No, that message was for everyone. It was spoken in General Conference, Stake Conference, at EFY/Youth Conference, in YM/YW, in Sunday School, and regularly talked about in Sacrament meeting. It seemed like, when I was a teenager, I had to hear that speech about once a month on the minimum.
And it's a real mindfuck for an abuse victim. What if your rapist refuses to kill you? Then what? Are these prophets/assholes saying that rape and abuse victims should KILL THEMSELVES? Is that the message here?
This is a hell of a lot more insidious and damaging than just trying to guilt some missionaries out of masturbating.
I remember reading in an old LDS book where a mother told her son just as he was parting for military service, to come home morally clean or don't come home at all (except in the pine box). I raised three kids, and I can't even begin to imagine saying that to any of them. She may never see her son again, and these are the parting words he is going to remember? How could a mother do this?
“There is no true Latter-day Saint who would not rather bury a son or a daughter than to have him or her lose his or her chastity – realizing that chastity is of more value than anything else in all the world.”
- Prophet Heber J. Grant, Gospel Standards, complied by G. Homer Durham, p. 55
“Also far-reaching is the effect of loss of chastity. Once given or taken or stolen it can never be regained. Even in a forced contact such as rape or incest, the injured one is greatly outraged. If she has not cooperated and contributed to the foul deed, she is of course in a more favorable position. There is no condemnation when there is no voluntary participation. It is better to die in defending one's virtue than to live having lost it without a struggle.”
- Prophet Spencer W. Kimball, LDS Prophet, The Miracle of Forgiveness, p. 196
“Among the most common sexual sins our young people commit are necking and petting. Not only do these improper relations often lead to fornication, pregnancy, and abortions – all ugly sins – but in and of themselves they are pernicious evils...”
- Prophet Spencer W. Kimball, The Miracle of Forgiveness, p. 65
“President David O. McKay has pleaded: Your virtue is worth more than your life. Please, young folk, preserve your virtue even if you lose your lives.”
- Prophet Spencer W. Kimball, LDS Prophet, The Miracle of Forgiveness, p. 63
“I know what my mother expects. I know what she's saying in her prayers. She'd rather have me come home dead than unclean.”
- Gordon B. Hinckley, Conference Report, April 1967, pp. 51-55
Yeah, that used to be pounded into our heads. I was even told in my patriarchal blessing to "guard your virtue with your very life, for nothing is more important than remaining chaste and clean before your Heavenly Father."
It used to eat me up. And I wondered if I'd be able to fight to the death if I was raped. I took self-defense and personal safety classes because I was so scared. I thought that if I was told that in my PB, it must be a warning of impending rape. I felt unworthy to even pray at times because I knew that God could read my thoughts and knew that I didn't think I would die for my virtue. In the safety classes we'd be told to do whatever it took--even giving in to a rapist in order to save our lives. I envied those girls who knew they could do that without guilt. They wouldn't be held to pay before God because they didn't know what I knew. Stupid stupid stupid damn cult.
Then I go to the temple and make covenants that I will "suffer my life to be taken" before I'd reveal the stupid signs and tokens. I knew damn well that I was not going to let anyone slit my throat or disembowel me for that nonsense. Somehow I made it to open mindedness before I had to give up my life for Jeebus and the boys.
Exactly. To put so much value and emphasis on something that is an imaginary problem is both ridiculous and unnecessary.
There is no way that I would prefer to see a child --- anyone's child --- dead rather than alive and sexually active. Or dead, rather than having done whatever was necessary, to survive a rape.
The idiots who say these things have either never really thought about what they are saying, or are horribly twisted and mangled by their hateful beliefs.
These things don't come from a loving god. They come from selfish, controlling old men who are trying desperately to preserve their control over everyone else.
Back in the olden days of The Improvement Era, there was an article with illustration of a farmer seeing off his son at the train station. The kid was going on his mission or off to college, or something. According to the story, they saw someone take a casket off the baggage car and put it on a cargo cart, which prompted the wise farmer to tell his son that he would rather see his son come home in a casket like that, than to have him come home having lost his "virtue."
"Virtue" can be lost "piecemeal," according to Spencer W. Kimball and others. Some kissing here, some "petting" there, and you keep losing percentage points. Until one day, to the moon, Alice! Mormons are wickedly fascinated by loss of one's virginity.
The thing is, it's probably safe to say that everyone alive today is the offspring of some kid born sometime in the near past or the very distant past through a couple having sex while not married. 100 years ago, 500, 1,000, 10,000.
Heber J. Grant, Spencer W. Kimball, Gordon B. Hinckley, David O. McKay, Packer, etc, etc. They are here only because some unmarried couple somewhere in the past was knocking boots in the desert, jungle, or a cave, on the Santa-Marie, or on the front fender of a Model-T.