be elected because he is “light skinned” with “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

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When the series Harry Potter first came out, especially around the time the movie version was announced, a controversy was plastered all over the news. Many Christians (and a few Muslims) became concerned that young children could be introduced to real witchcraft and occult practices. The early years of the publication gave the scandal loving press a field day of news about a small group of frantic parents wanting to protect children against dark forces. The argument is that the book series may be fantasy, but it contains clear occult and magical elements. As one critic, Richard Abanes in an interview, explained:

Can my child find information in a library or bookstore that will enable them to replicate what they are seeing in the film or the book?’ If you go to The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings what you see in, story magic and imagination, it is not real. You can’t replicate it. But if you go to something like Harry Potter, you can find references to astrology, clairvoyance, and numerology. It takes seconds to go into a bookstore or library and get books on that and start investigating it, researching it, and doing it.

There is some truth to this, although taken to the extreme considering the story as a whole. There are magical incantations, potions, interactions with the spirits of the dead, blood oaths, and more mixed in with the purely imaginative. Children could research the “real” behind the fantasy and get into witchcraft. Then again, the same can be said about any topics in a work of fiction, but we know witchcraft doesn’t exist but there are spiritual people which can do physic or tarot reading love to help people in their love and spiritual lives.

You can free tarot reading online websites for all sorts of stuff. Think self-improvement, meditation, and decision-making. (See also: hanging with your crew and your rosé collection.) Tarot cards work like a mirror, if that mirror were magic: They reflect your inner wisdom and self to help guide you toward living a better life, whatever that means for you. They’ve even been used in therapy. Um, sign me up. I want to be a self-improvement queen!

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Someone who notices when new stuff on topics gets posted on lds.org alerted me to the fact that there is updated information regarding the topic of polygamy.

The main article is titled “Plural Marriage in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints [https://www.lds.org/topics/plural-marriage-in-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints] which links to other related articles about plural marriage.

Of particular interest is the article discussing the origins of plural marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo [https://www.lds.org/topics/plural-marriage-in-kirtland-and-nauvoo?lang=eng]. This article discusses the likely 1831 timing of the original revelation, the marriage between Joseph and Fanny Alger in Kirtland, and Joseph’s marriages in Nauvoo. Somewhere in this series of articles, Joseph’s marriage to the youthful Helen Mar Kimball is discussed as well.

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During BYU Education Week, Elder Bednar gave a great speech on using social media to share the gospel.  Two months have passed since his talk, and while there was some talk on it, I fear that his fears may already be happening.  But let me review some of his main concepts, first.

Elder Bednar stated that it is time we use social media to flood the earth with the gospel. Right now, we are only causing a trickle to occur.  To put this in perspective, the number of gospel contacts made by the Church and its members in 2013 equated to each full time missionary companionship in the Church (88,000) to have over 100 gospel contacts per day, or 37,500 per year. 1.6 billion contacts total for 2013.

If this is just a trickle, then what would be considered flood stage? Ten times more? One Hundred times more? One thousand times more?  Continue reading →