Whooooo are they?

The following paragraph is from Tony Perkins's newsletter Washington Update. The article is about a bill introduced into Congress to permanently ban the federal funding of abortion procedures. Read down to the yellow-highlighted sentence, and tell me which of the blue-highlighted phrases is the referent of "they". 

This push is especially timely given that a group of pro-abortion Senators are trying to open the doors to abortion on military bases. Meanwhile, HHS officials and other abortion proponents still insist that the new health care law won't fund abortions--despite an independent analysis from Congressional Research Service, which reported that there's nothing stopping the agency from covering the procedure in its high risk pools. Regardless of what Americans think about the legality of abortion, they object to paying for it by overwhelming majorities--which could explain why the Smith-Lipinski bill has such broad bipartisan support. Any member who claims to be moderate on abortion knows that they have to vote for this legislation to prove it. Passing the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act is the only way to make pro-life policies permanent and apply them across the federal government. Even the Left should have no trouble supporting a bill that they insist is the status quo. Encourage your member to co-sponsor the Smith-Lipinski bill. Click here to contact them today!

What helped you decide who/what "they" were?
(Writing the title reminded me of the Cheshire Cat's query to Alice, in the old Disney animated feature: "Whhoooo aaaaare you?")

Sophisticated

Is a sophisticated mind, one that belongs to a recently converted sophist?

Sex ratio in language studies and missions

I was reading the list of students enrolled in the Second Language Studies PhD program at Michigan State, when I was struck by two things: first, most of them are Asians. Second, most of them are women. Try 22 females to 10 males.  Are all the men camping out in the grammar department?

Anyway, that reminded me that I have spent a lot more time over lunch with girls here at my summer linguistics program than with guys. So, I went over the phone list. Turns out, there are roughly 26 single young men, and 49 single young women... although there technically are more if you count the girls who are currently engaged or the ones in their thirties and forties. No wonder.

Which brings me to the Mormon church. How do they deal with this reality of more mission-minded females than males?


Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd. 1998. Mormon passage: a missionary chronicle. Univ. of Illinois.p. 31

Fn 3 As recently as January 1994, LDS bishops and stake presidents were instructed in a statement from church headquarters that "a young woman should not be recommended for a mission if it would interfere with a specific marriage proposal... Though capable and effective, young women do not have the same responsibility to serve full-time missions as do young men who hold the priesthood"... 

Embry quotes Apostle Thomas S. Monson as saying that missionary work for young women is "optional"; if they wish to serve, "we are happy to have them," but "we do not wish to create a program that would prevent them from finding -- or place hardships in their way toward finding -- a proper companion in marriage, because that is their foremost responsibility" (1997, 4)

 Fn 6  Unlike Mormon males, young women must wait until they are twenty-one before they can receive a call to serve a full-time mission, a rule that suppresses rather than stimulates female missionary enlistments. To our knowledge the official rationale for this gender discrepancy in age eligibility has not been stated publicly. We have been told informally in interviews with church officials that young women are called at a later age than young men in order to maximize their opportunities for marriage. 

One latent consequence of these gender-based age rules is the creation of a larger pool of marriage-eligible young LDS women available for Mormon males when the latter return home from their missions while simultaneously encouraging a traditional Mormon courtship pattern in which returned male missionaries marry somewhat younger females.

In addition, waiting until they reach the age of twenty-one before calling single women to missionary service maintains an imbalanced sex ratio of younger males to older females in the field. These age discrepancies are believed by LDS officials to reduce the likelihood of distracting mission field romances between sister missionaries and their male counterparts.

If marriage is, theologically, the foremost responsibility of the female, then policy can find a way to make it happen. What an economic twist! The Botkin sisters would be proud.