feminists and homosexuality

I believe that I am a feminist, I believe that women should be respected and given equal opportunity as men in the work forces. I also believe, however, that men and women are different and that is for a specific reason. We work best that way. When Adam was given Eve it was as a help meet. In Hebrew it actually means same but opposite. Just think of it as your hands. Your hands are the same, but opposite using both means you get the most done and you use each hand for different things. I feel that extreme feminists are trying to make it so we are all just one huge hand with 10 fingers on in. Where we try to make men women and when that doesn't work women gain more manly characteristics and we call them feminine. It is alright that we have different physical and mental abilities. Men in general see the big picture while women generally see the fine details. I find  the difference to be amazing and how we come together in marriage to be something more than just ourselves a miracle. But the world seems a little confused. It is probably because of my LDS background that I see this, it is something that we are taught along with that family being the central part of the eternal plan of happiness. . Wouldn't it make sense then that Satan would attack the first step of the family, marriage. He makes people feel that marriage is binding the freedom women and that it stifles their potential because we can't be just good for being mothers. I agree that women can do more, but being a mother is more exulted then anything else you can so. I think that this also has to do with the myths being projected in the media about homosexuality.  Here is where I feel it gets tricky to talk about the homosexuality myths. First some people don't separate people, children of God, from the classification. Suddenly it is part of their identity which means that when you say anything which could be construed as against it you are attacking them. Wrong there are an equal amount of good and bad between heterosexual people as their are homosexual. What I am not talking about is the person I am talking about the concept. This means it is a generalization of what being homosexual is there are many personal exceptions. Something which had been shifting in our society is that boys must to boy things or else they are gay. The little girl who acts like a tom boy is seen as cute, but not the little boy. I think that the teaches little girls that they can be anything and are great no matter what and that little boys are only as good as they fit a stereotype. This is what pushes more men to say that they are gay. It starts with the expressive qualities instead of instrumental. Usually expressive qualities are usually seen as feminine and  instrumental qualities male. So the boys who are sensitive, you are more into conversation and building relationships are shunned from the regular boys and even in elementary school they are called gay. So later on when a experimentation or a tramatic event like molestation happens their hindsight see that they must be gay because they were always called that. Which means that two women somewhere in the world wont get married and have families. I find it heart breaking. I think that instead of trying to make our boys into girls we should be helping them to become gentlemen. That girls should understand how to respect the opposite gender as much as boys do and that there are only two genders and confusion in between. 

$$$ vs. ^_^-ness

In my capstone class one of the moral dilemmas which we had to make a decision about was if a mexican man who lived in poverty with his family should illegally enter america and get money for his family and bring them to america for better opportunity.  We look at the church's official view of "undocumented workers" is that they discourage people from immigrating from their country, but for those who have they wish for a way that they can "square" themselves with the government. It kind of seems like a neutral cop out, but is there sense? I say yes and so does  Martical L. Bacallao and  Paul R. Smokowiski who wrote the article The cost of getting ahead: mexican family system changes after immigration. What they did is interviewed parents and children about the effect of moving to america had on them and their family relationships. It was qualitative research meaning we weren't dealing with the average number or percentages , but in what they described similarities emerged. When studying the family you can't just look at individuals it is about who all of the pieces work together in order to create something greater than just the sum of its parts. Because the fathers would have to be gone for at least 6 month to get the rest of his family the family system would have to change.  Part of what I brought up in my class was how it would effect his family, that they might not be as happy. Then people would point out that he lived in extreme poverty and that they could die, but it is possible that the family system itself could die or at least change to where it would never be the same. We can't think that we can take out a major factor in our live and it stay the same. That is why separating when you fell like you are having problems in a marriage is the worst thing you can do. You become comfortable with them not being there and it is hard to bring them back in. Many of the children felt much closer to their mothers than their fathers and felt it hard to have a boss again once they were reunited with him. Also the executive part of the family, mother and father, had to relearn reach other. Being gone that long in such different circumstances changes people. Because they had come to america the mother usually had to start working so the family was disjointed and the children weren't raised completely by their parents. Plus the different cultural view of what the family is or what behaviors are appropriate between a parent and child are different. So even though they are "getting ahead" in the end their families really suffered for it. So is it better to be in poverty and have a good family structure or be economically growing and have a struggling family. I know what I think, but also I wont be in that kind of situation where you are desperate to get what your family needs. (There are social theorist that say part of the reason we are civilized is that we have enough food.) But maybe looking into promoting that someone be come an undocumented worker or that we try to pay for them to come to the USA is something we shouldn't do. That we should help them where they are at in what we can. Because these patterns of family decay are even common for those who immigrate legally. The clash of culture and stress on the family is evident everywhere.

