Questions are curious things. They bring us into dialogue with others—this one, with Deity. 

This particular question is still one of the most important. This question is meant to save. Adam and Eve didn’t discover their nakedness on their own. Lucifer told them about it, and he reframed their relationship to their bodies. In that reframing, he also shifted their relationship to God. For the first time, they were ashamed of the very bodies God had given them. Their aprons of fig leaves represented a self-made identity—what Adam and Eve constructed when they accepted someone else’s story about who they were. But for Adam and Eve and for each of us, God’s question is not an accusation. It’s an invitation to examine whose story you are living in.

Someone handed you a story about your body, about what it means. You’ve been living inside that story ever since. You probably didn’t notice. Today, there are three stories about our bodies that tend to be prominent. The first is the oldest and, in many ways, the hardest to shake. It begins not with a question but with a verdict.

Cover Up: Self as Born Evil

Verdict One: You are born evil. What is it like to believe that? It must be exhausting. Every bodily appetite is a threat. Every desire is a battle. It starts with the belief that the physical world, which includes your body, is but a shadow of a truer reality. That better reality is the afterlife. Your body is a shadow that holds you back. This is where we get the idea of “mind over matter”: the mind is pure, but the body is deficient and requires mastery. The logic goes like this: if the body is unholy and you come into this world with a body, you must be born unholy and in sin. This sets the stage for infant baptism; you are born evil and need immediate redemption. (The scripture most often enlisted for this verdict, “the natural man is an enemy to God,” is not a bodily verdict; when read in full, Mosiah 3:19 is a call back to childlike faith, not a condemnation of the flesh.)

This story creates a schism between your mind and your body. You are not to trust your body. You, in fact, live in the enemy. So you are tempted to hate it. You wish it were different, or you wish it away. You certainly don’t trust it. You may start to think your body is “the enemy of God” or “the natural man.” And since your body is drawn physically to other bodies for comfort or connection, you become suspicious of other people, too. 

Viewing the body as the enemy creates an unhealthy relationship with yourself, your body, and others. You feel suspicious and wary of physical connection with others. You start to think of others as temptations. Statements like “She is the great temptress” and “He is just a pig” begin to feel normal. You simply don’t trust yourself or others, and the story gives you reasons for that: many have fallen into the pleasures of the body and found it hard to recover. The verdict hardens into some kind of lived certainty. Your body cannot be anything other than evil.

Your worship becomes marked by discontent with yourself and with others. That discontent creates suspicion in every relationship, including your relationship with God. When God places people in your path to nurture you, you may dismiss them because closeness feels dangerous. This is the path of loneliness. Your orientation toward God comes from a place of necessary shame. You reject the gift of mortality as inherently evil; the very instrument God gave you to experience life becomes, in this story, a weight pulling you under.

In this story, you externalize goodness and internalize evil. The downstream consequence is that you lose confidence in God’s presence. The short message is “Cover up; you’re shameful.”

And here is the thing about serious psychological damage: it also generates its opposite. When a story produces enough casualties—in this case, people who learned to hate their bodies and came to God already ashamed—a counterstory rises to correct it. The second story is that counter-story. For many people, it is the first time they feel free. And that’s exactly why it’s so persuasive and exactly why it’s worth examining carefully.

Nothing to Cover: Self as Born Good

Verdict Two: You are born good. Every person is essentially good and cannot be anything other than good. This is a revolutionary idea. And for people who grew up ashamed of their bodies, that verdict feels like a breath of fresh air. Think about it. Someone finally says, “The problem was never you.” Any guilt you may have felt was handed to you. In fact, you didn’t arrive broken; rather, you were made broken by the system, the institution, or anyone who wanted to make you manageable. Now, however, you stand taller. You stop apologizing for being you. That feeling matters more than anything else you have felt in a long time.

If you’ve ever been labeled “bad,” this story says the badness actually isn’t in you. Whatever “badness” exists comes from the outside, from societal ills imposed on you. What are those societal ills? Whenever groups of people, hierarchies, patriarchies, or institutions want you to act a certain way, this story says they are attempting to control you. Controlled behavior is inauthentic behavior. But because you are born good, whatever you want to do with your body, regardless of external pressures, is also good. As long as you’re free to be yourself, you’ll flourish. 

So who are you, truly? According to this story, you are whoever you choose to be. You are the source of good. Whatever you choose must also be good. That is the essence of the authentic self: the self that fully trusts itself to create its own identity. Because you are the ultimate authority on who you are, no one else will ever fully get you. The absurd end of this line of thinking is for billions of selves, each fundamentally different, to be fundamentally alone. Alone because no one else can ever fully be you. Your self is only truly comprehensible to yourself. This type of expressive individualism is sung from the rooftops with pop lyrics such as “I can buy myself flowers…I can love me better than you can.” But this is not so much a pop lyric as a philosophy of life.

In the 2022 worldwide devotional “Choices for Eternity,” President Russell M. Nelson, then president of The Church of Jesus Christ, addressed these premises directly, teaching that your identity is not whoever you choose to be. He identified three enduring designations—child of God, child of the covenant, disciple of Jesus Christ—and taught “no identifier should displace, replace, or take priority” over them. 

And yet, if you scroll far enough, a counterorthodoxy appears: “No one gets to tell me who I am.” “Cut the toxic people out of your life.” “You are enough, just as you are.” “Your only obligation is to yourself.” These aren’t just slogans. They are popular expressions of a serious philosophical tradition. That’s precisely why they need to be answered seriously, not dismissed.

But this liberation is false, for one simple reason: it is lonely. In your desire to be free, you free yourself from everyone. You internalize goodness and externalize evil. You stop seeking to change. The short message is “There’s nothing to cover.” Notice what both stories share. One says you are broken; the other says you are complete. One says, “Trust nothing in yourself”; the other says, “Trust nothing outside yourself.” They are mirror images. They produce mirror outcomes: isolation dressed in different clothes. Those who hate their bodies and those who worship self-expression can end up in the same place: alone, with an identity that doesn’t quite fit. You wonder why neither shame nor self-worship has made you feel whole. That is the hinge. Both of these stories begin with a verdict. The third, however, begins before the verdict.

Clothed by Another: Self as Born Innocent

The third story is that the verdict is not out yet. The restored gospel of Jesus Christ teaches that you are born innocent. You have the potential to be both good and evil. You are neither fixed as good nor condemned as evil. You are open. That openness is the space where agency lives. This is not a revolutionary idea; it is a restorative one. From this perspective, your body is a gift from God, a temple, and an essential component of the plan of salvation. As with Adam and Eve, you begin making choices between good and evil after a period of innocence. You arrive in this world with no verdict against you, only a readiness to be in relationship. Mormon declared plainly, “Little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin,” condemning the notion that any child comes into the world under condemnation. Doctrine and Covenants 93 further declares, “Every spirit of man was innocent in the beginning.” 

Every person in your life shows you part of yourself. But no one shows you all of it. And what lies in the unseen parts is not always comfortable. A man who spent years in a Soviet prison camp put it better than most. In “The Gulag Archipelago,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the line between good and evil passing through every human heart:

Gradually, it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil. 

Here is why this matters to you right now: good and evil are not relative terms because a power outside you brings knowledge of both. As Mormon taught: 

The Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; … every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ…But whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do evil, and believe not in Christ,…ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of the devil.’

This Light doesn’t just help you choose between good and evil. It also orients you toward the relationships through which your choices help you become most fully yourself. Emmanuel Levinas spent a career arguing that it is the face of another that calls you into responsibility. That call draws forth a self you couldn’t have assembled on your own. He was right about the structure, even if he didn’t have the full theology to complete it. You discover who you truly are in a covenant relationship with God, with a spouse, and with a community. That is your true identity. Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught that “the highest and deepest sense of belonging is obtained through keeping covenants with God.” Thus, the self is not found by looking inward but by being drawn outward into relationship.

Think of your best friend. Now imagine that person disappears from your life. You would grieve the loss of that friend, of course, but that’s not all you would lose. You would also lose a particular version of yourself that only that friend could bring out. You may have stood in front of a mirror trying to summon that version and found that it doesn’t work because this person is, in a very real sense, a partial owner of your personality. They have access to dimensions of you that you yourself cannot unlock, and that is precisely why you love your friend. You didn’t just love the person. You loved who you became in their presence. And that loss you just imagined—that’s not just grief for a person. It’s grief for a self.

Different people draw out different parts of you, some of which may genuinely surprise you or even frighten you. This is why surrounding yourself with a diverse group of people is one of the most powerful paths to self-knowledge, not because they tell you who you are but because in their presence, you discover who you are. You discover your possibilities for doing good and evil. But no human relationship, however rich, shows you the whole of what you are.

Consider what it means to be seen completely by Christ. Not just dimensions. All of it. The parts you perform for others, the parts you hide from yourself, the parts that haven’t emerged yet because you haven’t been in the right presence to call them out. If every human relationship reveals you partially, then complete self-knowledge requires a relationship with a being of complete knowledge. No human relationship, however deep, gives you back a complete self. Only one relationship does. That is why the covenant isn’t a transaction. It is the condition of your fullest becoming. And if that is true (if you are only fully yourself in His presence), then the question is no longer whether to surrender. It is only whether you are ready to do so. 

So what does innocence ask of you? It asks you to stop hiding. The fig leaves were never just about nakedness; they were about control—about managing what God and others were allowed to see. To receive the covering He offers, you have to release that control. You have to come out from behind the identity you constructed for yourself and stand where Adam and Eve stood: seen, vulnerable, and waiting. That is the surrender. His purpose has never been to expose or condemn, but, as He declared to Moses, “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”

So here is the question He is still asking—not as an accusation or as a test, but as an invitation. Who told you that you were naked? Whose story have you been living in, the one that says you are broken, or the one that says you need no one? Neither story is His. He has a different one. It begins with innocence. It moves through covenant. And it ends with you, clothed by Him. 

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But before the demands of the day began, Jesus started His day this way: “And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.” 

Our days may not include healing lepers or casting out devils. But like Jesus, we, as parents, face the challenge of having many people depend on us. Our daily demands may make us feel that our lives are impossibly full. 

Prayer helped the Savior meet the demands of His days. Jesus “went about doing good” because His Father was with Him. This connection helped Jesus with the challenges He faced. Our prayers connect us to God and help us meet our parenting challenges. The Savior’s example of turning to His Father in prayer is a pattern we can follow. 

Here are three things Jesus teaches us about prayer. 

Praying to Align with God’s Will

First, prayer can change us when we stop treating it as a means of controlling outcomes and begin to view it as a way to draw nearer to God.

It is easy to wish that Heavenly Father would grant our wishes for smooth parenting on demand. But while that doesn’t usually happen, He does listen, soften our hearts, ease our burdens, give us comfort, help us learn, and inspire us to find solutions. 

One young mother named Kenna changed her prayers, and her prayers changed her. When Kenna’s third child was suffering from ear infections and allergies, he had difficulty sleeping through the night. On the rare occasions that he would sleep through the night, the older two kids would often awake.

Kenna was totally exhausted. She kept praying desperately for her children to simply sleep through the night. But that never happened. She wrote: 

I would just walk out of the room after rocking the baby back to sleep, lie down, and hear his cries start again. “Heavenly Father,” I cried out in my heart, “I know that you have the power to heal, to raise people from the dead, to cause sleep to come over a person or an entire city of Lamanites. Why can’t you make my one little baby sleep? I am trying to do Thy work, and it’s hard enough with a good night’s rest, let alone without! Can you please help me get some sleep?” 

Over time, Kenna’s prayers shifted from a “grant me my wish” kind of prayer to one of acceptance of God’s will. She shared:

After some time of these increasingly frantic and repetitive pleas, I realized that I needed to change my prayer. “Please help him sleep, but if not, help me figure out what he needs. Help me get a nap tomorrow, or help me have enough energy to take care of the kids and get my things done at work.”

