Chapter 21

 Women's duties and opportunities under a proper program of charity

-- a well-funded Relief Society

[This is intended to be just a brief and bare outline of what this chapter should contain.]

If the church can't get the correct balance between the roles and responsibilities of men and women, then I'm not sure who can, and, at the moment, the church seems to be seriously out of balance, with the male-dominated central headquarters claiming far too much power and importance at the expense of the women.

Even in these days of rampant gender confusion, it doesn't seem too outrageous to claim that men and women have traditional roles on earth and in heaven, where the men tend to be the warriors and the builders, and the women tend to be the nurturers. In most cases, both genders enter into the world well prepared for those roles.

Traditionally, the men are the bread winners, and the women spread the peanut butter on it and pass it to those in need. In today's world, it appears that the zeal of the church leaders to require every religious nickel to pass through their fingers, basically cutting women out from their traditional charity activities on charges of "duplication," has greatly skewed things as a practical matter. The money the church receives today should mostly go to charity, to be handled mostly by the women, but instead the male impulse to create empires and build things has dominated where it shouldn't dominate, and most of that money is channeled into pointless and wasteful and prideful activities.

I believe in the religious realm, everything should be backwards from what it is in the normal economy. In the normal economy men get the resources and build facilities, and let the women fill those facilities up and teach and bring happiness to the people involved. When the religious leaders confuse religious activities with the normal economy, they get everything backwards. The men are supposed to run businesses in the real world, partly to get resources for religious purposes, not create a nearly pointless religious business to absorb resources and keep them from going to real charity, that religious business becoming a very bad substitute for real charity.

The church leaders might very well help collect resources for the women to use in charity activities, and then get out of the way and let the women do the work they are best qualified to do. Women should be basically in charge of all charitable activities – education, health care, the needs of old age, both short-term and long-term needs, etc.

Women are the ones who can bring life into the world, and they ought to be given all the authority and resources to bring those young people into the world, and to educate, and care for them as needed. If the women had the responsibility and the resources to take care of these things, they would see that they were done correctly, where the men would, as often as not, get confused about what to do, as they do today. For example, women who have been through the process themselves would be able to devise effective systems where women could feel confident and even eager about bearing children when they are young, with continuing confidence that they will have a respected and productive place in society when they have moved beyond their childbearing years.

The women would certainly help each other having babies, and presumably they would do something to stop the needless abortions, likely making changes to our society to structurally end this abomination. Today's church leaders seem to care nothing about that issue anymore, but the women would probably not let it pass but would take vigorous action if given the opportunity.

There is an ongoing agitation among some women for the church to "Ordain Women," which I assume is a reaction to the church leaders' demand that they have absolute control over everything church-related, including money, architecture, charity, women's activities, etc. Considering human nature, that is probably a bad thing simply because when anyone has absolute control of anything, they are going to do some foolish things, even including the dreaded "unrighteous dominion" mentioned in the scriptures. Simply dividing up the resources and responsibilities will make sure that there are multiple viewpoints to be considered. Church leaders counsel against husbands trying to dominate a family, arguing that husband and wife are equal, while at the same time the church leaders want absolute dominance over the women in all matters of church administration. There is philosophical incoherence here.

Every known totalitarian dictatorship always develops egregious policies simply because they believe they can. The U.S. Constitution is based on the concept that there ought to be a separation of powers in all governmental activities, if for no other reason than to keep people honest and restrained. The church ought to be implementing those principles internally and spontaneously, since freedom is such a basic principle of the gospel. The church is supposed to be teaching correct principles, but it fails to do so when it argues for absolute and unquestioned centralization of everything. Any arguments that the church is exempt from the U.S. Constitution and other similar constraints on administrative power ought to be poorly received.

I don't know the feelings of the women involved in the "Ordain Women" movement, but I am guessing that if they were given the full responsibility for all charitable activities, plus the resources to do it, they would feel quite satisfied and challenged with their assignments and their opportunities. I doubt that they really want to supplant the men in ward and stake administration when they could have a great deal more fun and satisfaction taking care of the needs of the young and the poor.

I assume that giving women all of these resources and powers would make them far more powerful missionaries than any we have now, especially if they were inviting people into a network of those supported by charitable giving, creating an entire social insurance system for those who are willing to abide by the rules of the gospel. It would be ideal if these well-informed and determined women could preside over a nearly complete replacement of the corrupt and wasteful tax-and-spend "charity" systems operated by secular governments, legislated for the very purpose of displacing religious charitable activity. These private charity systems are at least 2 to 5 times more efficient than anything any government can create, and their superiority in financial efficiency and meeting individual needs would quickly make these awkward Marxist systems obsolete.