Doom & Gloom and the convolutedness of forgetting to communicate

So we have been learning about the family as a system. The idea that you can't just effect and individual part without some reaction from the rest of it. We do this with the rules, roles and boundaries we make in our families. They don't always work, but we will keep them because we are too scared to try something new.  The rules of a family are those things which have repetitively been done and proven the same reaction. Thus the rule don't ask for anything is implicitly made but never spoken about. The roles of a family can be what keeps people from changing. The "problem child" might be their because they are serving a purpose within the family or they could be showing the symptoms of a dysfunctional family. The boundaries of the family are how open they are to the out side world. Some boundaries are ridged (like a cinder block wall), others diffused or unclear (like a fences that only has posts) or clear ( like a picket fences).  The best is a clear boundary where people know where the family is at and they let new ideas in and out of their boundaries. It was Salvador Minuchin (click on name to see a little video of him) who began to look at these relationships and draw maps of the family. One of the things which he is famous for is his manipulation of physical space in order to help the family system of a new experiences in a safer environment. My Teacher is actually a family therapist who uses these methods and spoke of how you can see a dynamic by how they first sit in the office. I thought about my family, which in and of itself is complicated. I have 3 biological siblings, 3 adoptive siblings, 4 biological step siblings and 2 adopted step siblings. Only the only the 7 youngest live at home now, but before I got married I lived their for about a year-ish. When we went to watch a movie we were always segregated. This is the first thought that sends me on the doom and gloom path. Second is the rules, Eliason's (my main family) never beat Lasley's (step family) and some other things which cause inequality between the two families. Then we started talking about how blended families often fail. And then I found out that two of my siblings are moving out for the summer or longer while my dad works two weeks on two weeks off in North Dakota.  And I am just thinking about how I am in a dysfunctional family and that it is never going to last and why did I feel so good about it in the beginning and dooming and glooming. It didn't help that I texted my little sister (the oldest child at home right now) about what the family rules are she expressed that their still was inequality between team Lasley and team Eliason. She is just tired of being at home and being a good responsible  young adult and still treated like she isn't. Shes is going to be heading out to college as soon as she can after her graduation. Me thinking of how families function I ask her basically if she things that it will fall into chaos when she leaves. She explains that Dad is worried about her mostly because she is the only one not getting along with mom. And that mom actually grounded my second oldest step brother at home for a day (this may sound like a short time to you, but he ALWAYS gets what he wants and is never punished so this is amazing) and the oldest step brother who doesn't really care about anything and goes the lazies route possible (partly because he is a teenage boy) she talked to about when it was important to go to church and mutual (an discussion she would have skipped before). I texted her back and just thanked her for letting me  know that something good is coming from this marriage. That the kids aren't just getting screwed up and the parents heart broken. I told her just to send me what good stuff is going on, in a text or email or phone call or face book message, I didn't care. It's just so easy to tell people what is going wrong and it can become so big that we miss the little baby steps that people are talking that after a time become leaps and bounds. The imagination is wonderful at times, but it also can take and twist things into a scarier picture than it really is. Lesson I have learned: It takes time for change so keep track of it all the way so you aren't shocked by the crisis and understand how things are really going.
PS: This is like how the news sensationalizes the new trends in sciences. Like how we were going into an ice age which would freeze the world and then global warming that would  melt all the polar caps and flood the world and now we are just dealing with the climate change and protecting the environment.