How I'm Working for Change Inside My Church | Chelsea Shields | TED Talks

78,811 views ・ 2015-12-08

TED


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00:12
Religion is more than belief.
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It's power, and it's influence.
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And that influence affects all of us,
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every day, regardless of your own belief.
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Despite the enormous influence of religion on the world today,
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we hold them to a different standard of scrutiny and accountability
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than any other sector of our society.
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For example, if there were a multinational organization,
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government or corporation today
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that said no female could be on a leadership board,
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not one woman could have a decision-making authority,
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not one woman could handle any financial matter,
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we would have outrage.
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There would be sanctions.
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And yet this is a common practice in almost every world religion today.
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We accept things in our religious lives
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that we do not accept in our secular lives,
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and I know this because I've been doing it for three decades.
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I was the type of girl that fought every form of gender discrimination growing up.
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I played pickup basketball games with the boys and inserted myself.
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I said I was going to be the first female President of the United States.
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I have been fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment,
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which has been dead for 40 years.
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I'm the first woman in both sides of my family
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to ever work outside the home and ever receive a higher education.
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I never accepted being excluded because I was a woman,
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except in my religion.
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Throughout all of that time,
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I was a part of a very patriarchal orthodox Mormon religion.
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I grew up in an enormously traditional family.
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I have eight siblings, a stay-at-home mother.
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My father's actually a religious leader in the community.
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And I grew up in a world believing that my worth and my standing
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was in keeping these rules that I'd known my whole life.
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You get married a virgin, you never drink alcohol,
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you don't smoke, you always do service,
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you're a good kid.
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Some of the rules we had were strict,
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but you followed the rules because you loved the people
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and you loved the religion and you believed.
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Everything about Mormonism determined what you wore,
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who you dated, who you married.
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It determined what underwear we wore.
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I was the kind of religious where everyone I know
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donated 10 percent of everything they earned to the church,
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including myself.
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From paper routes and babysitting, I donated 10 percent.
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I was the kind of religious where I heard parents tell children
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when they're leaving on a two-year proselytizing mission
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that they would rather have them die
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than return home without honor, having sinned.
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I was the type and the kind of religious
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where kids kill themselves every single year
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because they're terrified of coming out to our community as gay.
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But I was also the kind of religious
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where it didn't matter where in the world I lived,
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I had friendship, instantaneous mutual aid.
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This was where I felt safe. This is certainty and clarity about life.
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I had help raising my little daughter.
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So that's why I accepted without question that only men can lead,
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and I accepted without question
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that women can't have the spiritual authority of God on the Earth,
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which we call the priesthood.
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And I allowed discrepancies between men and women in operating budgets,
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disciplinary councils, in decision-making capacities,
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and I gave my religion a free pass
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because I loved it.
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Until I stopped,
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and I realized that I had been allowing myself to be treated
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as the support staff to the real work of men.
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And I faced this contradiction in myself,
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and I joined with other activists in my community.
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We've been working very, very, very hard for the last decade and more.
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The first thing we did was raise consciousness.
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You can't change what you can't see.
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We started podcasting, blogging, writing articles.
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I created lists of hundreds of ways
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that men and women are unequal in our community.
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The next thing we did was build advocacy organizations.
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We tried to do things that were unignorable,
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like wearing pants to church and trying to attend all-male meetings.
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These seem like simple things,
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but to us, the organizers, they were enormously costly.
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We lost relationships. We lost jobs.
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We got hate mail on a daily basis.
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We were attacked in social media and national press.
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We received death threats.
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We lost standing in our community. Some of us got excommunicated.
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Most of us got put in front of a disciplinary council,
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and were rejected from the communities that we loved
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because we wanted to make them better, because we believed that they could be.
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And I began to expect this reaction from my own people.
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I know what it feels like when you feel like someone's trying to change you
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or criticize you.
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But what utterly shocked me was throughout all of this work
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I received equal measures of vitriol from the secular left,
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the same vehemence as the religious right.
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And what my secular friends didn't realize was that this religious hostility,
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these phrases of, "Oh, all religious people are crazy or stupid."
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"Don't pay attention to religion."
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"They're going to be homophobic and sexist."
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What they didn't understand
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was that that type of hostility did not fight religious extremism,
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it bred religious extremism.
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Those arguments don't work, and I know because I remember
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someone telling me that I was stupid for being Mormon.
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And what it caused me to do was defend myself and my people
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and everything we believe in, because we're not stupid.
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So criticism and hostility doesn't work, and I didn't listen to these arguments.
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When I hear these arguments, I still continue to bristle,
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because I have family and friends.
