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Prelude to the National “Defense of Marriage” Campaign: Civil Discrimination Against Feared or Despised Minorities Special Award for Outstanding Scholarly Research and Writing, Affirmation Conference, Long Beach, September 2001 D. Michael Quinn1 Originally published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 33:3, pp. 1-52. Reproduced with permission. Introduction AMERICA IS CURRENTLY IN THE MIDST of state-by-state political activism and judicial appeals to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage. In 1996 the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated one example of the related effort to roll back laws protecting homosexuals from civil discrimination, but this campaign moves forward on various fronts in every state of the Union. Its organizers will certainly extend this political activism into all states currently lacking a "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA) which both prohibits same-sex marriage and refuses to recognize such unions legally performed in other states or countries. In view of the pace for this state-by-state political activism during the 1990s, the Defense of Marriage campaign will probably continue throughout the United States for at least another decade.2 As I have written elsewhere,3 there is a gulf of perception between those who have experienced erotic desire for a person of their same gender and those who have not. However, we can communicate with each other, even across the gulf of same-sex desire. Since I am in the minority as a homosexual and as a Mexican-American, I want to correct in advance what might appear to be us-versus-them dimension in my remarks about the heterosexual "white" majority. Whether minority or majority, individuals in every group display a wide diversity of attitudes and actions. Moreover, each of us belongs simultaneously to both minority and majority groups. For example, I am in the non-black majority and throughout my life have been embarrassed to discover my own prejudices and insensitivities about race. Likewise, most blacks are in the vast majority of persons who lack serious physical handicaps and who (like most of us) can be prejudiced and insensitive toward disabled persons of every skin color. While I condemn prejudice and social discrimination, I also acknowledge my own lapses in these areas.
It was difficult not to take the passage of Proposition 22 personally.... While one would like to think it wasn't personal, it's awfully difficult to really believe that anyone who put one of those signs in their yard truly thought they were protecting heterosexual marriage. The message they sent, whether intended or not, was: We don't like gay people. ...Non-gay friends and acquaintances need to know that to us it wasn't just a vote, it was personal.4In fact, the campaign against Prop. 22 was so personally painful for three Mormon gay males that they committed suicide in the spring of 2000, leaving letters of anguish about the LDS church's role in spearheading this activism against same-sex marriage.5 Homophobia--A Definition Gays, lesbians, and increasing numbers of heterosexual scholars use the terms "heterosexism" and "homophobia" to describe the opposition against legal protections based on sexual orientation. Two authors explain: "Heterosexism is a reasoned system of bias regarding sexual orientation. It denotes prejudice in favor of heterosexual people and connotes prejudice against bisexual and, especially, homosexual people." Further, "Heterosexism is analogous to racism and sexism. Homophobia finds appropriate analogies in racial bigotry and misogynism [or antagonism toward females]."6 Since the root word phobia means fear, "homophobia" describes expressions of discomfort, anxiety, or fear about homosexuality and homosexuals.7 Just as "Negrophobia" has often involved feelings of dislike or hatred toward African-Americans,8 homophobia can also involve feelings of dislike or hatred toward gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender persons. However, many whites are Negrophobic without being hateful, and many Americans are homophobic without being hateful. Furthermore, just as there have been calmly reasoned arguments of misogyny, racism, Negrophobia, and anti-Semitism, so are there now calmly reasoned arguments of homophobia.9 Such homophobia recently caused a Mormon to proclaim in Provo, Utah's newspaper: "God is a bigot."10 Same-Sex Marriage--Its Purposes By contrast, the Anglican Theological Review has presented a different perspective on same-sex relationships: "In fact, homophobia and heterosexism elicit such strong emotional responses that lesbians and gay men are often estranged from their natal families, and thus deprived of what is, for most other marginalized groups, a primary source of care and nurture."11 Parental rejection is also a frequent experience of Mormon gays and lesbians.12In a recent article about young gay males experiencing rejection, two of the eight examples were Utah-Mormon teenagers "thrown out of home" by their parents.13
A theology of same-sex relationship images God saying to gay men and lesbians, as well as to their heterosexual counterparts, "It is not good for you to be alone," and providing through a profound relationship with a companion (most commonly called a "lover" in the gay community) for their "mutual comfort and joy." In a gay or lesbian relationship, as well as in a heterosexual relationship, "each may be to the other a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity, a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy." For a parish community to celebrate and bless such a relationship is simply to say to the [same-sex] couple, "We share your joy, and we see your love as a gift from a loving Creator."14Just as heterosexual marriage binds a couple emotionally and spiritually far beyond sex and child-raising, so also do most homosexuals want a same-sex relationship that combines sexual attraction with mutual respect, love, shared goals, and even spiritual fulfillment.15 In addition, like members of every other group, gays and lesbians believe they deserve access to legally protected relationships.16 Likewise, the LDS father of a gay male has publicly declared that "affirming same-sex relationships" is "the logical next step" for both church and state.17 "Many Fine Friends" In expressing satisfaction at the passage of California's law prohibiting marriage for gays and lesbians, LDS president Gordon B. Hinckley insisted: "We are not anti-gay. We are pro-family." But the two slogans are linked. In its article on "The Pro-Family Movement," the Conservative Digest proudly listed those who are "Anti-Homosexuals" and "Anti-Gay Rights."18