Once I changed my prayers, I was certainly less disappointed. I could also see that the Lord was helping me with all the other things I was praying for. I learned that He doesn’t always take our trials away. But He will help us through them when we change our request from “please take this away” to “but if not, help me handle it.”               

How many of us have had desperate, agonizing, long nights like those she described? Kenna felt less disappointed with the outcome of her prayers when she recognized that her sleep challenge would likely continue, but God would help her in other ways. 

Kenna also demonstrated the importance of learning to pray “but if not.” Using this phrase—and meaning it—in our own prayers to Heavenly Father shows our willingness to submit to Him. Although He may not remove our parenting trials, He will help us through them in His wisdom. He looks at the potential for our overall growth, not just our short-term comfort. We can still ask for what we desire, but if He has something else in mind for us, we can humbly accept it and know that He hears and loves us still. Kenna’s prayers changed her, and our prayers can change us when we are humble enough to align our will to His. 

Praying for Children by Name

Jesus prayed often throughout His mortal ministry. The way He prayed can help us more effectively pray for help as parents.

We see glimpses of Jesus’ prayers in the scriptures. Jesus prayed for comfort and to give comfort to others. He prayed when He blessed and healed others. He expressed gratitude to His Father when His heart was full of joy and turned to Him when His heart was full of sorrow. We, too, can turn our hearts to God through prayer throughout our day, following Christ’s pattern.

A few years back, I relied on prayer to get over a hurt caused by my daughter. She said something unkind, and though I tried to act like it didn’t bother me, it hurt. It wasn’t until I took this hurt to the Lord in prayer that my feelings began to change. 

As I said her name while praying, I could feel my heart softening toward her. Involving God helped me see her efforts and stay kind. The Book of Mormon prophet Alma taught that we should “cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever.” Elder David A. Bednar has taught that when we have a prayer always in our hearts, we can experience the following: 

We notice during this particular day that there are occasions where normally we would have a tendency to speak harshly, and we do not; or we might be inclined to anger, but we are not. We discern heavenly help and strength and humbly recognize answers to our prayers. Even in that moment of recognition, we offer a silent prayer of gratitude. 

Praying Between a Stimulus and a Response 

Prayer can also help us respond better to the stressors of our day by creating space between when something happens and when we respond. Children fight over toys and cry when they don’t get their way, toast burns, socks are lost, and all before eight o’clock in the morning! With so many stimuli coming at us so fast, noticing the space between a trigger and our response can make a significant difference. 

A stimulus is what psychologists such as B. F. Skinner call an object or event that elicits a response. The scriptures might refer to these objects or events as “enticements,” and today, we often call them “triggers.” To me, a trigger is anything that irritates me and could cause me to respond in an angry, combative, or harsh way. Our reactions to triggers may feel instantaneous and out of our control, but in reality, we choose how we respond.

In his foreword to the book Prisoners of Our Thoughts by Alex Pattakos, Stephen R. Covey quotes an unidentified author: “Between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” Prayer can be a part of that pause between stimulus and response. It doesn’t have to be a long prayer, and usually it won’t be. But the act of calling upon God for aid or picturing the Savior in that space can help us slow down to avoid reacting to stimuli without thought.

This can be hard! It is often more natural to react without thinking. Someone says or does something to us, and we reflexively respond. But we are still responsible for our actions, even if we don’t put thought into them. As Elder Lynn G. Robbins taught, Satan would like us to “believe that we are victims of an emotion that we cannot control.” When we say something like “You make me so mad,” it can sound as if we are not responsible for our actions. Our kids may make a huge mess, and our conditioned response may be to yell. But our children didn’t “make” us yell at them, and the mess didn’t “make” us yell about it. We chose to yell. This power to choose allows us to take control of our responses and find freedom from both external and internal forces that try to rob us of our agency. 

When the scribes and Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery to Jesus, He remained calm despite the harsh words they hurled. Jesus didn’t answer them right away. He wrote in the dirt and waited until they were quiet before He responded. 

The scriptures don’t tell us why Jesus wrote on the ground, but His pause before responding stands out. It may have been to give Him time to think about how He wanted to act. Jesus lengthened His response time. When He did respond, He was in control of His emotions. 

We can also lengthen our response time. When children are upset, and the tension in the air makes us feel like our response needs to be immediate, we can slow it down by taking a deep breath, saying a quick prayer, and then trusting that the Lord will help us respond in a calm, positive way. 

We can practice lengthening our response time in simple moments. A while back, I asked my teen daughter to wash the dishes. She was not happy and exclaimed, “I’m not washing the dishes!” 

I could have responded immediately with, “Oh, yes, you are!” Instead, I took a breath, prayed for patience, and said, “I’m glad you know what your job is.” 

She reminded me how busy she was and that she didn’t have time, and I said, “I know you’re busy. Thanks for washing the dishes.” 

She huffed, and I ignored it. I simply put rubber gloves by the sink and smiled sympathetically as I walked out. I could hear her noisily getting ready to wash the dishes, but she was washing the dishes. 

Later that night, I thanked her for getting the job done, and she said, “Sorry, I overreacted. It didn’t take me that long.” I smiled and hugged her. It felt good to lengthen the space before I responded by letting Jesus in with a quick prayer. 

Through simple experiences like these with my children, I have learned that it feels good to lengthen the space before responding by letting Jesus in with a quick prayer. It may take time for this to feel natural, but by being patient and prayerful, Christ will help us lengthen the time between a trigger and our response, so we respond as He would. 

Making Prayer Part of Our Parenting Solution

Jesus often took time to pray, reflect, and center Himself. He didn’t wait for a problem to arise before He decided to be calm. He had likely made that decision during the time He spent with His Father. He acted rather than reacted to His challenges. His example can help us change our response to difficult situations. 

I still make mistakes and occasionally yell when things catch me off guard, but I know that through Christ I am more in control of my emotions than I used to be. When we make prayer a bigger part of our parenting, we can receive help with our responses, feel peace, and align our will with the Father’s. Jesus loves us, knows our hearts, and wants us to counsel with our Heavenly Father about creating space to act. And perhaps, as we follow the Savior’s example, our typical days can become something extraordinary, filled with His peace and joy.

This article is adapted from the author’s book Christ-Centered, Intentional Parenting, published by Cedar Fort Publishing & Media.

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Foster care, at its core, is meant to protect children. But it only comes into play after something has already started to fall apart.

In other words, foster care is an intervention, not a preventive measure, and the foster system steps in when families can no longer safely stay together. Understanding foster care this way changes the questions we should ask. Instead of considering only how we can improve the foster care system, we should also ask how families and communities can help ensure fewer children ever need it.

National data show that neglect is by far the top reason children enter foster care. In 2024, neglect accounted for 55% of U.S. child removals. While every family’s circumstances are different, this trend often reflects more than the failures of individual parents. In many cases, it also reveals the absence of the extended family, trusted neighbors, and community support that can help struggling families before crises escalate.

For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that absence isn’t just a social concern, but a spiritual one. It reveals a gap in the kind of covenant responsibility that calls people to notice and care for one another before a crisis begins. This gap can be an uncomfortable truth to face, especially when children are involved, but it is not a problem we should ignore.

Safety vs. Continuity

Removing a child from an unsafe home can save a life. But the act of removing a child can itself cause trauma. Children develop their sense of safety and identity through steady, consistent relationships. When even short separations occur, children’s emotional development and sense of security can suffer. For many foster youth, the loss of family means lost history and belonging too. Imagine a child who only knows a series of foster homes. No “hometown” and no consistent siblings around the dinner table. To this child, a new foster house is just another stop, which cannot truly feel like a home.  

Foster parents frequently provide extraordinary care, offering children patience, structure, and real stability—often more than the child has ever encountered. These efforts genuinely matter, and foster parents’ willingness to open their homes and create placements that make kids who land there feel safe should be celebrated.

While foster care provides physical safety and opportunities for healing, it often cannot act as a complete substitute for the continuity of family, history, and community that children need to thrive. Even in the best placements, the child’s life is unavoidably interrupted in some way, which doesn’t always resolve when a child grows up.​

The Echoes Into Adulthood

Many adults who grew up in foster care carry effects of separation throughout their lives. While unique to each individual who experiences the foster system, questions about origin often remain years later—not all of which are about pain. Some are quieter than that, more about identity than injury, because understanding where we come from is part of understanding who we are. 

Who do I look like?

Why did this happen the way it did?

Do I have siblings somewhere who don’t know I exist?

​For some, these questions lead to years of searching for their biological family—trying to put together their story, just to confirm that they came from somewhere real, that there were people who knew them before the system did. And, with all they have faced, adults in this position may not know where to begin, nor have the tools or resources to go about a search like this.

There are entire organizations, networks, and services that help former foster youth reconnect with biological relatives: DNA testing kits, reunion registries, people-search databases, and even internet groups where adults search for siblings they were separated from in childhood.

That should tell us something about the lack of identity foster alumni face. They’re not only looking for information, but are trying to recover a perception of identity, find belonging, and looking for a bond that was never replaced, and often can’t be replaced—at least, not fully. But answers can help. 

Kinship Care

As of 2024, over 40% of foster children in the United States are placed with relatives or close family friends. These placements, referred to as kinship care, are no longer a marginal alternative. Kinship placements often preserve something the system itself cannot duplicate, as children placed with relatives experience greater placement stability, fewer school disruptions, and better educational results than those placed with non-relative foster families. They are also more likely to maintain connections to siblings, cultural heritage, and extended family networks.

These outcomes show that children benefit not simply from being cared for, but from remaining connected to people who already know them. 

Kinship care reveals both the strength and the limits of the system. When aspects of family networks remain, children are often buffered from some of the worst disruptions that accompany removal. And when those networks are unsupported, even kinship placements strain under pressure.

This shifts the conversation in an important direction. Improving foster care will always matter, but so will strengthening the relationships that make kinship care possible before families reach a breaking point.

Systems vs. Relationships

Unfortunately, any system large enough to make an impact must function at scale, which changes what care looks like in practice. Decisions must be documented, legal standards consistently applied, and thousands of cases managed across communities with very different circumstances, sometimes by people who have never met each other or the families they’re deciding about. Children can become part of a process, and families can become case files. That framework is necessary, but often it is too far removed to resolve all issues at hand.

The people within that system often do remarkable work. Caseworkers regularly carry overwhelming caseloads while navigating heartbreaking situations, and foster parents open their homes to children they have never met. Their compassion and sacrifice deserve recognition, and without the structure, the inconsistency would cause different harm.

Even so, caseworkers are still operating inside a framework that wasn’t designed to center relationships and personalize outcomes. It was designed to manage risk. Those aren’t the same goal, and the gap between them shows up in ways that are hard to measure but easier to feel.

No public institution can build the kind of lifelong relationships that children need to flourish. Systems, by design, cannot replace relationships, or create a sense of belonging that a human needs. This limitation is not a failure of foster care, but reflects the reality that the foster care system is designed to respond to broken relationships, not to replace them.

And that raises a more difficult question.

What is the Goal?

If relationships are what children ultimately need, why are they so often missing before the system has to intervene? When a family starts to fall apart, there are often few people close enough to notice. And fewer still who feel like it’s their place to say anything.

Perhaps that is the harder challenge foster care exposes. The child welfare system exists because some relationships have already broken down. 

The goal isn’t to get rid of foster care, or to diminish the extraordinary work of foster parents or caseworkers, who often step into unimaginably difficult circumstances with compassion and sacrifice. Rather, it recognizes that they are being asked to repair losses that began long before they arrived. The foster system is necessary, and when homes become unsafe, it can save children’s lives. But we can appreciate the foster system while still understanding its limits— foster care was never meant to bear the full weight of meaningful, personal family connection. That work belongs to families, neighbors, and communities willing to know one another well enough to notice hardship before it becomes tragedy. 

We are stewards of one another, called to notice and act in the ordinary moments of life. 

For Latter-day Saints, this idea should feel familiar: people are responsible for one another not just in principle, but through everyday care and paying attention to each other’s struggles. It starts with whether we’re willing to be the kind of families, neighbors, and communities that don’t disappear when things get hard.

