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Tag: mormon church
About 1,500 Mormons Resign From Church In Protest Of Same-Sex Policy

About 1,500 Mormons Resign From Church In Protest Of Same-Sex Policy

By Jon Herskovitz

(Reuters) – About 1,500 Latter-day Saints have submitted letters of resignation from the Mormon Church to protest a new policy barring children of married same-sex couples from being baptized until they are adults, movement organizers said on Sunday.

More than 1,000 people gathered on Saturday near the Salt Lake City headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to protest the policy they see as discriminatory and harmful to families, with many standing in long lines to submit their resignations, they said.

A similar protest called “The Utah Rally for Love, Equality, Family and Acceptance” is set for next Saturday in the same area.

Leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints approved the policy this month. It added same-sex marriage to acts considered to be a renunciation of the Mormon faith and thus subject to church discipline, including excommunication.

“It is difficult for people to leave the Church. It takes people a long time to make this decision. It is a well-thought-out one and it is not taken lightly,” said Brooke Swallow, one of the organizers of the Saturday protest.

“The people in the Mormon Church are finding that this is not a Christ-centered policy,” Swallow added. “This is a policy that is about the people at the top, and their views and prejudices, and they are not thinking through what this will do long-term to families.”

A Church spokesman said: “We don’t want to see anyone leave the Church, especially people who have been struggling with any aspect of their life.

“It’s extremely important that our members read what leaders have said, and do not rely on other sources or interpretations or what people think they have said,” Eric Hawkins said in a statement.

The Church has more than 15 million adherents and 85,000 missionaries globally.

The new church policy bars children of gay married couples from being baptized in the faith until they turn 18, leave their parents’ home and disavow same-sex marriage or cohabitation.

Church leaders elaborated on Friday, saying the withholding of baptism would apply only to children whose primary residence was with a same-sex couple.

The provisions do not curtail the membership activities of children who have already been baptized.

The Church said this year it would support laws protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination in housing and employment. But Mormon leaders have said sex should only happen between a married couple, and they cannot sanction same-sex marriage.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, and Peg McEntee in Salt Lake City; Editing by Peter Cooney and Christian Plumb)

Sandy Newcomb stands with a flag near the Salt Lake Temple after members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mailed their membership resignation to the church in Salt Lake City, Utah November 14, 2015.  REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

 

 

Mormon Church’s Shift On Gay Rights Follows Series Of Defeats In California

Mormon Church’s Shift On Gay Rights Follows Series Of Defeats In California

By Maura Dolan and Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

The pledge Tuesday by the Mormon Church to oppose housing and job discrimination against gays follows years of piercing church losses in California over gay rights, including one last week.

The church opposed a new rule to bar California judges from becoming leaders in the Boy Scouts of America because the organization prohibits gays from being Scout leaders.

In letter after letter to the California Supreme Court, Mormons complained the policy would interfere with Mormon judges’ freedom of religion. The church sponsors Boy Scout troops and members are assigned leadership positions as part of their religious duties.

“The scouting program is an integral part of the church’s training of young people,” wrote Susan H. McCollum of Santa Barbara, Calif. “There are many people in each ward (congregation) who, as part of their required service in the church, must register as a member of the Boy Scouts of America.”

San Bernardino Superior Court Judge Steve Mapes wrote: “Whether or not it is intended, the effect of this modification would serve to disenfranchise LDS members of the Bar and Bench from Judicial Service.”

But the California Supreme Court voted unanimously last week to adopt the new rule anyway.

That fight over judges followed a drawn-out battle over gay marriage in California. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a leader in advocating for passage of Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in the state until courts overruled it, and Mormons were encouraged to support and contribute to the campaign.

Many of those supporters said they suffered threats on their lives, property vandalism, boycotts of their business and even lost jobs.

The church was caught off guard by the fury Proposition 8 provoked.

“Ever since then, they have tried to be clear that with the exception of same-sex marriage, they support the full range of civil rights for all citizens,” said Patrick Mason, director of the Mormon studies program at Claremont Graduate University.

Some gay rights leaders were not convinced of the church’s sincerity, but Kate Kendell, head of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, found the statements history-making.

“The Mormon Church is in a different place than it was during Prop. 8,” Kendell said. “There is an ongoing campaign to make a very strong course correction from where they were.”

Kendell, who grew up Mormon in Utah, was there Tuesday giving a speech at a ribbon cutting for a gay and lesbian resource center.

“The church has probably been influenced by Mormons living in places like Southern California, who want the church — particularly after the bruising experience of Prop. 8 — to actually live the values of kindness, acceptance and empathy that they believe are at the heart of the faith,” Kendell said.

About 768,000 Mormons lived in California as of 2013. The largest Mormon temples in California are in West Los Angeles and Oakland.

Still, the divisiveness of the Proposition 8 battle lingers. Andrew Pugno, who served as a lawyer for ProtectMarriage, which supported the measure, said he thought the church’s move “speaks to the need to better address religious freedoms in California.”

His group has sued state officials for requiring the campaign to disclose the addresses and employers of those who contributed to the proposition, many of whom declared under oath that they had received death threats.

Two Mormon temples and a Catholic Knights of Columbus building received envelopes containing a white powdery substance, according to the lawsuit.

Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, which organized boycotts of donors who supported Proposition 8, said he worried the church’s focus on religious freedom might mean they want a license to discriminate, despite their words of conciliation. Still, he called Tuesday “a great day.”

“When they speak like they did today, their 6.5 million members in the U.S. will change their minds accordingly, so that is huge and that is going to impact a lot of lives,” he said.
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Staff writer Jeff Gottlieb contributed to this report.

Photo: Kevin Goebel via Flickr

Analysis: Feminism And Mormon Doctrine Collide And Lead To Rare Excommunication

Analysis: Feminism And Mormon Doctrine Collide And Lead To Rare Excommunication

By Michael Muskal, Los Angeles Times

Kate Kelly, the face of the latest wave of feminist demands on the Mormon church, said she is unlikely to seek rebaptism in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints any time soon, after she was formally excommunicated on Monday.

“I’ve done nothing wrong and have nothing to repent,” Kelly said in an interview with the Salt Lake Tribune, published in Utah, where the church is based. “Once the church changes to be a more inclusive place and once women are ordained, that’s a place I’d feel welcome.”

Kelly said she will likely seek to appeal her ouster to a higher church authority, but the issue she represents — inclusion of women on an equal clerical standing with men — is one with which the Mormon church and other religions have long grappled.

Her case also highlights the issue of excommunication itself — essentially separating the individual from the body of her society. It sounds like a harsh penalty, but it has a long and glorious history in the annals of religion as well as in secular society.

All societies define their membership and operating rules, including those for separating individuals from the pack. If you think this is a phenomenon reserved for religions, just visit any office cooler after a big sporting event and watch the person who rooted for the wrong side being ostracized. American society has even developed a genre of reality television around one’s peers voting someone off of the island. It is no accident one show is called Survivor.

When it comes to religions, however, many have institutionalized ways of defining and including their members and casting out those who fail to make the grade or have thumbed their noses at the prevailing dogma.

Some Protestants sects call it shunning, barring all social contact with the miscreant. Judaism had a form of such censure as well, though the practice has gone by the wayside as Jews were allowed to move out of legal ghettos and the religion divided among different branches. Roman Catholics have a history of excommunication going back to the first century and include a whole slew of kings before, during and after the Protestant Reformation: One side’s excommunicated heretics are another side’s revered leaders.

Over the weekend, Pope Francis declared organized crime in Italy to be excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church: “Those who in their life have gone along the evil ways, as in the case of the Mafia, they are not with God, they are excommunicated,” he said on a visit to Calabria. But that proclamation lacked the formal heft of the leader of the church speaking about doctrine and probably was meant to be more of a warning to hoodlums.

Like all religions, Mormon excommunications, especially for apostasy, or the abandoning of a religious belief, can be complicated.

Last year, Kelly helped found Ordain Women, a group that seeks gender equality and women’s ordination to the priesthood. A former Mormon missionary, she rose to national prominence leading demonstrations at the church’s semiannual conferences at Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

Women do hold leadership positions in the church, which has about 15 million members worldwide, but the priesthood is closed to females, spokesman Eric Hawkins said in an email to the Los Angeles Times. “The pattern of ordaining men to the priesthood was established by Christ in His Church, and is followed in His restored Church today,” he stated.

The national church does not have statistics on how many people have been excommunicated, Hawkins said, since discipline is usually initiated at the local organizational level known as stakes. It was a stake in Virginia that met on Sunday on Kelly’s case and decided to excommunicate her.

AFP Photo / George Frey

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Mormon Women’s Leader Says Excommunicated From Church

Mormon Women’s Leader Says Excommunicated From Church

Los Angeles (AFP) — The Mormon church has ex-communicated the founder of a prominent women’s group for “conduct contrary” to its laws and order, according to an email cited Monday by the woman involved.

Kate Kelly, a founder of Ordain Women, said in a blog that she had been informed of her ouster after an all-male panel held a disciplinary trial over her case on Sunday.

The panel convicted her of the charge of apostasy, she said, and has decided to excommunicate her, the most serious punishment that can be levied by a church court.

Kelly, who has campaigned for greater female roles in the church, did not attend the hearing, instead holding a vigil in Salt Lake City in Utah, the home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“Our determination is that you be excommunicated for conduct contrary to the laws and order of the church,” Bishop Mark Harrison, Kelly’s former ecclesiastical leader in Virginia, told her in an email.

The penalties include being banned from wearing temple garments, taking the sacrament, holding a church calling, giving a talk in church, offering a public prayer in church, or voting for church officers, it said.

To be allowed back in to the church she must “show true repentance and satisfy” various conditions, it added.

“In order to be considered for readmission you will need to demonstrate over a period of time that you have stopped teachings and actions that undermine the church, its leaders, and the doctrine of the priesthood,” it said.

In addition “you must stop trying to gain a following for yourself or your cause and taking actions that could lead others away from the church.”

Kelly said: “The decision to force me outside my congregation and community is exceptionally painful.

“Today is a tragic day for my family and me as we process the many ways this will impact us, both in this life and in the eternities. I love the gospel and the courage of its people.

“Don’t leave. Stay, and make things better.”

Representatives of the church did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case.

AFP Photo / George Frey

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