Just another Jess

I am so disappointed in the behavior of church members following the statement released by BYU this week. If you haven’t been following the recent changes to LGBTQ+ policies in the church, I’ll catch you up quickly. In February 2020, the church updated the General Handbook. Part of the updates included rewording the sections about same-sex relationships and homosexuality to make it more inclusive and more representative of the doctrine. Following suit, BYU updated the honor code a few weeks later. In response, LGBTQ+ students tentatively approached the honor code office seeking clarification about what the changes to the honor code meant, and were informed by the HCO that it meant same-sex dating (hand-holding, kissing, going on dates) at BYU was okay as long as they lived the law of chastity like their heterosexual peers (no sexual relations before marriage). Two weeks later (4 March 2020), BYU released a statement “clarifying” the update to the honor code, which included ...

I was asked to speak at the October 2019 Alpine Utah YSA stake conference about doctrine and clarity. Anyone who knows me well knows this is one of my favorite discussion topics. Enough people asked me to send them the talk afterward that I thought I'd post it here with the sources to aid in future study. Enjoy! Doctrine & Clarity William Shakespeare once wrote: “The prince of darkness is a gentleman” (King Lear, Act 3 Scene 4 Line 143). I think about that a lot. While we know that truth exists, it can sometimes be difficult to ascertain because the adversary does an excellent job disguising deceit. In conference just two weeks ago, we learned from David A. Bednar that "[Satan camouflages] spiritually dangerous ideas and actions" ( Watchful unto Prayer Continually , 5 Oct. 2019), and from Gary E. Stevenson that Satan disguises sins as harmless, and that "there are forces at play today designed to deliberately lead us away from absolute truth...

I sent a couple of tweets a little over a week ago about being on my period. Nothing graphic—just two generic tweets, one promoting menstrual cups (yeet) and the other about how my period was exacerbating my emotional response to an Avengers meme (still not over I love you 3000, tbh). This weekend, I had a few people approach me about these tweets and inform me that they felt I was oversharing, insinuating that social media was an inappropriate platform to share this kind of information. As a sociologist with a special interest in social issues, I, of course, took to Instagram to collect some additional data from my social circle. I posted a poll to my Instagram story asking about whether it was inappropriate to talk about periods on social media, and got the response that I expected: the majority of poll respondents voted that talking about periods on social media is acceptable. One hypothesis to support these findings is that the millennial social atmosphere encour...

This is something that I have been wanting to write about for a long time, but haven’t understood it well enough to try until recently. I’ll start with some background. Several years ago when I was studying at BYU, I considered myself to be a pretty free-thinking, open-minded individual (especially in ultra-conservative Provo). In my mind, being “free-thinking” and “open-minded” meant that I had adopted this you-do-you attitude that has been growing in popularity among young adults for many years. My open-minded opinion at the time was something like this: God has told us to “love one another” (John 13:34, 15:12), and to “judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matthew 7:1; 3 Nephi 14:1). So in order to follow that counsel and love everyone, I have to accept that everyone has their agency to make whatever decisions they want, and it’s none of my business what decisions they choose make. I can make the decisions that I want to make, but I have no place telling someone else that the d...

Here’s the thing about feminism…I don’t love it. And it’s not that I don’t understand it – I get that it’s not just “man-hating,” and that it’s centered around empowering women to be strong and successful and respectful of other women (and men) and whatever. I get all of that. And that’s great. I’m just not sure that we need a  movement , a “club,” to make that happen. Because what happens when you start segregating people into inclusion/exclusion situations like “feminist” and “not a feminist,” is you end up creating a rift where you’re trying to create a bridge. Listen…I’m a woman. I’ve been a woman all my life. But I’ve never felt that being a woman has made any opportunities less available to me than to anyone else. Have I been mistreated on occasion by men? Yeah. Have I been mistreated on occasion by women? Yeah. Have men been mistreated on occasion by other men? Absolutely. Have men occasionally been mistreated by women? Yeah. So…okay, sure. Let’s encourage w...

"To you who are worthy and able to attend the temple, I would admonish you to go often. The temple is a place where we can find peace. There we receive a renewed dedication to the gospel and a strengthened resolve to keep the commandments."  - President Thomas S. Monson  I'm not always one for New Year's resolutions, but as the year draws to a close, it's natural to reflect on the accomplishments and happenings of this year and years' past. At the end of 2012, I made a New Year's resolution to attend the temple once a week, every week, for an entire year. I did well for the first little while, until four months in when it was geographically impossible for me to attend a temple in a seven-day span, so I went an additional time the next week to make up for it. By the time 2013 came to a close, with the exception of that one week in April, I had successfully attended the temple once a week every week for the entire year. This week, I had the opp...

...at least, not yet. I work for a holistic health company that recently released several new products to their product line. One of those new products is in the cannabinoid family, which has led to me think a lot over the last couple days about the medical marijuana battle. In January of this year, the Utah Medical Association made a statement claiming that "there is no such thing as medical marijuana" because it has not been studied and approved by science or government. For this reason, the Utah Medical Association believes that until such studies are completed, marijuana should stay illegal with penalties (read about that announcement here ). This is a responsible approach to the legalization of marijuana. Just because a substance is presumably helpful doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. I’m not adamantly opposed to medical marijuana – but there is a lot that we don’t understand about marijuana, and a lot that we do understand about physiology, pharmaceuticals, a...