Also, I love your pointed politically themed questions: made me laugh!

I’m probably not going too far out on a limb to assume you don’t identify with the politics of people who you -believe- make political excuses like that.

Certainly some people feel that way generally, and never want to help others. But then those people need to repent. Just as do teachers who use an opportunity to lecture or interject politics into a gospel lesson And I’ve sat in waaaaaaay too many pro-Republican interjections before that I felt the same way for. In fact, a previous ward I lived in, in a small Utah town removed it’s GD teacher after many ward members complained about his interjecting Republican politics into the lessons. And the people that complained agreed with his politics!

Anyway, what I wanted to say, the point you’re trying to make with your questions regarding helping your neighbor, etc. is a good one (ham handed politics as you already noted, not so good). I do think you’re doing a discredit to those who may disagree with you politically, however.

A person can believe that individuals, organizations, and especially churches have a moral obligation to help those in their area who are in need. But that has nothing to do with requiring government to fulfill that roll in your (Church’s, family’s, neighbor’s, friend’s) behalf.

If government did everything some people say it does, we wouldn’t have too much of a problem. But generally I see government saying one thing and doing a little bit to claim it’s fulfilling it’s responsibilities, while actively enriching or benefiting those very individuals who claim to serve in our behalf.

The Gentiles claimed the Mormons were foreign-born, with ideas alien to American government. The Mormons said no, the great majority of Mormons were native-born. The Gentiles countered by saying that was only true if you counted the flocks of very young children, that the majority of voting-age adults were foreign-born. The Mormons retorted that the Gentiles were unfairly painting Utah as un-American, controlled by foreign philosophies and behaviors, and presented evidence showing that virtually all civil and ecclesiastical leaders were American-born.

I’m not familiar with the absolute numbers (maybe someone else can dredge them up); I’m only familiar with how the various partisan interests used those numbers to further their own agendas.

Still, I probably shouldn’t have done that.

Wrong.

When all you do is hold a mirror up to peoples’ faces, they have no right to complain about the face that is looking back at them. Part of what might have made people so uncomfortable is that the truth is sometimes hard to bear.

You did the right thing.

It’s one thing to pose those as teasers on a thoroughly voluntary blog, and I’m very glad so many of you got a kick out of them. Laugh, and pass ‘em on, and God bless.

But as Geoff B. points out, Gospel Doctrine is not the place to be quite so blatantly political. (Geoff, I did say in the OP that this point was one of my trouble spots, so I recognized what you meant. I guess I really knew it from the beginning, or else I wouldn’t have recognized the need to apologize to my class in advance.) With more thought, and with less eagerness to set myself up as being oh-so-clever, I probably could have come up with a way to move people to think about some of those ideas in a less partisan way, more suitable for Sunday School.