Because once relationships get replaced by systems, you can manage the outcome. But you can’t recover what was lost. And the people who know that best are the ones still looking.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t to eliminate foster care but to create communities in which fewer children ever need it. Gospel teachings compel us to act early. This might include mentoring a child, noticing neighbors in need, supporting grandma raising grandkids, or becoming a licensed foster parent. By supporting at-risk youth, we can help ensure that the day a caseworker knocks on a door never comes. 

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Everyone says children come first.

Courts say it. Legislatures say it. Divorce lawyers say it. Parents say it. Spend any time in or around family law or family courts, and you cannot avoid hearing people talk about “the best interests of the child.”

But in practice, children only matter after the adults have already made all the decisions that matter most.

I thought this reality was aptly summed up in a statement by a local candidate for a family court judgeship. The candidate wrote that she would support the rights of mothers and fathers, and parenthetically added, “of course, children come first.” 

We say children come first, but as in this candidate’s statement, the phrase is used like an incantation: If we say it enough, it will absolve us of the fact that we don’t truly believe or practice it.

In the current no-fault divorce legal regime, a court can dissolve a child’s intact legal family even if there is no damage being done to anyone. The child does not need to be found unsafe. No parent needs to be found unfit. There doesn’t need to be abuse, abandonment, adultery, cruelty, addiction, or family dysfunction. A child’s family, on which the child depends, can be taken from the child merely because a parent feels like it. And no one else in that child’s life can protect the child from the consequences of that choice: not the other parent, nor the current legal system.

That legal structure makes sense when the only interest at stake is adult autonomy. But when minor children are involved, the legal act is not merely an adult exiting a private romantic relationship; it is a state decree that restructures the child’s family, home, time, finances, identity, and access to the child’s parents. 

How can the state strip so much from a citizen, without that citizen having any legal pathway to help fight for him or herself? Doesn’t a child have any rights?

The Fourteenth Amendment and Family-Integrity Doctrine

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is the constitutional principle that a state cannot take something from you (whether that’s freedom or a fine) unless there is a process in place for you to try to defend yourself.

But while it’s usually thought of in terms of protecting property or courtroom procedure, due process has long been read to protect the substance of fundamental liberty interests, including family relationships. 

But family integrity is not only a parental right. The child is also a person who has the right to family integrity as protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Perhaps the clearest description of this principle appears in a 1982 case. The State of New York had terminated a parent’s parental rights to a child. The Supreme Court found that New York acted improperly because it did not recognize “the child and his parents shared a vital interest” in preventing the destruction of their family.

The American Bar Association recently described the child’s constitutional right to family integrity as a fundamental right rooted primarily in the Fourteenth Amendment, though some courts locate it in the First Amendment’s freedom of association. 

Divorce Is State Action

If a child has a constitutional interest in preserving family relationships when the state acts through child welfare law, why should that interest disappear when the state acts through divorce law?

The bottom line is that there is no good reason.

No-fault divorce is not a private act. It is the state intervening in a private relationship to allow one spouse’s preferences to affect the entire family unit.

A marriage is not dissolved by private act, but by court order. The state changes the legal status, divides marital property, and allocates how children will be shuttled back and forth between homes.

When a court uses public authority to dismantle the legal structure of a child’s intact family, the Fourteenth Amendment should have something to say about the process and the justification required. 

This does not mean that the Constitution must forbid divorce in families with children, nor that an individual should be required to stay in a marriage he or she wishes to leave. It does mean that when states choose how they will dissolve marriages where minor children are involved, they should not be able to treat that dissolution as purely an adult entitlement.

Custody as a Secondary Determination

Modern divorce law claims to protect children through custody and “best interest” determinations. But that application of children’s rights arrives too late.

At this stage, the courts do not consider what happens when the child no longer has a primary residence, nor do they consider the negative academic or behavioral outcomes. 

In my opinion, that is a constitutional error. 

Custody law asks: After divorce, where should the children go?

A Fourteenth Amendment family-integrity analysis would ask a prior question: What must the state prove before it allows the dissolution of the child’s intact legal family in the first place?

The child’s interests are considered, but only after the decisive constitutional injury has been allowed.

Parental Autonomy and Children’s Rights

Children should not get to decide whether their parents stay married. That is obviously true. They do not get to command their parents’ emotions. They do not get to force marital affection or fidelity. 

Children should not be able to imprison their parents in miserable or dangerous relationships.

That is not what this argument claims or attempts to implement. 

Recognizing a child’s right to family integrity does not give any control over the parent at all, only the state. It means the state must justify its legal act before dissolving something the child depends on. Constitutional rights often limit what the government may do without giving the rights-holder total control. A criminal defendant’s due process rights do not mean he controls the prosecutor. 

A child’s right to family integrity would not mean the child controls the marriage. Just that when we say children come first, we actually consider them first, not last.

There is an irony in the “children should not decide” objection. In no-fault divorce, the child is also not deciding. But no-fault divorce allows it without requiring both parents to agree. In some cases, one parent is deciding singlehandedly, while the children and the other parent are left helpless.

The parent who wishes to preserve the best arrangement for the child is left with no additional rights or resources to provide the child with ongoing stability. That parent is instead treated as no different from the parent who chose to dissolve the child’s family.

The Effect of Miserable Marriages on Children

Another important objection is that children are not helped by forcing parents who hate each other to remain married. Again, recognizing a child’s Fourteenth Amendment rights does not require this.

If the family environment is indeed harmful, the law can say so. If the children are being hurt by their current family system, then let that be proven, not assumed.

And again, recognizing children’s rights does not prevent a parent from exercising a new preference; it only determines how the law treats the parent who does. 

No-fault divorce treats grave harm, ordinary unhappiness, boredom, domestic violence, personal reinvention, and adultery the same. That is administratively efficient. But constitutional rights are often inconvenient. The Due Process Clause exists precisely to prevent efficiency from overcoming important individual rights.

The law already knows how to make these kinds of distinctions. 

Why Has Divorce Law Not Integrated This Right?

There are several reasons why this constitutional principle has, to date, not been integrated into divorce law.

First, divorce has historically been framed as a dispute between adults. The only listed parties are the spouses. The pleadings are filed by adults; the adults have the lawyers. Children only enter the case as subjects for custodial findings, not as independent constitutional persons. 

Second, the family-integrity doctrine has been developed within the context of child welfare cases, not divorce cases. Courts use the Fourteenth Amendment when the state removes a child from one parent or terminates parental rights. While divorce does functionally remove a child from at least one parent at least some of the time, no-fault divorces have never been held to the same standard.

Third, courts can mistake the “best interests of the child” analysis for the application of the child’s constitutional rights. But the “best interests” standard is usually a statutory standard. It gives judges discretion, but only after the family is already divided. 

Fourth, the law treats parental autonomy as asymmetrical. In non-divorce contexts, the state presumes that fit parents will act in their children’s best interests. But in no-fault divorce, the state effectively allows one parent to singlehandedly override the family-integrity interests of the child, while the parent acting in the child’s interests is effectively sidelined. 

Fifth, legislatures and judges fear the alternative. They worry, reasonably, that requiring a higher standard for divorce will revive ugly fault litigation, trap abused spouses, or invite children to be weaponized. Those are real concerns, and they should be addressed. But they are reasons to design better procedures, not reasons to pretend the child has no constitutional interests.

What the Law Could Require

An approach to divorce law that recognizes children’s Fourteenth Amendment rights would not abolish divorce. It would create a separate track for divorces involving minor children.

The law could still permit immediate separation, protective orders, emergency custody orders, and expedited divorce where abuse, violence, abandonment, or serious danger is shown. And it should. 

But there are many ways that states could reorganize their divorce laws to structurally protect children’s families and encourage parents to choose to stay within their marriage.

I’ve outlined one option I describe as “abandonment divorce.” In this structure, a parent could always choose to abandon the marriage, respecting that parent’s autonomy, if there is no other cause for the divorce, but that choice would be determinative in distributing marital assets and determining child custody, providing the children with the support and stability that they currently lack in the wake of this decision. It would also include a channel for filing for a divorce when it is in fact in the children’s best interests.

At a minimum, any solution should require a restructuring of incentives so that parents are legally incentivized to try to preserve a happy marriage. And it should recognize the child’s rights before a divorce is granted, not merely after. 

The Core Constitutional Error

The mistake in no-fault divorce is not that it lets people leave marriages they are unhappy in. It’s that it provides no legal incentive not to. 

It treats a child’s family as something that the child has no constitutional interest in preserving. 

But whatever divorce laws states create, they should require courts to see the child before they act. 

If family integrity is a constitutional right, then divorce law cannot treat children as merely a downstream custody problem. They are more than passengers in their parents’ litigation. They are whole persons with distinct rights, whose lives are being reordered by a state power that didn’t even think about them first.

Everyone says children come first. Let’s create a divorce regime that actually believes it. 

The post Children Come First appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

More than 50 years later, Denmark’s experiment has spread far beyond its borders. Pornography is now legal in most Western countries and nearly impossible to avoid. Pornography has evolved from print to film, from film to the internet, and now toward increasingly immersive technologies of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

Has this cultural shift harmed us?

Many people don’t think so. In a large study of Danish young adults, participants reported that pornography had little to no negative impact on their lives. Many even believed it improved their sexual knowledge and attitudes. Similar findings appear elsewhere. A representative Norwegian study found that 41% of adults reported no effect from pornography on their sex lives, while about a third believed it had positive effects. 

One study that asked open-ended questions of people mainly from Canada and the United States, but also Australia, France, Italy, Japan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, found that the most frequent report of pornography’s effect on their relationship was “No Negative Impact,” followed by reports that it was a “Source of Information” or useful for “Sexual Experimentation.” 

In other words, if we simply ask people whether pornography has harmed them, many will say it has not.

As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who studies the effects of pornography, I’ve learned how hard it can be to explain why I believe pornography is inherently harmful. When concerns about harm arise, they are frequently met with counterarguments from academics.

Conversations tend to go something like this:

Dysregulated Use

Me: Pornography use can become dysregulated. Some people experience patterns resembling addiction with loss of control, escalating use, and distress.

Counterpoint: Yes, some people struggle with dysregulated use. But research suggests this is only a minority of users. Depending on how it’s defined, estimates range from roughly 1% to 15%. If people keep their use under control, then pornography itself may not be inherently harmful.

Moral Conflict and Shame

Me: What about the shame that comes from pornography use? Research shows that people can experience distress from moral conflict even without addiction-like patterns of use.

Counterpoint: If you and society don’t believe pornography is wrong, you won’t experience shame from use. No shame, no distress.

Relationship Betrayal

Me: What about betrayal trauma from finding out a spouse is using pornography? Some experience reactions similar to discovering infidelity. Recent research on married women’s responses to spousal pornography describes it as a threat akin to infidelity. 

Counterpoint: That reaction depends on expectations. Couples can negotiate their boundaries. If partners mutually agree on its role in their relationship, the sense of betrayal disappears.

Violence and Sexual Aggression

Me: How about the way it promotes violence? Content analyses of popular pornographic videos show high levels of aggression toward women. Other studies have linked pornography consumption to sexually aggressive attitudes.

Counterpoint: But causation is unclear. Are people becoming more aggressive because of pornography, or are people with aggressive tendencies drawn to certain types of pornography? Maybe pornography functions more like gasoline on an existing fire rather than the spark that starts it. Also, if problematic content is the issue, then maybe the solution is to make the content more empowering toward women.

Exploitation

Me: What about exploitation in the industry? There are stories about coercion, manipulation, and poor working conditions for performers. 

Counterpoint: Some performers report negative experiences, but others say they’re relatively satisfied with life. If exploitation is the problem, then let’s have better regulation and working conditions. Also, artificial intelligence could eliminate the issue by replacing human performers entirely.

The Debate That Never Ends

After years of these conversations, it felt like every argument about pornography’s harm generated a counterargument.

