Defense of Truth

Excuse me a little bold language here, without meaning to be harsh, but firm: I have serious doubts as to the qualifications of the historians cited in the PBS special "the Mormons". The same guy who claimed that there was no archeological evidence either for the story of the Exodus or for the Book of Mormon (topic I dealt with here ), made the fantastic claim that the 1830s in America were a time of crisis for the nuclear family. After an hour on various Google searches, I can find no evidence to substantiate that claim. Gold rushes around that time period DID cause a number of families in the East to be more or less temporarily broken, but I don't believe census records on the number of households containing nuclear families reduced so drastically as to support the idea that Joseph Smith's insistence on the sealing of families could be reasonably seen as a reaction to it. And the other female historian makes the nonsensical claim that the question of the celestial s...

It's been enlightening for me reflect upon some of the different types of marital relationships that I observed in such a multicultural tapestry as the Côte d'Ivoire. I say multicultural because there are over 60 different languages spoken by the different peoples within the nation's borders, and though many of their traditions are similar if not analogous, there are also competing varieties of modern European and Eastern traditional types of marital arrangements there also. There was an amazing complexity compared with what I had always assumed was the almost binary choice of cohabitating couples in Western cultures (marry, or live together, with few other socially sanctioned arrangements possible), and yet there seemed to be no confusion. If there was any confusion, it didn't come from the culture, but rather from recent successive changes in the state's legal definition of marriage. As with many African nations there existed a long history of traditional marriage...