A month after the vote on Prop. 22, one of Southern California's Roman Catholic bishops publicly apologized for the role of the Catholic Church in promoting antagonism toward gays and lesbians. Presiding over a diocese of more than one million Catholics, Monsignor Gerald Barnes said: "I ask forgiveness for the members of the Church and for myself. . . . The rhetoric and propaganda of some proponents of Proposition 22 served to remind all of us of the fear and hatred of which we are all capable of [sic] in the name of Christian virtue."21 Monsignor Barnes was following the example of Pope John Paul II who referred "to Racism, Sexism and Anti-Semitism" in the Vatican's recent "Landmark Apology for Church Sins."22 To date, Elder Callister has issued no such apology for statements made by LDS members during the DOMA activism in California. No similar acknowledgment has come from LDS church headquarters, which continues to promote its "pro-family" political campaign of fear against gays and lesbians throughout the nation. However, Robert Rees (a former LDS bishop and mission president) has observed: "Thus, in spite of President Hinckley's strong admonition not to let support of Proposition 22 lead to prejudicial treatment of homosexuals, there have been more homophobic sentiments expressed in our [LDS] meetings in the past year than I can remember over an entire lifetime. One only has to ask Latter-day Saint homosexuals living in California if they feel safer today than they did a year ago to determine how destructive these expressions have been."23 A statistical report issued by the California Attorney General has verified that violence against gays and lesbians increased in 1999 during the interfaith campaign against same-sex marriage.24 For those who oppose marriage for homosexuals but insist they have no ill feeling toward gays and lesbians, a recent book by music composer Ned Rorem is useful. Openly gay himself, he interviewed theater critic John Simon who had published remarks which many regarded as homophobic. Rorem commented: "What you've said, apparently homophobically to some people, is powerful enough to disqualify what you may say compassionately in other contexts."25 Obviously, this also applies to what people do homophobically. Obedience Vs. Conscience In the state-by-state campaigns for Defense of Marriage laws from the 1990s to the present, LDS officials have repeatedly instructed Mormons to regard their vote as an act of obedience to leadership, rather than an act of individual conscience. This has occurred in Utah, Hawaii, Washington, Alaska, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Nebraska, and Texas.26 This attitude separates Mormon voters and legislators from most of the others in the political "coalition" against same-sex marriage, which President Hinckley publicly described: "We have worked with Jewish groups, Catholics, Muslims, Protestants, and those of no particular religious affiliation. . . ."27 For the current LDS leadership, lock-step obedience to the "living prophet" is more important than the church member's own sense of what is right and fair.28 In addition, LDS general authorities and regional leaders have tried to conceal their role in directing this political campaign and in soliciting monetary donations for its support. As instructed by church headquarters, regional leaders have told local members to conceal their Mormon affiliation when writing against same-sex marriage to newspapers or elected officials.29 Rather than being a spontaneous expression of citizenship, the thousands of letters flooding each state's legislature have merely reflected instructions from LDS headquarters, and sometimes even specific quotas given to local congregations by regional LDS leaders. In previous political campaigns, Mormons have written up to 85 percent of the letters received by legislatures in states where they comprised less than one percent of the population.30
The current pattern of political deception and emphasis on obedience-above-conscience dates from the LDS church's 1975-82 campaign against ratification of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, during which the presidency of Spencer W. Kimball made homosexuality a major reason for this political activism. As I wrote in 1997, Gordon B. Hinckley's direction of the national anti-ERA campaign provided the tactics and "blueprint for the Mormon effort to prohibit same-sex marriages and to oppose any legislation favoring homosexuals."33 Marriage Restrictions against Despised Groups in History However, this essay does not emphasize the details of the campaign by various groups against same-sex marriage. Instead, I used the musical term "prelude" as my title's first word because the Defense of Marriage Act in Congress and various states is simply a different verse of the same old song for denying civil rights to feared or despised minorities. The most direct correlation involves access to marriage. Ironically, many who have supported laws against same-sex marriage are themselves members of groups which were once denied the right to marry those of their choice. While some of this might be due to selective memory, persecuted minorities also sometimes demonstrate their assimilation by mimicking their former persecutors. Jews have had the longest experience with legal restrictions against their choice of marriage partners. For a thousand years, medieval Europe prohibited Jews from marrying Christians.34 In 1935, Nazi Germany passed laws against intermarriage between Jews and "Germans or kindred blood."35 In our nation's history, African-Americans suffered hundreds of years of legal restrictions on marriage. From the colonial era onward, there was either no legal option for slaves to marry or the laws actually prohibited their marriage.36 Additionally, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, nearly all states had statutes against "free Negroes" marrying "white" persons. Some states even banned marriage with a person of one-sixteenth "Negro blood" (in other words, having one great-great-grandparent who was African-American).37 In 1850, California enacted its law against interracial marriage, which remained in force until 1948 when the state supreme court overturned it.38 Before that year, the state courts were not friendly to the civil rights of minorities. In 1941, the California District Court of Appeals ruled that a person with "one-eighth part or more of Negro blood" could not legally testify against a white person, nor marry one.39 Sixteen states still prohibited interracial marriage in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared this unconstitutional in the landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia.40 Ten states (including Delaware and Montana) also refused to recognize the legitimacy of interracial marriages legally performed elsewhere.41 This is now the same tactic used by California, Utah, and other states toward same-sex marriages legally performed elsewhere.42 While the groups involved are certainly different, the opposition to gay rights has many similarities to the pattern of denying other minorities their civil rights. Regarding marriage, the majority has often said to the disapproved minority: "We will not allow you full access to marriage because you are not our kind of people."
