Interesting article by Joe Vogel in the Huffington post. If I’m reading this right, Joe is Mormon, and less than happy with the way the mormon church is reacting to Prop 8 in California.
The LDS Church’s cautious official response to the war (one of the most consequential decisions in recent American history) and near-unconditional subsequent support for the Bush Administration (in 2005, Dick Cheney was awarded an honorary doctorate and invited as the commencement speaker at BYU, the Church’s flagship institution), raise important questions about the Church’s involvement in political affairs, particularly when an issue has moral/ethical implications. When should it speak out? When should it stay neutral? And how does it treat its members with minority views?
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This stand, sadly, follows a disturbing trend of being on the wrong side of history on issues of social justice and equality for the LDS Church. For nearly 150 years, the Mormon Church stubbornly held to a racist policy that refused all members of African descent the privilege of entering temples or receiving the Priesthood. Even as slavery, segregation, and Jim Crowe receded into the American past, the Mormon Church still treated its own black members as second-class citizens. The practice was justified as the plan of God.
For the full article, click here.
Tags: discrimination, ex mormon, exmormon, gay marriage, LDS, Mormon, mormonism, prop 8, proposition 8
October 28, 2008 at 12:21 pm |
I’ve wondered about this for a long, long, time. Sure, the Mormon church can speak up about moral issues. The question is, why doesn’t it?
Are the overwhelming number of moral issues that barely qualify for a talk or two at conference really that unimportant? Gay Marriage is so much more important than war? The Church talks about how Gay Marriage will end up hurting their right to freely practice our religion. If that’s a moral issue, why isn’t the restriction of freedom of speech, or of the press, or any of that a moral issue?
Why isn’t the overwhelming corporate greed a moral issue? Why isn’t the church pushing for federal and state regulations on that? Why didn’t the church prophetically push for more funding of the corporate regulators, so we could catch some of these abuses that are hurting society to greatly?
Sex isn’t the only moral issue. So why does the church act like it is?