I am very familiar with the LDS and the role of women – understanding fully what you say – but what you describe is the very definition of “Complimentarianism” – that is to say men and women have equally important but complimentary, not identical, roles. In my own PC(USA) such arguments were made for about 20 years before they fell and are also part of the splintering within prebyterianism.

On a personal note, I do not defend the current egalitarian current view of my church, but do not find it so objectionable as to want to leave over it. Were it my decision, I would tend to be complimentarian, but in my church such decisions are taken corporately.

My point is straightforward, by the view of most liberal and or “forward-looking” (whatever that really means) complimentarianism is an “old” view. It is routinely insulted and ridiculed in academic and leadership circles. I have little doubt that the article was a set up to attack Romney’s faith on that ground.

I attended law school at the University of Utah with a married couple, who went on to become a member of the Utah Supreme Court and a juvenile court judge as they raised a family. They recently retired.

Again, being ordained as a priest in the CJCLDS church has nothing to do with having a career as a pastor. There are no Mormon career pastors. The primary function of priesthood ordination of all worthy men is to enable them to perform religious duties in their own families.

There are a few positions as professors teaching religious doctrine and history at the various BYU campuses, but many of those positions are filled by women. for example, on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Smith, BYU produced a TV series on his life, which was hosted by noted historian Professor Susan Easton Black.

The few men (just over a hundred) who are paid full-time church leaders have generally first served decades as unpaid part-time leaders at various levels of the Church organization, and given up careers in all sorts of fields. In general, you can depend on the fact that most of them were getting paid more money in the successful professional careers they left behind. For example, I attended college with the son of one senior Church leader, who had been a chemistry professor at the University of Utah. At one point in his career, he was approached with three job offers. General Electric Offered to double his professor salary. Westinghouse offered to triple it. The Church offered to cut it in half.

Any Mormon woman who wants to serve others as a leader and teacher in the Church will have plenty of opportunities over her lifetime. Any Mormon, woman or man, who wants to be PAID for performing the functions of a pastor is going to be frustrated, because there aren’t any such positions. Any person, woman or man, who craves the position of pastor in order to exercise power over others rather than serve them needs to repent and give up their pride.

I am wondering here how well acquainted you are with women’s roles in the CJCLDS Church. If your comment is based on the emphasis on mothers caring for children in the home, I would point out that Mormons also emphasize the importance of fathers playing a nurturing role in the home, as a higher priority above their careers and even positions in the Church.

If your comment is based on the fact that Mormons don’t ordain women in their priesthood, I would note that, because Mormons don’t have career clergy, this is not something that closes off a career choice to women; men don’t have such a choice either. In fact, while priesthood ordination is an element of certain leadership positions, women also have significant leadership positions, ones that would be considered pastoral if they were in many Protestant churches. The adult women of a congregation are led by a presidency of women. Women presidencies also lead and teach teenage girls, and all of the children under age 12. There are women in oversight positions for all three of these organizations at higher levels of the Church as well, including worldwide leadership positions, held by women who travel the world and speak in the Church’s general conference every six months, as well as in general church wide meetings just for adult women and for teenage girls and their adult leaders.

In the weekly worship service, the invocation or benediction are often given by women, and many of the sermons are by women who belong to the congregation. Women also teach many of the Sunday School classes for teens and adults.

You are aware that many young women serve as volunteer missionaries, and that many retired couples, husbands and wives, also serve as volunteer missionaries around the world. For example, just in the last few years my neighbors have served as missionaries in New Jersey, Florida, North Dakota, Omaha, and Nigeria.

Mormon women are encouraged to gain educations, and half of BYU students are women. Many of their professors are also women. For example, my son-in-law’s aunt and her husband are both mathematics professors at BYU. A number of the senior leaders of the CJCLDS have wives who were professionals in their own right. The current president of Deseret Book, the commercial publishing company for the Church, is Sheri Dew, a single woman and popular author and speaker, who spent several years as one of the three members of the world-wide Relief Society presidency leading all adult women.

The Mormon Declaration on the Family teaches Latter-day Saint men that they are to treat their wives as equals in the marriage and family. Mormon doctrine instructs men that they cannot use any position of authority coercively, but that leadership in the family and church can only be exercised by “gentleness, and meekness, and by love unfeigned.” There is no “My word is law” patriarchy in orthodox Mormonism.