In historical perspective, Jews and African-Americans were not the only groups denied free access to marriage. Such laws also targeted other minorities. In 1901, California prohibited intermarriage with Asians. In 1919, South Dakota specifically targeted Koreans, and in 1933, California added Malaysians to its list of prohibited marriages.44 While America was defending freedom during World War II, there were laws against marrying Asians in fourteen states of the South, Midwest, and West, including Mormon-dominated Utah.45 Chieko N. Okazaki (a Japanese-American resident of Salt Lake City since 1951 and a recent counselor in the LDS church's Relief Society general presidency) has written: 'A Japanese person could not be sealed to a Caucasian in the Salt Lake Temple at that time because of state law."46 Utah also prohibited marriage between Chinese and African-Americans.47 As a recent analysis observes: "State laws even interfered with the basic family relationships of Asian Americans."48 During this time, it was also illegal for American Indians to marry whites in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.49 As late as 1962, North Carolina prohibited a Cherokee woman from marrying a white man. Until 1966, Maryland actively prevented Polynesians and Filipinos from marrying whites.50 Whether targeting Jews, African-Americans, Asians, Native American tribes, or Pacific Islanders, the proponents of these marriage restrictions argued that such laws were necessary for racial "purity" or to protect society.51 Only with regard to Mormons did the advocates of repressive legislation argue that restrictions were necessary to protect marriage itself. Mormon Polygamy as a Threat to Traditional Marriage
Ironically, in the nineteenth century, Mormons argued that the traditional marriages of the majority were not threatened by allowing a small minority to marry differently.55 This plea was as rational then as it is now. Social Hysteria Is "social hysteria" an appropriate term for the attitudes and actions of white Americans against blacks and interracial marriage? Historians have cited "full scale white hysteria about black male sexuality" to explain the lynching of thousands of African-American men for merely looking at a white woman.56
Likewise, in an 1881 sermon on Salt Lake's Temple Square, Southern States Mission President John Morgan spoke approvingly of hanging Negro males "to a lamp-post" for "impudence." This appeared in the officially published Deseret News and Journal of Discourses, and Morgan became an LDS general authority a year after a Salt Lake City mob lynched an African-American male on a lamp-post in 1883 for killing an LDS bishop.59 Apostle Heber J. Grant wrote that "the citizens" hanged "the nigger."60 A similar kind of social hysteria propelled the popular campaign against Mormon polygamy. For example, claiming that they were defending the family, seven million Americans signed petitions for the U.S. House of Representatives to exclude Brigham H. Roberts from his elected office in 1900, solely because he was a Mormon polygamist.61 Historians view the anti-polygamy campaign of the 1860s to the early 1900s as a hysteric reaction of Victorian America against a tiny minority who advocated non-traditional marriage.62 Traditional Marriage Threatened? Would "social hysteria" also be an appropriate term to describe current claims that the existence of heterosexual marriage is threatened by allowing same-sex marriages? I believe so, particularly since various non-western cultures (including more than one hundred Native American tribes) have sanctioned same-sex marriages for centuries, and perhaps even millennia. Anthropologists have observed that many of these cultures have given same-sex marriages the same status as heterosexual marriages.63 Traditional marriage didn't decline in these cultures, but bigotry did.64 Likewise, during early medieval times, the Catholic Church performed unions for same-sex friends who seemed to be given the status of marriage. The Eastern Orthodox Church continued performing same-sex unions until the 1500s. Heterosexual marriages neither declined nor suffered by the coexistence of these same-sex unions in early Christianity.65 It does not make sense to blame the small number of homosexuals for the problems of heterosexual marriage. If there are declines in the rate and quality of heterosexual marriage, it is the fault of heterosexuals, who comprise at least 90 percent of the population. Nearly twenty years ago, a Roman Catholic task force astutely observed: "In contemporary America, family has become a shibboleth of internal national security. . . with homosexuality as the scapegoat."66 Likewise, the BYU Religious Studies Center in 1988 published a woman's essay which commented on the lack of "legalized marriage" for "those homosexual men and women who wish to maintain an on-going, monogamous same-sex relationship." She then asked: "Why should an expanded definition of family, which makes room for many more categories