The problem was never the pornography. The solution was always to change everything around it. 

The debate goes on. Eventually, seeing the mixed messages and counterarguments from research, I began to wonder whether we were asking the wrong question.

What Is Sexuality For?

I decided to take a step back in thinking through why some people report harm, benefits, or no effect from their pornography use. I realized that we need to think about what we truly want from sexuality. Without a clear destination of what we want from sexuality, every path can look equally valid.

Lewis Carroll illustrates this idea in “Alice in Wonderland.” When Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which road she should take, the cat asks where she wants to go. When Alice admits she doesn’t much care where she goes, the cat replies that it doesn’t matter which road she takes.

The same problem appears in debates about pornography. Before asking whether pornography harms us, we should ask a deeper question: what kind of sexuality do we want to cultivate?

Sexual Drive, Love, and Attachment

Research on relationships suggests that sexuality is driven by three motivational systems: sexual desire, romantic love, and attachment.

Sexual desire motivates attraction and arousal. It can be directed toward many different people and responds strongly to novelty.

Romantic love motivates exclusivity to a particular person. That person becomes special and irreplaceable. Their traits, even their quirks, become endearing.

Attachment develops in a relationship from being reliably responsive to each other’s needs over time. By supporting rather than obstructing dreams and protecting rather than exploiting vulnerabilities, trust and emotional security develop from knowing and caring for someone.

These systems work together in healthy relationships. Sexual desire may spark initial attraction, but romantic love and attachment transform desire into a lasting bond between two people.

Pornography clearly stimulates sexual desire. It’s designed to capture attention, increase novelty, and provoke arousal. But can pornography strengthen the romantic love and attachment that sustain long-term intimacy?

Objectification

The heart of pornography’s inconsistency with romantic love and attachment is objectification. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum describes objectification as treating a person primarily as a tool for one’s own purposes rather than as a full human subject. Philosopher Roger Scruton argued that sexual morality ultimately revolves around whether we encounter another person as a subject or reduce that person to an object of appetite.

Pornography alters that structure. It reinforces novelty and replaceability. Desire becomes oriented toward stimulation from endless interchangeable bodies, rather than toward knowing another person.

Romantic love and attachment depend on recognizing another person’s unique personhood rather than an interchangeable source of stimulation. Because pornography is structurally objectifying, it cannot promote the personhood-focused romantic love and attachment that sustain long-term sexual intimacy. We cannot love someone completely for who they are if we accept a message of sexuality without identity.

For Latter-day Saints, this vision of sexuality is not merely philosophical. It is theological. The vision cannot be reduced to pleasure, consent, or private preference alone. The restored gospel places sexuality within a vision of embodied love, covenant loyalty, family, and divine personhood. Within that vision, sexual intimacy is not merely a source of depersonalized stimulation or private gratification, but a sacred expression of mutual love and commitment. That doctrine on sexual intimacy does not settle every empirical question about pornography, but it does give us a vision for where to go.

Countering the Counters

Defenders of pornography will still raise reasonable questions. I don’t think, however, that the concern about objectification can be fixed. Some of my conversations have looked like the following.

Change the Content

Counter: Just change the content! Make it more relational, focused on identity and people who care about each other. What if it portrayed loving relationships instead of anonymous encounters?

Me: That change wouldn’t resolve the deeper issue. The interaction remains fundamentally one-sided. The people on screen still exist to produce an experience for someone else. The viewer receives stimulation without participating in the mutual recognition that defines real intimacy.

Use It to Strengthen Your Relationship with Your Spouse

Counter: What if couples watch pornography together? It could spark ideas, increase communication, or deepen intimacy.

Me: Even then, the focus shifts outward. Instead of discovering what’s unique about their relationship, the couple turns toward other bodies and other scenarios for stimulation. This introduces comparison, increases reliance on novelty, and can weaken the process of discovering one another more deeply. Real intimacy grows as someone becomes less replaceable, not more. Anything that consistently shifts attention away from that process can begin to reshape what sexuality feels like within the relationship.

What about Interactive AI Sexual Experience?

Counter: What about interactive artificial intelligence? What if technology could simulate attention, responsiveness, and emotional connection?

Choosing Connection Over Consumption

Critics and defenders of pornography often focus on measurable harms from addiction, shame, relationship conflict, or violence. These are important to understand, but pornography’s deeper influence may lie not in immediate outcomes, but in how it quietly trains our desires and expectations about sexuality itself.

Denmark’s decision in 1969 launched a cultural transformation that has spread across the Western world. Pornography is widely accessible, socially normalized, and often perceived as harmless. If we ask people whether it has harmed them, many will say it hasn’t. But that may not be the only question worth asking. People may be so immersed in pornography’s consumerist vision of sexuality that they struggle to see its inconsistency with authentic human connection. 

We need to think about what vision of sexuality we want to cultivate as a society. Pornography presents a vision of sexuality where stimulation is central, identity is optional, and relationship is secondary. It teaches that desire can be separated from the person who embodies it. It suggests that connection can be simulated without mutual knowing. It trains us to imagine bodies can be experienced without truly encountering the self behind them. Do we want to treat each other and ourselves as if we’re casual sexual partners?

The kind of intimacy most people ultimately want isn’t just about pleasure. It’s about being known. It’s about being chosen, not for what we provide, but for who we are. It’s about becoming irreplaceable to another person and allowing them to become irreplaceable to us. That kind of intimacy doesn’t come from treating sexuality casually. It comes from learning to see more in the same person over time.

Pornography doesn’t just shape what we do. It subtly reshapes what we learn to desire. Are we becoming the kind of people who can experience sexuality with deep intimacy? The answer may depend on whether we choose a sexuality of consumption or a sexuality of connection.

The post The Desecration of Desire appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

We recently sat down with Professor George to talk about what Fidelity Month is all about. This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and Professor George has approved the edits.

Public Square Magazine: For readers who may not be familiar with Fidelity Month, what is it and how did it start?

Robert George: Back in the spring of 2023, I happened to read a report in the Wall Street Journal. It included polling data showing that the belief of Americans in certain core values—values that had traditionally been sources of unity and strength for Americans—had very considerably diminished over the past decade or decade and a half. I’m talking about values such as religion, family, and patriotism. And these values have indeed been sources of our unity and strength in the United States of America because we are not a nation who can look to a common racial heritage or ethnic heritage, or even a common religious tradition or cultural heritage for our unity and strength. We Americans come from many, many different racial and ethnic backgrounds. We come from different traditions of faith. Our cultural histories are very different. So what do we have in common? What binds us together? Especially when times get tough—what are our sources of unity and strength?

Historically, they’ve been a shared commitment to the principles of our civic order, the principles of our Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. But also, very critically, they’ve been a shared belief in the importance of fidelity to God. Whether we’re Jewish or Christian, whether we’re Protestant or Catholic, Orthodox, LDS, we share, at least historically have shared, a commitment to the idea that there is a superintending deity: a God who creates us, indeed creates us equal, and endows us with certain unalienable rights. These rights don’t come from government; they don’t come from kings or parliaments or presidents or congresses; they come from a more than merely human source. And therefore, no merely human authority can legitimately violate those rights or take them away. So we’ve had that in common historically.

In fact, the polling showed that one value had increased in importance in the minds of Americans, and that was money. Religion went down, family went down, country went down, but the belief in the importance of money went up. Now, I’m all for people being prosperous. I want everybody to be financially secure. I want people to have enough money to take care of themselves and their families, and have a few luxuries, and all that. But money, as important as it is, is not on the same scale of importance with God, family, and country.

So, I really was concerned. And I thought, “How can we go about the business of reviving and restoring our fellow citizens’ commitment to the principles that once were the sources of our unity and strength that once bound us together?” How do we rebuild faith in God, a deeper commitment to spouses and families, a sense of the importance of patriotism and love of country? So, I said, initially to myself, well, we have a day for this, and a week for that, and a month for the other thing. How about having a month that’s dedicated to fidelity? To fidelity to God, fidelity to spouses and families, and fidelity to our country and communities.

And so I did what you do these days. I went online. I went to my Facebook account and my Twitter account, and I announced: “By the power vested in me by absolutely no one, henceforth the month of June will be Fidelity Month.” And that’s how it all began. And then, fortunately, people read the social media posts, and a number of people said, this is a great idea. We want to get behind this. And the next thing you know, we had Fidelity Month up and going. It’s entirely a grassroots movement. It’s not a top-down directed thing. There’s no budget, there’s no staff, there’s no administrative structure, there’s no president. I guess I’m the founder, since it was my idea, and I floated it on social media, but there’s no official structure for Fidelity Month. But it’s grown as a grassroots movement.

And I was really delighted, that for this month, for June of 2026, the governors of both Utah and Arkansas have proclaimed, officially, their states’ recognition of Fidelity Month, as has Michigan’s House of Representatives. So, it’s a growing movement.

PSM: This seems to be catching on. Why are people interested in this idea?

Robert George: Because at the end of the day, there are some things that money can’t buy. And there are some things that are more important than money. That’s not to deprecate the importance of material things. As I say, I really do want everyone to prosper financially. I want everyone to have a materially good life. But that’s a secondary consideration, or should be a secondary consideration. And I think even if things have gotten a bit out of whack, and people are tending to value material things over the more-than-merely-material things, people feel the want or the need for something greater, something beyond ourselves, something beyond the material.

And that’s when faith in God, the importance of fidelity to the family, the importance of patriotism and love of country and community come to the fore. Of course, people sometimes just need reminding. There’s an old saying that people more often need reminding than instruction. And I think that’s true in this case. People know in their hearts that there are some things that money can’t buy, there are some things that are more important than the material things of life, and they have a pretty good idea of what those things are. But sometimes, folks need to be reminded. So Fidelity Month is a reminder for all of us.

PSM: For you, is there an important distinction between “fidelity” and related concepts like “commitment” or “loyalty”? Was it important for you for this to be Fidelity Month?

Robert George: Well, there are certainly related concepts that are very important, and that are aspects of fidelity in some cases, but I think the term fidelity is the right term. What we need to revive is faith. Now, part of that is what we usually mean by faith, namely, faith in God. But we also need greater (and richer) fidelity in marriage and in the family. And we also need a revival of patriotism—fidelity to our country and communities. Being faithful involves being grateful—and that is another related concept. We’re faithful when we’re grateful. And fidelity does require gratitude, and gratitude does prompt fidelity, or reinforces fidelity. We should be grateful to live in this country, where we have, by the standards of history and cultures, an almost unique measure of liberty, opportunity, and security. Most people, in most places, at most times, would give their right arm for the opportunity to live in a place like the United States of America. And we don’t often appreciate enough what our country makes available to us and makes possible for us. Therefore, sometimes we’re not grateful; but we should be.

PSM: I think many people can easily get on board with the idea of fidelity to God and fidelity to family, but fidelity to country might be harder for some people. When many people hear patriotism, they immediately link it to nationalism. Could you walk us through how you think about patriotism?

Robert George: When some people hear the word “patriotism,” what they think is being evoked is a kind of chauvinism. But patriotism is not that. Patriotism is not thinking, because I’m an American, I’m better than you because you’re Japanese, or Indonesian, or French, or whatever. Even the concept of American exceptionalism, which I think is an important concept that I’ll talk about in a minute, is not a matter of beating on our chests and saying how wonderful we are and how much better we are than other people. That’s not it at all. Patriotism is simply a matter of being grateful and therefore being loyal. In other words, faithful to the country.

And patriotism itself is concern for one’s community—recognizing that one is not an island or an atomistic individual. So that’s the respect in which America is an exceptional place. No, it’s not that other people don’t believe in God, or think the family is very important, or believe in patriotism. People, wherever they are, should love their country for the gifts that their country gives them and makes available to them. They might not love their regime, they might not love their government. But patriotism is not love of your government. And it does not require us to adopt the position, “my government right or wrong.” Patriotism is love of one’s country.

