In central Utah where I lived and worked for many years, the curse of gardeners is field bindweed. It grows explosively, twining and binding the most beautiful flowers, and will literally take over a garden, covering everything in sight. It’s utterly tenacious: on average, it takes three solid years of dedicated vigilance to blunt its attack. And bindweed often gets the last laughits seeds can lie dormant for a full fifty years before germinating to invade once more.



False conceptions about women in LDS culture are much like field bindweed. They serve to obscure doctrine and strangle our hopes of becoming a Zion society. They are intensely discouraging to all who labor in the garden, and just when you think they are gone, they reappear in subtly different form to threaten our progress once more.



My thesis is quite simple: We must eradicate these weeds in our midst. A season of intensive yard work in the Kingdom of God is required, and we are all enlisted in that challenging labor.



The stakes in this case are highas high and as wide as eternity itself. Indeed, we would offer that since the male-female relationship is at the heart of divinity and simultaneously at the heart of every mortal family (D&C 132), weeding out these false perspectives will be a transformation that will refine us to the very core. Just as Eve was first in wisely and courageously initiating the Plan of Happiness, so resolving and clarifying how Eve’s daughters stand before God and men is foundational to the final ushering in of a society patterned after heaven. No society in which women are viewed as inferior to men can possibly effect that transition, for our Heavenly Father and our Heavenly Mother could never countenance such a belief to be held in their presence.



We stand at that threshold as a faith community, and it is an exciting time. Perhaps most exciting are the halting first steps toward a new language for speaking of these things, for that permits the articulation of truths that we “seeing, see not” (Mt 13:13).



For example, over the last several years, we have come to understand that “the priesthood is the eternal power and authority of our Heavenly Father,” suggesting that there is another eternal power and authority on the earth, that of our Heavenly Mother, wielded by Her daughters. We are a faith community of priests and priestesses, then, and when united in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, men and women together hold the fullness of the Priesthood, its capital “P” signifying more than the male-only priesthood.



This conceptual turn has permitted our leaders to teach us more about these things than perhaps was possible in previous years. We have been recently taught by Elder M. Russell Ballard, that, when endowed, both men and women are given power in the Priesthood, and by Elder Dallin H. Oaks that women may possess Priesthood authority. It is no longer women alone who “hold the Priesthood” when embracing their spouse; we realize now that their husbands do the very same.



Coming into clearer view is the vision of the “co-presidency” of men and woman anticipated by Elder L. Tom Perry (see L. Tom Perry, “FatherhoodAn Eternal Calling,” Church News, 10 April 2004:15, hard copy version only; the original wording is in the audio version of the 2004 April General Conference address), wherein, as President James E. Faust expressed it, “Every father is to his family a patriarch and every mother a matriarch as coequals in their distinctive parental roles.”



Only now has it become possible to comprehend and articulate that women have always been beings of divine power and authority. Women have their own apprenticeship to the divine that is not identical to that of men’s apprenticeship, but is equally powerful and equally authoritative. This power and authority is not given to women by men, for men are literally incapable of giving what they themselves do not possess. Thus it is ultimately misogynist to insist that women can only be equal to men if men deign to share godly power with women through ordination. Men cannot give us what we already have, and that insistence reveals an erroneous view of how women stand before men. We do not stand as supplicants; we stand as co-presidents.

The task before us as a people, then, is to finally see who women are and who they have always been even when we were blind to that reality. And once we “see” it, we must believe itreally believe itand live up to the privileges and the obligations that “seeing” entails. In this, there is no need to feel that the present situation of women in the Church is “bad.” Indeed, the vast majority of women in the Church would be hard-pressed to agree with any such judgment.

Rather, we can simply and joyfully move forward from grace to grace, precept to precept, from not-full to fullness, from not-complete to completeness. The sure promises of God declare such forward movement in the Church to be inexorable. Our destiny is to live as our Heavenly Parents, and He and She live as “coequals.”



Our leaders are doing their part. Doctrine is being clarified, as has been mentioned. Teachings based on this clarified doctrine are being widely promulgated, such as in the new temple films and the new YM and YW manuals. (One of my favorite changes is that the 2014 YW lesson on priesthood revolves around the question, “What are my responsibilities in the work of the priesthood?” Wow!) Practices are being changed right and leftsister missionaries leaving at age nineteen and sitting on Mission Leadership Councils, women praying in General Conference, apostles and female leaders sitting together as equals in Worldwide Leadership Councils, and numerous other changes large and small.

full of good ideas

in this regard, and the Church is interested in hearing those ideas. For example, a former student was recently invited by Church Headquarters to a focus group of educated young adult LDS women, where they were asked for their thoughts on these matters.

Is there more that can be done? Sure, lots! Our people are

The Church leadership is pulling lots of weedsit is uprooting beliefs and practices handed down from a time when women were viewed as inferiorsand they deserve our thanks.



We the membership must do our part as well. We must pull the weeds in our own backyardour homes, our wards, our stakesand be prepared to put our backs into it when the roots are deep. But there is more; in our homes we are planting the seeds of the future in how we raise our children. We need to raise them strong and true by sparing them the old and ugly misunderstandings about women that are so common in our culture. Our children could become majestic redwoods whose branches touch the heavens, if we do not hobble them with the bindweed of the “false traditions of the fathers” concerning women.



Let us wear out our lives in pulling weeds and planting redwoods in their stead, and harvest joy to our souls thereby. This is a wonderful time to be an LDS woman, and the future will be even better.