Olive Branch from LDS Church Will Be Huge
Olive Branch from LDS Church Will Be Huge
The announcement that the LDS Church is supportive of the Salt Lake City statute that prohibits discrimination against gays in housing and employment has implications far beyond Salt Lake City and changes the landscape of gay politics, not only in Utah, but across the nation. This is no lightweight matter.
Dr. Gary Watts (my brother), one of Utah’s foremost gay rights activists, and a former Mormon who resigned his church membership over the issue, said, “I believe this is the first time in the history of the church that it has ever publicly said anything supportive of gay rights. It is a sea change and great news and I commend the church for this progress.”
While it was a foregone conclusion that SLC was going to pass the ordinance, the announcement by the LDS Church preceding the vote turned it into a unanimous vote.
Some vocal anti-gay rights legislators had already threatened to override the ordinance if SLC passed it, but now that seems unlikely, and in fact, the legislature will now be under extreme pressure to pass a similar state wide statute.
The influence of the LDS Church is far reaching and could even have positive effects beyond state borders. There are a significant number of Mormons in the state legislatures throughout the west, and a change of attitudes on their part can have influence with others and turn minorities into majorities quite quickly.
Even on the national level it will have influence. There are four Mormon senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, Utah’s two Republican senators Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, and Mike Crapo of Idaho, and at least ten in the House of Representatives, who will be more open to reconsider national non-discrimination laws in housing and employment, hospital visitations, and other legal considerations that have been denied gays and their partners. They each have influence with other colleagues, and of course, President Obama has surely taken note of the clear public stance by the church and he can use it to help form national opinion. Although the LDS Church has no influence with the evangelical churches, it has worked closely with the mainstream churches in recent years and the newly articulated LDS viewpoint will be duly noted.
Furthermore, the announcement will have an immediate and positive effect of influencing its general church membership to recognize the importance of respect for gays and will have a chilling effect on Mormons who have seemingly thought they had a green light from their leaders to bash gays. It may even result in a more civil tone and tenor coming from the mouths of our Mormon legislators who hitherto have led the gay-bashing chorus at the capitol over the past dozen years without any rebuke from their church.
This is a big moment and the LDS Church is to be commended for this monumental shift in attitude. However, with all the positives there is a clear downside. The church has thrown down the gauntlet even harder when it comes to gay marriage. The announcement provocatively said that gay marriage ‘would do violence’ to the institution of marriage and it was made perfectly clear that the church won’t be bending on that one.
While this announcement is not an apology for its sins of the past in its treatment of gays, it is certainly an about face, and is about as much of an apology that one can hope for from a church that never admits to a mistake. It has yet to apologize for denying blacks the priesthood for more than a century and so gays should not be expecting apologies anytime soon.
The face saving statement infers that it is not a change of policy, that it always supported equal rights for gays because it is the ‘fair and reasonable’ thing to do and that it always supports ‘human dignity,’ but that dishonestly brushes aside the continual rejection of previous proposals much too flippantly.
The church has had many opportunities in the past 15 years to be a leader on the issue, and it has chosen to be a stumbling block every step of the way. In fact, just last year, in trying to quell the backlash of Prop 8 in California, the church made a public announcement that it ‘would not object’ to legislation supporting nondiscrimination against gays in a laundry list of rights. Equality Utah took the church up on the statement, produced the legislation, but when push came to shove the church failed to support any of them. Not objecting to something and supporting them are apparently two different things and the bills failed miserably.
While this action by the church is monumentally good news it doesn’t whitewash the past. It is still there, loud, clear, and devastating, and the future is still very, very murky. The church can’t erase all those years of anti-gay rhetoric with an olive branch in one hand, a hammer in the other hand, and the still pompous pretention that it has done nothing wrong.