Now, for those of us who are religious believers, certainly for those of us who are Christians, we recognize that love of country is secondary. Our first loyalty is to God. And our second loyalty is to our family. But to recognize that our first loyalty is to God and our second loyalty is our family is in no way to suggest that we don’t also need to be grateful to, and loyal to, our country and our community. It’s true that love of country can go haywire. And the nation can become an idol. But anything can become an idol. Anything can replace God. We have to be careful of that, no matter what the other thing is. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t properly contribute to, believe in, uphold, and be loyal to our country and our family.

PSM: I’m curious what threats you see to fidelity both in culture and in the ways that laws are changing. Where are these threats coming from, in your view?

Robert George: There are plenty of threats; there are always plenty of threats. As I said, anything can become an idol. The human condition is such that human beings—we frail, fallen, fallible creatures—are always vulnerable to the temptation to put something in God’s place, to put something first above God. Those of us who are Christians, of course, believe that there is nothing that comes above God or before God. The trouble is, we can put other things first. We can put money first. We can put fulfilling or satisfying our desires ahead of God—making our desires into idols. We can put fame or celebrity first, replacing God with those idols. Power, wealth, status, all of those things can become idols.

And we today, in 2026, here in the United States and throughout the world, are as vulnerable to those temptations to idol worship as anybody has ever been in the history of the human race. We are as prone to idol worship as were the people who bowed down before stone outcroppings or worshiped golden calves in ancient times. So that’s number one.

Now, what are the threats? Well, the threats are everywhere. Promiscuity. The divorce culture. Everything that came out of the sexual revolution. You can date the sexual revolution in different ways. You know, once you start trying to trace these things back, the next thing you know you’re in the Garden of Eden with the serpent and the apple and Adam and Eve. But certainly in the 1940s Alfred Kinsey’s widely hyped and quite phony and fraudulent so-called sexuality “science” became a kind of justifying theory for breaking traditional norms of sexual morality. And then in the 1950s, we had the mainstreaming of pornography, so-called softcore pornography, beginning with Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine and his whole empire. Then the 1960s counterculture normalized promiscuity and made it socially acceptable. With that came the rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing and massive fatherlessness, especially in some of the most vulnerable communities, or sub-communities of our country. And then the sexual revolution continued to the point at which you now have people claiming that being male or female is not an objective biological reality. Instead, it’s said to be a matter of some subjective alleged “gender identity” that you have invisibly somewhere inside you. So, there are very significant threats to the family today.

And then with patriotism and love of country, it’s so easy to fall into thinking, well, my country owes me, or my community owes me, but I owe nothing back. I’m here for them to serve. And I need to just focus on getting everything I can from the common stock or the common pool. And, I don’t have any responsibility to give back, to serve, to do my part, to be a contributing member of the community. And I think, again, we have to fight back and push back against such attitudes. We need to remind people of the importance of being contributors and not just takers.

PSM: I’m curious, if you could have this grassroots movement grow in an ideal fashion, which institutions would be the most important for this to take hold? I know it’s exciting to see some states adopting it, but what about families, religious groups, or other groups? How do we spread it to those who maybe aren’t already inclined toward faithfulness?

Robert George: I like grassroots building. I want this to be a grassroots movement. I don’t want to try to direct everything from the top. So, I’d like to see it begin in the family, with Mom and Dad teaching the kids—not just by precept, but by example too. Precept is important. It’s important for parents and teachers and pastors to preach a little bit, to talk. But even more important is setting an example. So, Mom and Dad, set the example for your children of worshiping God and putting God first. That’s what my parents did for me. It’s the greatest gift they gave to me and my brothers.

Second, parents should model fidelity in their love and concern for each other. And by fidelity, I want to make clear, I mean more than merely avoiding having adulterous affairs. That’s important, obviously. But that’s only the beginning of fidelity, not the whole of fidelity in marriage. The whole of fidelity in marriage means serving your husband or wife. Serving your spouse. That’s why we think of marriage, rightly, as a vocation. Vocation is not a career; vocation is not a job. Vocation is a way of serving, and in marriage, husband serves wife and wife serves husband. Marriage is a way of serving. And of course, husband and wife, as father and mother, serve their children. So, I think it’s important for men and women as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, to model fidelity in its richest sense in marriage.

Third, parents, again, by precept and example, can model patriotism. They can take their civic responsibilities seriously and thereby encourage and teach their children to take their civic responsibilities seriously. Vote. Contribute to campaigns. Get behind the causes you believe in. Contribute time as well as money to serving the civic interest. Be willing to run for office. It doesn’t have to be President of the United States. How about the local school board? How about the county commission? Or support friends and neighbors who you think would be good office holders in their efforts to be a county commissioner, or a school board member, or mayor, or whatever it is.  I think those are some of the ways, and they all involve teaching by both precept and example. People can begin in the family to promote fidelity.

Then, what’s next? Churches and synagogues and mosques and other houses of worship all over the country should be promoting these values. I would love the churches—all denominations and traditions, because they basically share the same set of principles—I’d love to see them get behind Fidelity Month, recognize Fidelity Month. The pastor should preach a sermon about fidelity at least once during the month. Preach on fidelity. Maybe you could do three Fidelity Month sermons: One on faithfulness to God, one on faithfulness in marriage, one on patriotism and love of country, and why that’s legitimate and not idolatrous, unless you go about it in an idolatrous way.

And remember, this is all about reminding people of what they already know. We’re not teaching something new. This is not some new ideology. It’s not some new philosophy, it’s not some new theory. It’s just reminding people that there are some things that really matter, that ultimately matter.

You know, I sometimes say to my students, and to my kids (and to myself, to be honest with you) that there are some things that matter, but at the end of the day, not all that much. And then there are other things that really matter. So, what are the things that matter, but at the end of the day, not all that much? Things like wealth, power, influence, status, prestige, celebrity. Those aren’t bad things. It’s not bad to want those things. In fact, they can be good things because you can use them for good. You can use money for lots of good things. You can use power, if you have it, in a good way, for good things, to do good things. You can use influence for good. You can use celebrity for good.

But those things, though they matter, are not, at the end of the day the things that really matter, because things like wealth, power, status, influence, prestige, and celebrity are not ends in themselves. They’re not things that we want just for their own sake. They’re things that are means to other ends, and they have their value only as means to other ends. And they need to be contrasted with the things that really matter, the things that are not mere means to other ends but are desirable for their own sakes—things like faith, family, friendship, knowledge, beauty, integrity, honesty, decency, and compassion. Those are the things we want, not just as extrinsic instruments to get something else that they will make it possible for us to obtain or attain. They are the things you want for their own sakes. They are the things that really matter. They’re the things that ultimately matter.

David Brooks has a good way of illustrating the difference. He asks, what do you want on your tombstone someday? We all have just a short period of time on this earth. If you live 100 years, that’s a really old age, but it’s a blink of an eye in the history of the cosmos. What do you want on your tombstone for whatever number of years you have? Do you want it to say something like, Summa Cum Laude, Princeton? Goldman Sachs partner? No. What you want is something like “faithful husband, loving father and grandfather, loyal friend.” From the perspective of death, we can see more clearly the difference between the things that really matter, such as family, friendship, faith, knowledge, beauty, integrity, from the things that matter but not all that much.

PSM: Are there other ways that people can get involved if they are interested in doing more?

Robert George: Yes. I’d like everybody to go to the Fidelity Month website, www.fidelitymonth.com, because there at the website, you’ll be able to see what you personally can do to be part of this grassroots movement. There aren’t going be people upstairs who are doing stuff. Everything about Fidelity Month is grassroots, so if you go to the website, you can see what you can do to promote Fidelity Month.

Number one, you can say the Fidelity Month Prayer, which is a prayer that people in all traditions of faith can, in good conscience, say to ask God’s blessing on us, that we may be truly faithful to Him, faithful to our spouses and families, loyal and faithful to our country. Number two, you’ll be able to access the Fidelity Month logo for free. Use it for the month of June for your social media accounts. Use it on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or whatever social media accounts you have. Number three, it has suggestions about what you can do in your local community, like hosting a speaker for Fidelity Month, maybe at your church, maybe at your community center, or having a panel discussion. You can also go to the merch section of the website, and you can buy at cost (we don’t make any money on it, it’s just sold at cost) the Fidelity Month flag, or a Fidelity Month cap or tee-shirt. Those things help to get the message out. People see the cap, they see the shirt, they see the flag, and they ask, hey, what’s that about? And boy, there’s your opportunity to witness to the importance of fidelity. And there are many other suggestions about how just everyday people, just ordinary folks, in every walk of life, from every tradition of faith, with every background, can spread the word about fidelity and be part of this movement to remind people about the things that really matter.

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We are almost to June, a month often known as LGBT+ Pride Month.

Pride is a loaded term. But it’s easy to understand why pride feels a lot better than shame and hiding in the closet, especially when sexual feelings can be fundamental to one’s identity. And superficially, pride seems to be not only the opposite of shame, but also superior in every way. 

Shame feels lonely and paralyzing (because it is). Pride feels liberating and connecting. If my only choice were between pride and shame, of course I would choose pride. 

But those are not our only two choices. And pride and shame are not actually opposing choices; they are just two sides of the same limiting coin. Pride does not actually liberate or connect us. It isolates us in a different way than shame does, but just as profoundly. 

The Twin Errors of Pride and Shame

As C.S. Lewis wrote, Satan “always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he relies on your extra dislike of one to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors.” 

As near as I can tell, Satan is the author of both pride and shame. He introduced pride by rebelling against Heavenly Father and launching the War in Heaven for his own glory, permanently separating him from God. Later, he introduced shame in the Garden of Eden by convincing Adam and Eve they needed to hide from Heavenly Father when they made a mistake. 

When we are stuck in this false binary, we can quickly flip back and forth between shame and pride, dysfunctionally ping-ponging between them: hating ourselves, then thinking we are justified in staying where we are because the standards are unfair.

A Better Way

The better way is where true liberation, true freedom, and true discipleship are found: in a covenant relationship with God. It is a place of consecrated living, spiritual peace, and abundant joy. Covenant relationship is not primarily about our weaknesses or strengths, but to whom they are consecrated, and how well we are connected to others. We no longer worry about hiding our flaws, but repent of them. We no longer need praise and affirmation from others to feel good about our own characteristics and accomplishments. We recognize that as to ourselves we are weak, but with God we can do all things. 

Perhaps the best scriptural term for the antidote to pride and shame is meekness, as Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles discussed at a 2017 BYU Devotional, and again during April 2018 General Conference. He taught that the most valuable learning comes through experience, not merely intellectually understanding something, because experience allows us to repent, which helps us grow. 

When we understand that the goal of life is gaining these experiences, we realize that opposition doesn’t mean it’s time to give up or we’re failing. Instead, it’s how we learn to place our faith in Jesus Christ, not in outcomes, as my friend Blake Fisher puts it. 

But, as Elder Bednar teaches, being meek does not mean being “weak, timid, or passive.” Rather, it is the quality of being God-fearing, righteous, teachable, patient in suffering, and willing to follow gospel teachings. Meekness is being receptive to divinely directed counsel and correction.

Neither Pride Nor Shame Leads to Change

On that theme, Elder Bednar shared a remarkable story he has never forgotten. Then-Elder Henry B. Eyring told him, “President, if you have not been rebuked lately by the Holy Ghost as you are praying, then you need to improve your prayers.”

On the other hand, those in the grasp of pride will hear this and take offense. They will discard the counsel because the tone was wrong or the message was painful. They are unwilling and unable to look at the beneficial principles that may underlie a harsh or poorly-timed delivery method.

Shame tells us that we aren’t worthy of the Savior’s Atonement. Pride tells us we don’t need it. Both alienate us from a relationship with the One who alone can offer relief, peace, and transformation. Jesus Christ and His Atoning power enable us to conquer these traps and consecrate our experiences for our good.

