(They) Don't stand so close to me.

As you might expect, the Modern Pharisee draws heavily on FLDS members for it's readership, but not so heavily as you might think.

The vain part of me wonders what I'm going to do when the story resolves itself. But that is another narcissistic rabbit trail that I'll go on later when I can make it look like I don't so much care about me, but about you, the dear reader. (whoopsies, was I just unattractively revealing?)

I periodically in my vanity wonder why it is that people don't link back to me. Assuredly some of you do, and I thank you all. But some don't. The fact that I make some uncomfortable was evidenced by Steve and Paula Runyan, who write an excellent blog that I endorse almost without reservation, writing me to say that they didn't want me to LINK to their blog. I'm filling in the blanks here, but I suspect that my readers liked them as much as I did, and regularly visited them through the link provided in my blogroll.

In case you haven't noticed traveling around the blogosphere, particularly in the "Blogger" environment, if you click off of a blogroll to another "Blogger" blog, it leaves a mark, a link. I've found the phenomenon annoying from time to time when a blogger, whose name I won't mentioned seemed to have set up a "Bot" function where every one of his posts on his blog got automatically linked to the first one in mine, whatever that was. He (or she) has stopped and I've ceased to be annoyed. I never mentioned it to the owner of the blog, and the problem seems to have corrected itself, mark up one for patient procrastination as a problem solving technique.

But the Runyan's were getting links from my blog, because readers of the Modern Pharisee shared an interest in their general lifestyle and I'm sure, a vague kinship with their religious outlook. Apparently though, associating with my outlook and interests is not the public face they wished to share with their core readership (again, I fill in the blanks) because of the probable intolerance of their own readership. In other words, someone or several someones were upset about seeing my link there, and following it back, and reading what they read here.

So I've been wondering what it is? I for instance decided tentatively that it was in part due to my tendency to name the minor children of FLDS families who are embroiled in custody controversies with the State of Texas. The FLDS have never objected, and if one message got back to me that they did (and I do have contacts among them) I would take the time to expunge every name from my blog. I also wait until someone else "outs" the name, prior to using it myself. But that was exploded when a rather prominent or famous blog linked to an Anti FLDS site that started using her name. Scratch that.

Is it my apparent support of practices that amount in others eyes, to pedophilia? That's the real candidate I suppose. I too was once of the opinion that female human beings below a certain age were sinful to take as wives. I would of course have no sexual relationship with a woman not my wife, and thus would not have "affairs" (God of course granting me that grace to avoid such sin) with young girls, any more than I would have affairs with adult women. The Bible however, which is the essential "rule book" of Christianity only seems to tag the passing of menses as the demarcation point for taking a wife actively. There's the whole issue of betrothal and the state of marriage that it creates in God's law and eyes. Betrothals were broken, like marriage, with divorce. Sex or no sex, once the vow was completed to marry someday, a betrothed was treated as married with relationship to other men.

Combining age issues and betrothal issues I can easily be characterized as being in favor of sexual relations with very young girls (teens), and I'm sure this makes people uncomfortable. But face it, this issue is not going to go away. Society has fooled itself into thinking it can legislate upwards the age of sexual experience, but instead has created the age of fornication where kids that aren't kids physically are asked to hang out with one another and specifically not marry. The result? They fool around, and the Christian should react that this is destruction of the very soul. Faced with destroying the soul, or a potential "white collar" or "professional" career, where should we really come down? Preservation of an acceptable career path for our daughters, or holiness in their lives? So I think in reality, this is why people push away from associating with this blog. But they sure do read it. The pincushion map of the readers of the Pharisee are from all over the United States and I've picked up English speaking viewers all over the world.

Or it could just be that I'm a jerk, and people have picked up on that. I thus invent reasons to flatter myself with people distancing themselves (in my mind) over lofty concepts, that I, if they listened to me, would simply end up being right, and them agreeing with his majesty. That's rather off putting and because I'm our there like Terrell Owens waving my hands and kvetching that I don't get enough attention, I do, in fact, get it. But no one wants to admit that they're looking, at least that much.

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