Mormonism allows women whose husbands are unfaithful or abusive to divorce without any Church opposition. Husbands who commit adultery will be considered for excommunication. Chastity within marriage is expected of both men and women.

In Mormon theology, the ultimate ordinance is marriage for eternity in one of the temples. No man can receive full exaltation without his wife. Within the temple, ordinances specifically for women are performed by women. In the ordinance of vicarious baptism on behalf of our kindred dead, women stand in for their female ancestors.

One of the beliefs that Mormons are often criticized for is the belief that we have both a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother. Whatever people may think of this, they should admit that it provides an exalted role model for women. Holiness for men or women is not found, Mormons believe, in isolation and permanent celibacy, but in the union for eternity of man and woman, husband and wife, father and mother, who will be united with their children and descendants in the resurrection of the just.

I am a professional and I work with women professionals in my company who are attorneys, engineers, accountants, and managers. I can’t think of any of those jobs that could not be done by a Mormon woman. In the local community of Mormon lawyers here in the Tri-Cities in eastern Washington State, there are several Mormon women.

On the short list of women who have served in the US Senate, one of them was Paula Hawkins of Florida, a Mormon, whose son-in-law was a missionary in France with Mitt Romney, and whose daughter was a congressional staffer when we knew them in Maryland.

In sum, I don’t see any of the above aspects of the lives of Mormon women as either “archaic” or “sexist.” I doubt that Mitt Romney’s wife or daughters-in-law do either. Certainly his mother, who was highly involved in politics, did not.

That is in fact my suggestion. “Mainstream Denominational Christians” refers to Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Lutherans – all of which ordain women. Southern Baptists are the bridge between protestant denominationalism and evangelicalism and the RCC and Orthodox are the mother churches.

I’m not sure what you meant by this comment–but if you are referring to priesthood ordination and the absence of women in presiding priesthood quorums, I believe that Latter-days Saints have much in common with Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics and Orthodox believers (all mainline denominations). Are you suggesting that the views of these groups are also “archaic if being kind and sexist if not”?

One of the things that happened on the frontier was the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830. Since that time, as was pointed out by Baylor University sociologist Rodney Stark, the growth rate of the CJCLDS Church has served as an example of the moderate but steady growth that the original Christian church experienced in the first centuries of the Christian Era. Worldwide, and consistently since 1830, the Church at least doubles every 20 years. These days, half of Mormons live outside the US, and in the US the growth rate is not as fast, though Mormons still have almost twice the birthrate of other Christians, including Catholics.

There are almost 6 million Mormons on record in the US. If we assume a doubling of the US CJCLDS membership only every 30 years, this continued growth rate would place LDS membership in the US at over 2 to the 6th power = 64, times 5 million, or 320,000,000 Mormons by the year 2240. With the general US birth rate, and thus the population, shrinking past 2050, this would be almost everyone in the US.

That seems hard to imagine. Currently the highest Mormon proportion in a nation is in Tonga at 45%, followed by Samoa at 30%. May I suggest it is conceivable that, in two centuries, a third of the US could be Mormon. Sometime between now and then, it seems likely that at least one of the presidents Americans elect will be Mormon, just as it is certain that there will be a number of female presidents, as well.

I don’t think that the election of a Mormon president is going to signifiantly advance membership in the CJCLDS Church. To the contrary, given the continuing prejudice against Mormons, it seems more likely to me that the continuing growth of Mormonism is eventually going to make election of more Mormons to Congress, and then a Mormon to the presidency, seem inevitable. By that time, indeed, it may be that a member of the ticket in each major political party (whatever they are then) could be Mormon, just as Harry Reid and Mitt Romney are national leaders of their parties. And because of the expanding diversity of Mormon demographics, one of those Mormons could be of Polynesian, Asian, Hispanic or black ancestry.

Obviously all sorts of things can happen between now and then, but if Christians want to remain a significant part of US society in the next 200 years, they should take seriously the need to maintain family size and the need to recruit and keep people from the remainder of society. Loss or growth at the margins is all it takes to determine the future.

Sadly, the driving assumption of the currently ruling party is neither that of Lewis nor that of Rousseau. The current government does not recognize human fallability in government, nor does it believe in trusting in the citizenry to make decisions. It is instead an oligarchy that defines “democracy” as that which rules “for the people” but not “by the people”. We do not remember, in our commemorations of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, that ALL governments are governments “OF the people”, including the Nazis and the communists. The precious thing that Lincoln saw at risk in 1863 was government “BY the people, and For the people.”