As we focus on making and keeping our covenants, our relationship with Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ deepens, and our gaze naturally lifts upward toward the Father and His Son. This conscious ascension—choosing to look to Them instead of being consumed by our fallen nature’s tendency toward pride or shame—is what allows our behavior and life focus to follow, gradually elevating us to become more like Them.

The pride-and-shame trap is just one of several traps that can occur when a shallow understanding of the gospel is combined with secular worldviews. Rising above these false dichotomies enables us to experience the true growth and blessings that the restored gospel offers, including in approaching our sexuality. All of us—regardless of our specific challenges—can find hope, community, and the blessings of the restored gospel. I second Elder Bednar’s observation that “walking in meekness will help us to press forward through the messy middle.” In doing so, we can receive “beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.” 

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It took over 40 years to put into words what happened to me as a child. Each time I tried, I would somehow find ways to avoid talking about the abuse openly. 

After grappling with the dark shadows of trauma for over 60 years, the heart-level healing I am now experiencing—after so long—has surprised me.

As a little child in the early ‘60s, I often heard the words: “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.”

My dad, raised during World War II by a Marine drill sergeant father, viewed emotional outbursts, especially crying, as weakness—much like others of his generation. Even in my mid-20s, I remember Mom asking me not to tell her anything “upsetting” because she didn’t want to cry. “Crying doesn’t help anything,” she said.

But I had plenty to cry about. 

I had been the victim of ongoing abuse since the tender age of three through my midteens at the hands of multiple perpetrators. I also had plenty to say, but couldn’t say it, because “no one likes a tattletale.” Contributing to this barrier of silence were words from war-era Bambi: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”

Those phrases may seem small. But for a child living with abuse, I applied those sayings to the situation I was in, and those standards became a kind of prison for me.

That’s one reason why so many victims wait years, or even decades, to speak out. 

Mistaking Silence for Safety

Standing in front of a small U-Haul in December 1968, I pointed down the street and, with as much feeling as I could muster, exclaimed, “I don’t like that boy. He’s mean!”

Mom snapped: “Diana! We don’t say naughty things about people we don’t know. I don’t ever want to hear you say anything naughty about that boy again.”

And I didn’t.

It’s only because we were moving that I had the courage to point him out that day. But after Mom’s scolding, I didn’t dare say another word about him (or other abusers) for nearly 20 years.

I’m not alone with delayed disclosure. It is, tragically, common in cases of child sexual abuse. Many victims wait years or decades to tell anyone. Some research puts the average age of first disclosure or reporting at 52.

One 2010 research report summarizes: “On average it takes 17 years before victims disclose their abuse.”

Why do victims wait so long to speak out? What makes speaking out feel so impossible? Fear, shame, confusion, culture, threats, and the absence of empathy can all work together to keep a child silent. 

It wasn’t until recently that I could see how being scared to “tell” set me up for years of continuing abuse and ensuing mental health issues.

Saying It Out Loud

Even today, I wonder: Why didn’t someone stop the abuse when I was little? Why didn’t anyone see that I was suffering and try to help?

Those questions troubled me until words I overheard as a child came to mind while writing a few months ago: 

“Should we talk to her about it?”

“No, she’s too little. She won’t remember.”

Although it took me 20 years to speak up, I remembered.

I had just tried a third antidepressant, and I still wasn’t doing well. My doctor said, “I think what’s going on is more in here,” pointing to my head, “than anything else. A good therapist will help you more than I can.”

Even then, it took 18 anxiety-filled months before I mustered the courage to finally “tell”—to say out loud the words: “I was sexually abused as a child.”

Trauma researcher Peter A. Levine has written, “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” He also explains that avoidance is sometimes “the nervous system’s attempt to cope with overwhelming activation.” 

Looking back, I can see that as soon as I came close to mentioning that I had been sexually abused, I would stop going to therapy. That is, until the next triggered depression. Without realizing it, I was actually avoiding the emotional turmoil of talking about what happened to me.

What felt for a season as a weakness was, in part, woundedness and fear. That distinction matters for survivors, but also for families, friends, and faith communities. If we misunderstand the factors that keep survivors silent, we may unintentionally deepen another person’s isolation. 

Deeper healing needed

Because that on-again, off-again cycle continued for over thirty-five years, progress seemed so slow that I often wondered what was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I experience more than fleeting relief from depression?

“Innocence offended, peace and comfort hid; Swallowed cups of bitterness, came to live,” I once wrote in a poem trying to make sense of it all.

Trauma does not stay neatly in memory. As Bessel van der Kolk has observed, “The effects of trauma are stored in the body. Until they are addressed there, words alone are not enough.”

That insight helped me understand why my healing required more than brief conversations or temporary relief. It also helped me see why healing can take longer than outsiders expect. Survivors are not machines to be reset. They are wounded souls and bodies learning and healing.

My emotionally raw poetry continued to help me heal: 

“Years of vinegar passed; no one knew but me. Sorrow’s Jailor, ne’er a wounded heart frees.”

When I first began writing, I didn’t know I had entered a pathway out of trauma. Even so, words still mattered a great deal to me—words expressed to others, and to God, too. 

I didn’t often pray aloud, but my wounded heart continually pleaded for help—yearning for deeper, more lasting healing. It wasn’t until recent years, while pondering and writing about my experiences, that I began to clearly see God’s hand in my life.

All along, silent prayers were being answered. 

As President Thomas S. Monson, former President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once taught, “I promise you that you will one day stand aside and look at your difficult times, and you will realize that He was always there beside you.”

More Than My Story

Learning to trust in the Lord with all my heart has not been easy for me. But as I choose to trust Him—and his timing—I have, indeed, experienced deeper, more lasting healing. 

My story is personal, but the struggle that victims of childhood sexual abuse experience is not. Many who suffer do not disclose quickly. Many who try to speak do so indirectly. Many are met with misunderstanding. 

This issue asks something of all of us. 

It took over 40 years to put into words what happened to me as a child.

I wish it had not taken so long.

But I am grateful that, by God’s grace, it was not too late.

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I couldn’t believe I yelled at my five-year-old for spilling milk. It happened so fast. The milk jug just slipped out of his hands. What a mess! 

Milk covered my son and the floor, and I felt frustrated. My daughter sensed the tension and rushed out of the room. My baby’s wails rang out. The milk spiller was in shock and scared of what I would do next. Everyone was upset because I was yelling—again. 

Before my husband and I had kids, I vowed never to be a yeller. But somehow I had become one. I wondered what would happen in the future if I hollered about insignificant, accidental things like this. Telling myself not to yell wasn’t enough, but what could I do?

This is parenthood, where showers and sleeping seem optional, and an overwhelmed parent sometimes serves tears for breakfast when milk spills. Realizing I wanted to change what I was serving, I began studying how the Savior’s example could help me with my parenting triggers. Each of our parenting journeys is different, but our source for comfort, peace, and direction can be the same. Jesus shows us the way in all things, especially in parenting. 

An Inspired Lesson

After the milk incident, I spent the next couple of days in a fog, discouraged by how I had handled things. I knew I could do better, but how was I going to “fix” this part of me that yelled when I felt stressed and overwhelmed?

The question “What would Jesus do?” came to mind, but my mind went blank. I thought of the loving Jesus who was kind and compassionate, but I wasn’t sure this version of Jesus could help me with my current dilemma. 

That Sunday, the incident still weighed on my heart during a Sunday School lesson about the Savior and the woman caught in adultery. I had always concentrated on the Savior’s compassionate response to the woman. But this time, the way He dealt with the judgmental scribes and Pharisees caught my attention. 

The difference between how the Savior responded and how the scribes and Pharisees handled this situation was notable. The scribes and Pharisees were ready to argue and came pointing their fingers at the woman to stir up trouble. (I have to admit, they reminded me of my kids when they accused their siblings of misbehavior!)

But Jesus didn’t let the actions of the scribes and Pharisees determine how He would respond. He decided to respond intentionally in positive, calm ways rather than react in anger. Jesus didn’t react. He acted.

Agency and Anger

We choose how we act when confronted, disappointed, frustrated, or caught off guard. As Elder Lynn G. Robbins, a General Authority in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, taught, one of Satan’s cunning lies is to “dissociate anger from agency, making us believe that we are victims of an emotion that we cannot control.” When we say, “I lost my temper,” it implies we were not responsible: someone else “made” us act out in anger. But although we may be strongly provoked, we choose whether to let anger escalate and dictate our behavior. 

Jesus understood this and gave us an example to follow. John wrote that “Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.” The scribes and Pharisees were so busy shouting accusations about the woman that they could not listen. Jesus understood this and didn’t shout over them.  He waited for them to be quiet. When Jesus ignored their outburst, it seemed as though it did not affect Him. This was not the reaction they expected. And so in their stunned, quiet state, His simple words were enough to teach “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.”

Practical Preparation

Staying calm during the outbursts of others isn’t easy, but it can quickly dispel anger. Dr. Glenn Latham researched this Christlike approach. He wrote: “I have been astounded to find that if parents remain calm, empathetic, and direct even in the face of outrageous reviling, 97 out of 100 times, on the third directive, children will comply.” It amazes me how consistently my children’s anger disappears after their third attempt to engage me in an argument. If I stay calm, their anger fades.

Another thing I realized is that Jesus didn’t just decide to be calm when problems arose. He took time to pray, reflect, ponder, and center Himself often. This may have been why He went to the Mount of Olives before going to the temple. When Jesus woke in the morning, He may not have known that angry men would confront Him while He was teaching, but He was prepared to respond intentionally. 

I also discovered that our trouble spots often occurred at the same time and were about the same things. The Lord prompted me to make some intentional changes, like establishing a nightly routine that helped everyone know what to expect. A healthy afternoon snack reduced tears before dinner. When milk spilled at breakfast (again!), I learned to take a deep breath, say a quick prayer, and picture the Savior before responding. This helped me to stay calm and in control of my actions (most of the time). 

Leading with Love

From studying this Bible story, I realized I had developed the mistaken belief that yelling was necessary in parenting because it seemed to yield immediate results. I also recognized that, in the long run, my lack of self-control could provoke anger and resentment in my children. By not abusing my power, I could build a better relationship with them. 

Love and compassion were key to the Savior staying calm. Just imagine how scared and embarrassed the woman caught in adultery must have been. Jesus understood this. When we are compassionate, we try to feel what others may be feeling and consider how we would want to be treated. This softens our hearts, allowing us to respond with empathy rather than anger. I thought this aspect of the Savior wouldn’t help me with my dilemma. I was so wrong. Our charity towards others helps us approach contention differently. 

Jesus loved the scribes and Pharisees. I had overlooked this. These contentious men were also God’s children. Jesus was patient and looked for the best way to reach them. 

Jesus’s questions and calmness helped these men consider their own actions. Jesus gave them time to reflect while He bent down and continued writing in the dirt. His question pricked their hearts. It was something the men couldn’t argue with, and they went away. 

Jesus also modeled a vital parenting principle: Jesus reproved in private and praised in public. After the accusers left, He knelt near the woman and asked her questions. He didn’t congratulate the accusers for finding a sinner; instead, He encouraged the woman to change: “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” Condemnation would not have helped this woman to change, but the Savior knew that love could. As the Joseph Smith Translation notes, “the woman glorified God from that hour, and believed on his name.” Love brought about lasting change.

A More Excellent Way

What can I do to bring about lasting change? Learning from Jesus’s example, I can ask my children better questions instead of just telling them what to do. Giving children the responsibility of thinking about their own actions can help them learn to choose good for themselves. 

The milk incident happened over twenty years ago, and I am still trying to master my actions. Once in a while, the “yeller” returns, but I have made progress. I now view the times I get upset as opportunities to grow instead of an excuse to feel bad.

Recently, one of my daughters was having a rough morning before a volleyball tournament. She yelled about the early hour. She yelled about not being able to find her “stupid” socks. And she yelled about having to go to her sister’s “stupid” tournament. 

I chose to stay calm and compassionate. I didn’t argue or try to fix her “stupid” words in the moment.

A few days later, she asked me, “Mom, why didn’t you yell back?”

