Thanks for answering. For the record I was just curious, I meant no offense.

It’s been said before — and I whole-heartedly believe it — that the Lord desperately wants us to seek and search and dig. He just doesn’t want us losing perspective over what we find and He doesn’t want us tearing down the Church with our misguided perspective.

It seemed that it was a huge deal in 2000. Now, in 2008, a lot of people haven’t even heard of MT anymore, and I suspect that in a generation, she’ll be little more than a footnote and Bloggernacle darling. And maybe that’s how it should be.

I was at BYU in the 1990s during the period when English and Anthropology had so many problems and were losing professors (in fact, an extended family member was marginally caught up in the periphery). And I never could understand how such supremely intelligent and gifted people could have botched their employment like they did. In both of my academic departments, there was writing and research and classroom conversations that went WAY beyond anything the deposed were saying, but we did it respectfully and our professors made sure that they took care of the basic things first to protect their employment.

MT would have done great in my department — in fact, we read literature from artists that was more bold and more shocking than anything she said, and wrote term papers and had classroom discussions that would have made her seem conservative. She could have pursued 90% of what she wanted to pursue, but she just had to cross a certain line. It made her famous for a generation, I guess.

ESO, you make a very good point about the single adults. I think the documentary was created for the non-LDS audience, and therefore it might not strike a hot enough chord. If they really dug, they might find that it often strikes one of the hottest chords in the Church.

Except that she hadn’t stopped writing about it or attacking it. She didn’t get excommunicated just because she was angry. In fact, the Church is more than willing to let people alone when they are hurt and angry and want to be left alone. But when you’re still taking positions of advocacy against the Church, no degree of deliberate separation should replace formal discipline.

Any accounts from her are incredibly one-sided, because the Church won’t respond or tell their story. Take it with a grain of salt.

(As you can tell, I don’t have a lot of respect for St. Margaret. I’m a closet fascist, I guess. I do have a family case of an unjust excommunication — and the First Presidency overturned it. I have more faith in a stake presidency and a high council than I do in the one-sided testimony of one who admitted she wouldn’t follow the counsel of her leaders.)

You raise a vary good question. I believe it’s possible for people to experience the power of the Atonement in any number of churches, or outside of church altogether. I have seen a lot of examples of this.
That said, I think we make some very unique claims about the Atonement and Christ’s role in the Church, and the only possible way I can see to verify those claims is by seeing if the power of God is manifest in Church service that is geared towards bringing people to Christ in the context of the Church.
For example, if the power of God is evident in our missionary work and our temple work, then I think we can say that the Church is the place where God wants those particular people to experience the Atonement, and I stay in the Church because I believe that to be true in my case. That is not an exclusive claim to Christianity on our part, but I don’t apologize for my conviction that God honors our basic claims as a Church by showing His power in our efforts to bring people into the Church and help them stay engaged here.

I liked THE MORMONS well enough, but it can’t have been EVERYTHING. I realize gayness is a hot topic, but it seems there are some others that are, in fact, bigger issues for more people in the Church. Like being hetero and single–that cuts a lot of people. My single sister was just telling me yesterday she was not Celestial material–she does not qualify as a single person. Sure, she was joking about it, but it is a major issue for many many more Mormons than homosexuality (and, of course, it is the issue that includes many gay Mormons–being (forced to be ) single in a family church.