My work (5D Robotics) decided to celebrate Christmas by dressing up our lawyer as Santa and driving a row of robots down the street: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7kSbmdLkik . Oh yeah, and there's an elf on a unicycle.

Just find your nearest Mormon neighbor and mooch off them.

Are the majority of us genuinely possessed of such remarkable self-control? Or might some of these self-reported stoics be exercising a bit of selective memory?

Just because the submitter has a temper and a foul mouth doesn't mean everyone does...

You're not the customer, the websites are. They have no reason to ask the visitors to the websites to opt in or out.

There's nothing worth "getting" at the Lagrange points, or geosynchronous orbit, or any number of places. That doesn't mean it's not worth going there.

By that logic, I hate to break it to you but all computers are already sentient. Ever take a hammer to a computer? That noise it makes is proof of its sentience.

Question: How the hell do you smuggle a cell phone into prison? Answer: You don't. You bribe/threaten a guard. Sure, you can smuggle a cell phone into prison. At our local county jail, the inmates tend a three-acre garden during the summer. There's no fence around it, no bars, no watch towers. Anybody could drop a cell phone or a stash of drugs into a carved-out watermelon, and it's trotted into the prison kitchen the next day. Three inmates work at the animal shelter next door as well. While the inmates hose out the kennels, people off the street walk up and down looking at animals. How can the shelter workers tell that one of the visitors isn't the inmate's cousin, dropping off a bag of drugs? It's laughably easy to smuggle things into prison, especially minimum-security ones with work-release programs.

>contemporary political issue

You have every right to your opinion, but Latter-day Saints believe marriage is an eternal and sacred commitment, not a "contemporary political issue." Hence their interest.

>By staying in their church, Mormons explicitly endorse their churches actions and stances

I completely agree.

>...the LDS church can and will inject itself and its considerable demographic and monetary clout directly and voluminously into any political debate that takes its fancy

I wouldn't doubt it. I can even tell you what political debates will take it's fancy: those involving religious issues.

I'll even toss out another idea: it has every right to do so. When you say "the LDS church" what you're really saying is "every member that belongs to the LDS church." Those members have every right to participate in the democratic process, and the "leaders" of the LDS church have as much right to preach their viewpoint to their members as the man in the commercial on TV.

>You can stay and support the actions of your church leaders, or you can leave.

Again, we're totally in agreement here. Even more-so in the Mormon church than any other, since twice a year we have a world-wide meeting where every member has a chance to *literally* raise their hand in support or disagreement with church leaders--watch it online, you'll see the actual hand-raise.

For what it's worth, I think the reason this topic is so difficult to discuss is because there's so little data to go on. I think the LDS church is concerned about the long-term effects on society, but obviously there's been no studies done.

There's no good analogy, but consider it like proposing legalizing off-shore drilling before doing environmental studies, while what little data you have shows what you consider a lot of negative effects.