I told her, “I’m trying to be more like Jesus. He frequently had people yelling at Him, but He didn’t yell back. He chose to be calm instead of reacting in anger.”

She smiled and said, “Mom, you did that the other morning. I think I can do that, too.”

The Savior’s example of staying calm inspires. When we respond as He did, we not only become more like Him, but we invite others to feel His love and follow Him. We feel the joy that only comes from following Him. I may still occasionally burn the toast and undercook the eggs, but thanks to the Great Tutor, the “tears for breakfast” are becoming a thing of the past.

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“I feel so sorry for you.”

My relative’s words took me by surprise. We were enjoying an afternoon together at a big family gathering, immersed in a conversation completely unrelated to her abrupt and pitying sentence.

“Oh?”

“You must be so bored,” she said with compassion. “You’ve spent so many years on your education—reading the most difficult texts, solving complex legal problems. I can’t imagine how monotonous taking care of babies must feel compared to that. Do you ever miss the intellectual stimulation?”

Her tone was sincere. She genuinely worried I might not be enjoying my decision to put my legal career on hold—my decision to dedicate all my time and energy to my children. She wanted to make space for me to voice any frustrations or regrets.

But I had to tell her the truth: “Actually, parenting is the most intellectually stimulating thing I’ve ever done.”

And I meant it.

My relative’s words could have been my own five years earlier, when I assumed that life as a stay-at-home mother would be mundane, a waste of my potential, something I was too “smart” for.

At the conclusion of my bachelor’s degree, I dove headfirst into LSAT study, then entered law school, and then enrolled in every possible extracurricular. I set the stage for an illustrious legal career.

When my husband and I decided to welcome our first baby into our family halfway through law school, I didn’t expect much to change. Sure, I would have a child to take care of, but there was no way this little person would derail me from my ambitions.

Or so I thought.

Nothing could have prepared me for how wildly my first daughter would take over my heart and soul. As her birth approached, my legal career started to look less like the burning flame I thought it was and more like a meager candle—dim compared to the roaring sun of my daughter’s existence.

These feelings only escalated after Brea’s birth. The sacred trust of introducing another human into this world enveloped me. When I should have been studying for law school, I immersed myself in parenting books, striving to refine my personal parenting philosophy. The insights I gained lit up my mind and heart more than any legal text ever could.

I hung onto my career as long as I could. I graduated from law school, studied for and passed the bar exam, and worked part-time for a year. But from the moment Brea took her first breath, almost any time spent away from her was maddening. Listening to her cry for me while I worked—even though I knew she was safe with my husband—tore me to pieces.

When our second daughter, Scottie, was born, I quit my job as an attorney and changed my legal license to “inactive” status. And I haven’t looked back. Yes, legal work was incredibly intellectually challenging, but I haven’t lacked for intellectual stimulation one bit. If anything, stay-at-home motherhood feels more intellectually engaging than my career ever did.

In the months since my well-meaning relative suggested motherhood might bore me, I’ve reflected continually on why my answer was such an emphatic “not at all.” These reflections have turned into a list of all the ways motherhood fills my intellectual cup. I made this list for myself as a reminder of all the ways my mind can expand, even when my days might look outwardly mundane. But I’ve also felt compelled to share this list with other parents, especially parents wondering whether stepping away from paid work will mean stepping away from intellectual life.

My goal is not to tell any family what to do. I firmly believe that every family should pursue a life that aligns with their talents, interests, and values, in consultation with the Lord, regardless of societal or cultural norms. But I hope this list excites those who have chosen to parent full time: I hope it helps them revel in the opportunities that childrearing provides. And to anyone else, I hope it offers a different view of stay-at-home parenthood—the unveiling of a dimension beyond  dirty diapers and dino nuggets.

Motherhood Engages the Mind through Interpretation

Consider Your Child’s Perspective

“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” Matthew 7:12

One of the most challenging yet rewarding intellectual opportunities parenting provides is the chance to grow in compassion.

It isn’t easy, especially when your child is acting in a way that you could never imagine yourself acting. But asking yourself the right questions can get the gears turning:

• If I were acting the way my child is, why would I be doing it?
• If I were the child in this situation, how would I want an adult to respond to my behavior?
• What might be the good intentions behind this behavior?
• What unmet need might be driving this behavior?

As I have asked myself these questions, even some of my toddler’s most confusing behaviors have become understandable. Perhaps hitting the baby is her attempt to get attention and connection. Sometimes “pushing my buttons” is really just her trying to find a way to play.

Compassion doesn’t make harmful behavior acceptable. But it does help me understand and address the root causes of that behavior. And often, it turns down the emotional volume of the situation. It puts me into a collaborative, solution-oriented mindset rather than a defensive one.

Get Curious About Your Own Behavior

“But let a man examine himself.” 1 Corinthians 11:28

As a parent, I’ve taken a page out of my toddler’s book and am constantly asking myself the age-old question:

Why?

I’ve come to question everything that I do, especially when it’s impulsive or reactive. I don’t do this in a condemning way, but rather with curiosity and compassion. Where did I learn this response to a child’s behavior? When did I learn that this is what a “good” parent does, says, or looks like? If I were to treat an adult this way, would that go over well? If I were treated this way, would I feel inclined to trust and cooperate—or to resist and shut down?

As Roslyn Ross, author of “A Theory of Objectivist Parenting,” put it well: “Raising children is an act of philosophy.” When we become conscious of why and how we do the things we do, childcare can become an intentional expression of our most deeply cherished values.

Motherhood Engages the Mind through Attention

Journal

“I will remember the deeds of the Lord.” Psalm 77:11

A journal has the power to romanticize the mundane. I use mine to catalog the moments that make each day sparkle: the hilarious things that Brea says, the way “mama” was Scottie’s first word, the memories of pen pal–ing, fort building, and flower picking—all collected into my own little whimsical volume.

A journal is also a tool for mental rehearsal. In mine, I reflect on my most challenging moments as a parent and write out how I intend to respond to similar moments in the future. Writing out a game plan makes it easier to act in a way that I’m proud of once I meet the heat of the moment.

Indulge in a Sense of Awe

“O how great the goodness of our God.” 2 Nephi 9:10

Albert Einstein said, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” Nothing is more mysterious or beautiful than a newborn baby. When my first daughter was born, I was constantly awestruck by the miracle of her existence and the mystery of who she was and who she would become. Even the tiniest developmental steps felt like magic.

As our kids get older and our families grow, it can be easy to lose this sense of awe. But the truth is that every child at every age is just as worthy of wonder. Our kids are constantly changing, each day unveiling another piece of their unique spirits. Reminding myself of this truth helps me see beyond whatever the stresses of the day are and instead bask in the blessing of watching my children unfold right in front of me.

And often it is my children’s examples that remind me how else I might indulge in the awe and wonder of life. Hearing my kids point out all the wonders they notice as we go on walks or drive through town reminds me how much I’ve been taking for granted, and how much I could be using my brain to celebrate beauty instead of lamenting inconvenience.

Practice Presence

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” Matthew 6:34

Amidst the modern world’s accelerating pace, parents have the opportunity to slow to the (literal) crawl of brand-new people. Our children show us the pace that humans are biologically wired for.

I enjoy practicing the art of being present without preoccupation. Finding moments to be with my children without any ulterior motives—no desire to teach, distract, entertain, or manipulate. Just taking them in; learning their hearts.

Motherhood Engages the Mind through Growth

Make Talent Development a Family Affair

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” Matthew 5:16

As parents, we sometimes obsess over stuffing our kids with a toolbox of talents. We simultaneously enroll them in ceramics, violin, gymnastics, and lacrosse, hoping our children grow into prodigies or Olympians.

But what if talent development were more of a team effort? What if it were less about parents managing their children’s careers and more about spending quality time together—time that is genuinely enjoyable and talent-enhancing for both parent and child?

For me, this looks like letting Brea measure and stir, sharing my passion for cooking delicious, healthy food. It’s challenging myself to improve my own lackluster drawing skills while Brea hones her mastery of the crayon. It’s reading a novel while nursing Scottie, with Brea nearby, flipping through picture books. It’s my husband taking Brea to the skate park in the evenings, letting her zoom around on her scooter while he practices skateboard tricks.

Set Flexible Goals

“Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope.” 2 Nephi 31:20

In our efforts to help our children “become something,” it’s easy to forget that we, too, are still in the process of becoming. Setting personal goals has been integral to my own sense that I am still “myself” as a parent.

Yet parenting requires flexibility, and one of the biggest learning curves for me has been learning to pursue my goals and plans even when they inevitably get derailed. Sometimes, a dirty diaper demands to be changed before a podcast episode can be recorded or a 5K can be run. The good news is that flexibility is a hallmark of mental health. While goals can foster self-improvement, learning to navigate unpredictability also boosts self-efficacy.

Strengthen the Muscles of Your Character

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” Galatians 5:22–23

I have grown to enjoy practicing all the traits I want to embody—patience, kindness, confidence—especially when they are tested. I have come to see each tantrum, “power struggle,” and milk spill as a workout for my character: an opportunity to dig deep and be the person I want to be, even when resistance is high. Although none of us will be perfect when we do this, each challenge is an opportunity to get stronger.

And when we are not in the midst of a “character workout,” we can work to cultivate our internal dialogue. I am learning to speak to myself with compassion and empowerment—the exact same way you would want your kids to speak to themselves.

See Through the Savior’s Eyes

Most poignant to me is how parenthood has driven me to the Savior. I’ve gone beyond asking, “What would Jesus do?” and now contemplate, “How would Jesus see, think, and feel in this situation?” I can think of nothing more intellectually engaging than trying to mirror the mind and heart of Jesus Christ.

I am only two and a half years into my journey as a parent. I don’t have it all figured out.

But this is why parenting is so intellectually fulfilling for me. Each day meets me with an abundance of lessons to learn. I get to figure life out, all over again, alongside my children. Teaching my kids what it means to be human is cracking me open and forcing me to learn the same lessons. It is challenging, humbling, and more rewarding than I could have ever imagined.

And while I am confident I’ll one day return to the legal career that once filled my intellectual cup, I’m more than satisfied with the overflow God is pouring in during this crayon-filled season.

The post The Intellectual Life of A Stay-at-Home Mother appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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When I was a teenager, I competed in a track meet and made it to the finals. Events ran later than anticipated and my dad, who was serving as a bishop, had interviews scheduled for that evening. He went searching for a pay phone, but couldn’t get hold of everyone he needed to, so he called a family that lived close to the church and asked them to tape a note on the door explaining his absence. 

This is a small story, and one that loses some of its impact in the age of cell phones, but it was significant to me as a fifteen-year-old. My dad was very conscientious in his church work, but he had cancelled interviews to see me run. This incident spoke to my teenage heart, and it has continued to inform me through the years. 

Something struck me recently, though. I didn’t know the details of this story from my dad. It was my mom who later told me of the missed interviews. Mom was the narrator of much of what occurred in our home, and this was just one example of many. It was Mom’s voice that often provided the tone of the plot points in our family story. She was an optimistic narrator who expressed reverence for the characters involved even when addressing complexity.  

Much gets said about women’s emotional labor on social media. It’s argued that mothers carry the burden of the emotional needs of the family. As I look back on my parents’ marriage, I recognize that my more talkative mom did carry the responsibility of being the communication hub in our family, and by extension much of the emotional climate as well. But was it a burden for her? I hadn’t sensed that and she was a strong, confident woman who shared her thoughts. 

My dad was a reserved man, and he didn’t talk as much as my mom. This difference in my parents’ personalities underscored to me that the way in which a wife approaches her husband’s strengths and weaknesses has a profound effect on a family. The healthy dialogue my mom encouraged invited a synergy of their strengths.

In 2006, Elder James E. Faust counseled:

There are some voices in our society who would demean some of the attributes of masculinity. A few of these are women who mistakenly believe that they build their own feminine causes by tearing down the image of manhood. This has serious social overtones because a primary problem in the insecurity of sons and daughters can be the diminution of the role of the father image.

