President Hinckley said that marriage was beautiful (giving his due to its difficulties) and then had this to say about divorce

Some of you within the sound of my voice could recount family sorrows in your own experience. But among the greatest of tragedies, and I think the most common, is divorce. It has become as a great scourge. The most recent issue of the World Almanac says that in the United States during the twelve months ending with March 1990, an estimated 2,423,000 couples married. During this same period, an estimated 1,177,000 couples divorced. (See The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1991, New York: World Almanac, 1990, p. 834.)

This means that in the United States almost one divorce occurred for every two marriages.

Those are only figures written on the pages of a book. But behind them lies more of betrayal, more of sorrow, more of neglect and poverty and struggle than the human mind can imagine.

We live and have lived in a country that is free for many practical purposes.  The downside is that to date the greatest persecutions inflicted upon us as a people have been inflicted by ourselves.  True, we live in a society that encourages and facilitates divorce.  But no one made us do it.

I sometimes wish we excommunicated for more divorces, though that would not cure the ugliness that led to the divorce in the first place.

Other Posts from the Sunday Morning Session of the April 1991 General Conference

Marriage is an Eternal Concept

The way to draw closer

Lies and thefts are the fire in which every Rome burns.

Murders are an advanced stage of the disease. They are not the disease.

the average 22-year-old man today has an testosterone level roughly equal to that of a 67-year-old man in 2000.

-read the whole thing

The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers’ meeting
Or luck or fame.

Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.

-A.E. Housman

I was reading D&C 1 and felt a General Conference Doggerel coming on.

Lord, I come to you with but 10 sins

Or if you press me, how ’bout just one sin?

A faint little sin, like it hardly had been.

And the Good Lord said, divide it by ten.

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Teddy Roosevelt. The older I get the more I admire the man.  Though he was a ham and a showman, like a better Donald Trump for a much better age.

Here he is on reading.  Some excerpts:

Now and then I am asked as to “what books a statesman should read,” and my answer is, poetry and novels — including short stories under the head of novels.

…

why! there are scores and scores of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as the best of all the novels, and of as permanent value.

The same thing is true of Darwin and Huxley and Carlyle and Emerson, and parts of Kant, and of volumes like Sutherland’s “Growth of the Moral Instinct,” or Acton’s Essays and Lounsbury’s studies

Parts of Kant!  Ha ha ha ha.  Oh, Teddy.

 I still read a number of Scott’s novels over and over again, whereas if I finish anything by Miss Austen I have a feeling that duty performed is a rainbow to the soul. But other booklovers who are very close kin to me, and whose taste I know to be better than mine, read Miss Austen all the time — and, moreover, they are very kind, and never pity me in too offensive a manner for not reading her myself.

Our challenges demand that we should be supermen of history, capable of resolving the crisis our age and place and constructing the new understanding. Nothing less will do than be iron men and saints.

We should be men with hearts full from the well-springs of tradition, but also with fierce eyes for the coming forms of life that lie over the horizon. We should have a dual orientation: both an immovable rootedness and the most expansive wanderlust.

-thus Rafael M.

Holy Pirate King or bust.

“The weak things of the world shall come forth and break down the mighty and strong ones,” D&C 1:19.

I once thought this prophecy was real inspiring.  I now think its a prophecy of bad times coming.  Because the weak don’t take on the strong, nor win, unless the strong have made an utter misery of the world and dragged everything including themselves down into destruction.

“The prophecies and promises … shall all be fulfilled,” D&C 1:37.

Inspired by Rozy, I wrote a poem in the style I call General Conference Doggerel, though bluer.

(For you single people, sorry. Your display of the nameless virtue is honorable.)

Here goes.

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