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These are my people, and I'm the first to defend them,
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but the struggle is real.
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How do we respect someone's religious beliefs
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while still holding them accountable for the harm or damage
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that those beliefs may cause others?
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It's a tough question. I still don't have a perfect answer.
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My parents and I have been walking on this tightrope for the last decade.
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They're intelligent people. They're lovely people.
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And let me try to help you understand their perspective.
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In Mormonism, we believe that after you die,
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if you keep all the rules and you follow all the rituals,
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you can be together as a family again.
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And to my parents, me doing something as simple
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as having a sleeveless top right now, showing my shoulders,
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that makes me unworthy.
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I won't be with my family in the eternities.
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But even more, I had a brother die in a tragic accident at 15,
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and something as simple as this means we won't be together as a family.
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And to my parents, they cannot understand
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why something as simple as fashion or women's rights
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would prevent me from seeing my brother again.
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And that's the mindset that we're dealing with,
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and criticism does not change that.
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And so my parents and I have been walking this tightrope,
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explaining our sides, respecting one another,
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but actually invalidating each other's very basic beliefs
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by the way we live our lives, and it's been difficult.
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The way that we've been able to do that
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is to get past those defensive shells
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and really see the soft inside of unbelief and belief
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and try to respect each other while still holding boundaries clear.
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The other thing that the secular left and the atheists and the orthodox
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and the religious right, what they all don't understand
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was why even care about religious activism?
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I cannot tell you the hundreds of people who have said,
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"If you don't like religion, just leave."
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Why would you try to change it?
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Because what is taught on the Sabbath
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leaks into our politics, our health policy,
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violence around the world.
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It leaks into education, military, fiscal decision-making.
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These laws get legally and culturally codified.
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In fact, my own religion has had an enormous effect on this nation.
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For example, during Prop 8, my church raised over 22 million dollars
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to fight same-sex marriage in California.
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Forty years ago, political historians will say,
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that if it wasn't for the Mormon opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment,
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we'd have an Equal Rights Amendment in our Constitution today.
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How many lives did that affect?
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And we can spend time fighting every single one
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of these little tiny laws and rules,
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or we can ask ourselves,
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why is gender inequality the default around the world?
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Why is that the assumption?
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Because religion doesn't just create the roots of morality,
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it creates the seeds of normality.
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Religions can liberate or subjugate,
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they can empower or exploit, they can comfort or destroy,
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and the people that tip the scales over to the ethical and the moral
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are often not those in charge.
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Religions can't be dismissed or ignored.
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We need to take them seriously.
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But it's not easy to influence a religion, like we just talked about.
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But I'll tell you what my people have done.
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My groups are small, there's hundreds of us,
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but we've had huge impact.
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Right now, women's pictures are hanging in the halls next to men
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for the first time.
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Women are now allowed to pray in our church-wide meetings,
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and they never were before in the general conferences.
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As of last week, in a historic move,
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three women were invited down to three leadership boards
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that oversee the entire church.
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We've seen perceptual shifts in the Mormon community
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that allow for talk of gender inequality.
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We've opened up space, regardless of being despised,
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for more conservative women to step in and make real changes,
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and the words "women" and "the priesthood" can now be uttered in the same sentence.
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I never had that.
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My daughter and my nieces are inheriting a religion that I never had,
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that's more equal -- we've had an effect.
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It wasn't easy standing in those lines
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trying to get into those male meetings.
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There were hundreds of us,
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and one by one, when we got to the door,
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we were told, "I'm sorry, this meeting is just for men,"
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and we had to step back and watch men get into the meeting
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as young as 12 years old,
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escorted and walked past us as we all stood in line.
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But not one woman in that line will forget that day,
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and not one little boy that walked past us will forget that day.
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If we were a multinational corporation or a government, and that had happened,
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there would be outrage,
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but we're just a religion.
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We're all just part of religions.
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We can't keep looking at religion that way,
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because it doesn't only affect me, it affects my daughter
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and all of your daughters and what opportunities they have,
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what they can wear, who they can love and marry,
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if they have access to reproductive healthcare.
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We need to reclaim morality in a secular context
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that creates ethical scrutiny and accountability
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for religions all around the world,
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but we need to do it in a respectful way
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that breeds cooperation and not extremism.
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And we can do it through unignorable acts of bravery,
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standing up for gender equality.
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It's time that half of the world's population
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had voice and equality within our world's religions,
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churches, synagogues, mosques and shrines around the world.
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I'm working on my people. What are you doing for yours?
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(Applause)
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