Let every mother understand that if she does anything to diminish her children’s father or the father’s image in the eyes of the children, it may injure and do irreparable damage to the self-worth and personal security of the children themselves. How infinitely more productive and satisfying it is for a woman to build up her husband rather than tear him down.

The dialogue in our homes affects all family members and we are shaped by the conversations we are exposed to and participate in. The Canadian philosopher, Ralph Heintzman, describes how each of us is born into an ongoing conversation that began before our birth and will continue after our death. It is in a conversational context that “we develop our sense of ourselves and of the world…and it is by joining the conversation that we become who we are.” 

But, Heintzman warns, we aren’t just individuals. We need to “give a full account of humanity…which reflects our necessary involvement in a greater whole.” Heintzman argues for language that addresses the relational nature of what it means to be human and provides balance for the language of self-assertion. The name that he gives to this is a “language of reverence.” He describes reverence as conveying “a human attitude of respect and deference for something larger or higher in priority than our own individual selves; something that commands our admiration and our loyalty, and may imply obligations or duties on our part.” “The virtues of self-assertion and the virtues of reverence are the two sides of the human paradox.” 

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ, we are often taught in ways that remind us of the virtues of reverence, but we are immersed in a culture that speaks the language of self-assertion. Sometimes we are tempted to look at the gospel primarily through the self-asserted lens and as a result, we distort prophetic counsel or push against it. This is particularly true of teachings about the relationship between men and women because the virtues of reverence are so necessary for bringing feminine and masculine strength together. When focusing only on the self, without the tempering virtues of reverence, men use their strength against women to get what they want, as I’ve written about previously, and women weaponize their innate abilities to gain leverage over men. The results are a tragic loss of potential and some of the greatest human suffering. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught, “In the work of the Kingdom, men and women are not without each other, but do not envy each other, lest by reversals and renunciations of role we make a wasteland of both womanhood and manhood.” 

I feel very secure as a woman. I know that women are recognized, valued and loved by the Lord. I feel confident that this is truth…I also recognize that this regard for womanhood that is held by the Lord is the model for all who seek to be like Him…for those who are His disciples… and for those who bear His priesthood and act in His name. I appreciate the noble men of the church for the many responsibilities that they shoulder; for the service and respect that they give to women.

Mom had a confident voice full of reverence, and she used it to strengthen relationships. There were distinct themes in Mom’s life, and an appreciation for how men and women complement one another, both in the family and in church service, was one of them. 

All those years ago on that track field, she had wanted me to know that Dad had cancelled his appointments to see me run, so I would understand how much he loved me. I’m so grateful for that.

The post The Reverent Conversation Between Men and Women appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the fight over abortion’s legal status in each state has raged on. For the pro-life movement, it’s not going well. The movement has lost nearly all of the state ballots and referendums aimed at restricting abortion. In Florida, abortion restrictions only survived because the state failed to reach the the 60% supermajority required to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution, demonstrating the unpopularity of abortion restrictions among even nominally conservative voters.

Radical abortion policies that would allow abortion late in pregnancy are being implemented across the country as secular feminists and the governments they control go for broke, leaving the pro-life movement in the dust. For example, abortion has been enshrined as a right in the Colorado state constitution, making near-unlimited abortion part of the state’s highest law. In 2024, pro-life measures were outspent approximately 14  to 1.

It is time for a candid assessment of our role as Latter-day Saints in the pro-life movement. Latter-day Saints have a special duty to oppose abortion and to stand for life through activism, legislation, and volunteering. The movement against abortion needs all the help it can get, and now is the time to act.

I cannot exceed Terryl Givens in eloquence or force of argument, which he articulated against abortion in these pages. In particular, he highlighted the fallacy of being personally opposed to abortion but pro-choice politically. He said: 

There is no more ethical or logical sense in being “personally opposed, but pro-choice” than in being personally opposed to sex trafficking, slavery, or child abuse, “but” pro-choice regarding the adult’s prerogatives in those cases. Abortion is not like heavy drinking or pornography or blaspheming, where one deplores the action but accords another the right to act immorally. Abortion is of that class of wrongs that entails the willful infliction of pain or killing on another human being. Ultimately, the pro-life position is not a commitment predicated on sectarian values or God’s precepts. It is the fruit of a more universal commitment to protect the most vulnerable and voiceless. It is a commitment to the most fundamental obligation we have as part of the human family: to defend the defenseless.

It struck me how little presence Latter-day Saints had at this year’s March for Life in Washington, D.C. I saw no signs identifying participants as members of the Church, though I understand Latter-day Saints for Life were there. I also recently attended a pro-life event hosted by the David Network for Ivy League students. Of the 400 participants, only four were members of their school’s Latter-day Saint Student Associations. 

Some of our distinguished members have lost sight of the grave evil of abortion. Indeed, the only Latter-day Saint billionaire who has commented publicly on abortion did so to assure members and staff of a new sports team in Utah that they would be refunded for any out-of-state abortion they received. Such lacunae disappoint me, as we as a people generally punch above our weight. We’re often educated, intelligent, organized, and capable. Most importantly, we have priesthood power and the gift of the Holy Ghost. So why are we hesitating to stand for life? 

Why Do We Hesitate? 

Some Latter-day Saints may shy away from opposing abortion because the issue is viewed as too political or partisan. By virtue of standing for life, they believe they may signal association with a political party with which they do not necessarily agree.  Yet lately, neither political party seriously supports the pro-life movement. The Trumpian GOP increasingly substitutes radical nationalism (and, in some cases, white ethnonationalism) for serious pro-life social policy. The Democrats have not supported unborn children for a long time, and that has accelerated with the fall of Roe. Now is the time to depoliticize and to show that the desire to protect the life of a child cuts across all political and social categories. 

Others are concerned that women will suffer from abortion bans due to uncertainty about the legality of abortion in medical emergencies. This concern is over-stated. Even in the most stringent states, such as Texas, abortion is allowed in the case of medical emergencies. Pro-life supporters care about protecting emergency care for women. To emphasize the point, Texas recently amended its law to ensure that doctors know they can provide abortion when a woman’s health is gravely threatened. The claim that women will die en masse because of abortion bans simply is not true and ignores the real threat to life: the killing of the unborn by abortion.

Some Latter-day Saints might hide behind the idea of being a peacemaker. Of course, we should be peacemakers. Those who support abortion are human beings, too, deserving the love and respect that are inherent in our shared identity as children of God. There is no need to add to the screaming match on the internet to defend the right of a child to life. However, merely emphasizing our role in peacemaking ignores the Savior’s own example. He fearlessly confronted those who taught evil and did not back down, even at the cost of His own life. As disciples, we have a dual mandate to fight for the truth and to love our fellow man. We cannot sacrifice one for the other.

Some might hesitate to stand for life because it is difficult to fully align the Church’s position with pro-life groups or policies, given that the Church contemplates exceptions for the health and life of the mother, rape and incest, and fetal inviability. Yet over 95 percent of abortions are elective or have no reason specified for the abortion. Latter-day Saints and other Christian groups agree far more than they disagree on abortion. However, occasionally these differences can cause tensions and friction. I think the Church is wise, morally and politically, to acknowledge some possible exceptions (though not automatic dispensations) to its general opposition to abortion. And politically, many women will not support pro-life legislation that does not include rape exceptions, making it necessary to advance such legislation. In many states that ban abortion or ban it after six weeks, laws make allowances for the exceptions that the Church advocates. For example, Idaho, North Dakota, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, West Virginia, Mississippi, Iowa, and Indiana all provide exceptions for rape, as will Utah if its law is implemented after the current legal battle. There is ample room for the Church’s position within the pro-life movement.

I think the final reason why many Latter-day Saints don’t want to get involved is simpler and more embarrassing. The pro-life cause is gauche. It is unpopular with the rich and the powerful, the beautiful and charismatic. It feels embarrassing to be involved in, and it is a movement that higher minds scorn. It interferes with the unmitigated rights of adults to unlimited sexual pleasure. The cries of the great and spacious building are amplified by the high levels of education that many Latter-day Saints attain and their deep craving for acceptance. For a century, we have tried to assimilate into the mainstream and to be accepted. I will be blunt: that project is over. We cannot serve two masters, and we cannot assimilate to the ideology of secularism. The secular church that Elder Neal A. Maxwell foresaw has formed, and it will brook no opposition. It is time to stop worrying about what other people think, like an anxious teenager looking around at the popular kids, and stride forward out of adolescence and into maturity. 

Current Ballot Initiatives

There are three states with significant Latter-day Saint populations where abortion will likely be on the ballot this fall: Missouri, Virginia, and Nevada. In Missouri, voters will be asked to repeal the current abortion regime that allows elective abortion up to fetal viability and replace it with one that prohibits elective abortion, while leaving exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother or serious health risks, and fetal inviability. This aligns strongly, though not perfectly, with the position of The Church of Jesus Christ. The referendum that legalized elective abortion in Missouri succeeded narrowly. Organizing for this new referendum is crucial. The growing Latter-day Saint population in Missouri has an opportunity to stand for life. 

In Virginia, an amendment that would enshrine elective abortion up to birth in the Virginia Constitution will be on the ballot. Defeating it would be a pro-life win, though, unfortunately, elective abortion is already allowed up to 26 weeks. Regardless, a large Latter-day Saint population exists in the D.C. suburbs of Virginia, allowing for serious and substantive action to stop this monstrous assault on life from passing. 

In Nevada, another amendment would enshrine the right to elective abortion in the Nevada Constitution up to fetal viability. It already passed overwhelmingly in 2024, but it needs to pass again this year. With the large Latter-day Saint population in Nevada, I hope we can tip the scales and prevent this dark and disturbing practice from being enshrined in yet another state constitution.

Of course, even in states like Massachusetts and New York, the pro-life movement still needs volunteers and support. And in all states, young, scared single mothers still need support. Latter-day Saints have a role to play no matter where they live in the quest to protect unborn life.

Putting Our Shoulder to the Wheel

There are many evils in America, but abortion is unique. No matter how anyone tries to spin it, abortion is the intentional destruction of a real human being. In later stages of pregnancy, it is murder, though even early on, it is a grievous sin. It has no other parallel in modern America. 

Above all, abortion strikes at the heart of the plan of salvation and the heart of the Church’s task. It exists to enable the abuse of the sacred powers of procreation, and it turns the most loving of relationships—between mother and child—into violence and terror. We cannot accept our sacred priesthood responsibilities as a people without standing for the unborn. The temple, the pinnacle of the priesthood, binds families together. Abortion exists to destroy the family unit through violence, making it the antithesis of priesthood power.

As then Elder Russell M. Nelson taught about abortion, “It is a war on the defenseless—and the voiceless.” Abortion is frequently implemented to protect individuals from the consequences of their sexual promiscuity, men as well as women. Many who have the nerve to celebrate abortion see it as a triumph of liberation—a child sacrifice to my “freedom.” As David Bentley Hart has stated: 

For me, it is enough to consider that, in America alone, more than forty million babies have been aborted since the Supreme Court invented the ‘right’ that allows for this, and that there are many for whom this is viewed not even as a tragic ‘necessity,’ but as a triumph of moral truth. When the Carthaginians were prevailed upon to cease sacrificing their babies, at least the place vacated by Baal reminded them that they should seek the divine above themselves; we offer up our babies to ‘my’ freedom of choice, to ‘me.’ No society’s moral vision has ever, surely, been more degenerate than that.

The current state of abortion’s legality is discouraging for those who prize life. But that is not an excuse for disengagement. Let us “do what is right, let the consequence follow.” Let us bid farewell to Babylon and stand strong against its temptations and seductions. And let us “put our shoulder to the wheel.” The battle will be long and hard, but it will be worth it to save the lives of the unborn and to frustrate Satan’s plans. “Come, come ye saints, no toil nor labor fear.” 

The post Carrying Our Weight in the Pro-Life Movement appeared first on Public Square Magazine.