of persons who are longing for closeness, be considered threatening and harmful to family life?"67 In 1999, BYU sociology professor Tim B. Heaton observed, "The legitimization of same-sex relationships has been viewed by some as a major threat to the family. I have yet to see compelling evidence for this claim."68 Marriage as a Civil Right Is full access to marriage a civil right for American minorities? Not according to the thirty-eight state legislatures which passed miscegenation laws against various races and ethnic minorities prior to 1967.69 Likewise, is non-traditional marriage a civil right for a despised minority? Not according to Congress which passed several laws against Mormon polygamy from 1862 onward, nor according to the U.S. Supreme Court which validated these laws from 1879 to 1890.70
Nevertheless, in the topsy-turvy mind-set of bigotry, racial segregationists accused African-Americans of "prejudice" and "bigotry" for condemning segregation as "racist,"72 just as opponents of same-sex marriage now accuse gays and lesbians of "intolerance" and "bigotry" for condemning Defense of Marriage laws as "homophobic."73 Regarding civil discrimination generally, one author has observed: "In cases of civilized oppression the victims may have to face not only the suppression of protest but also dangerous misdescriptions of the overall situation."74 For example, one argument used to incite fear against same-sex marriage is the warning that its legalization would result in ministers being "forced to perform same-sex marriages."75 This statement appeared in a brochure issued in 1999 by LDS headquarters which said that "if DOMA fails in California" an "obvious" consequence will be "civil penalties for churches who refuse to perform gay marriages." However, in March 1995, the Circuit Court of Hawaii ruled that this was a false claim in the LDS church's petition to the Hawaii court.76 State licensing law permits churches to perform civil marriages but does not require them to do so. Both ministers and lawyers knew this for decades before the controversy about same-sex marriage. In the years since the Supreme Court legalized all interracial marriages in 1967, no minister has been "forced" to perform an interracial marriage, either in the South or elsewhere. Likewise, although interfaith marriages have always been legal in the United States, Roman Catholic priests and orthodox Jewish rabbis have traditionally refused to perform such marriages. LDS bishops have never been legally required to perform a marriage for a non-Mormon. Although licensed by the state to perform civil marriage, ministers have always had the right to refuse any person for any reason. The Morality Argument and Selective Memory LDS president Hinckley proclaimed in October 1999: "Some portray legalization of so-called same-sex marriage as a civil right. This is not a matter of civil rights; it is a matter of morality."77 Yet "morality" was also the principal argument of America's vast majority for legally prohibiting polygamy, or what BYU professor Brent A. Barlow once called Mormonism's "alternative family lifestyle."78 Public morality was also the Mormon argument in April 1836 against the marriage of whites with African-Americans. An editorial in the official LDS magazine at Kirtland, Ohio, proclaimed: ". . .and low indeed must be the mind, that would consent for a moment, to see his fair daughter, his sister, or perhaps, his bosom companion in the embrace of a NEGRO!"79 This had nothing to do with Utah Mormonism's decades-later policy of denying priesthood ordination to African-Americans.80 In fact, a month before this editorial, Mormon founder Joseph Smith had authorized the ordination of free black Elijah Abel as an elder in Kirtland, and to the priesthood office of Seventy eight months after it.81 This LDS editorial (apparently written by Associate President Oliver Cowdery)82 simply reflected the prevailing bigotry of America. George Santayana was only partly right when he said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."83 The African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jews, Mormons, Native American Indians, and Polynesian-Americans who now oppose the legalization of same-sex unions are re-living their persecuted past in a different way--this time as the persecutors claiming to protect society while denying a despised minority the choice of marriage partners. However, of all those currently promoting laws against same-sex marriage, only the Mormons have adopted the same argument used by their former persecutors. The target has changed to gays and lesbians, but the pattern is the same. The Role of Churches in Restricting Civil Rights Because various churches have actively campaigned against the legalization of marriage for gays and lesbians, a related question is the historic role of churches in denying civil rights to minorities. For example, the Protestant and Catholic churches of the South led the pro-slavery rhetoric before the American Civil War. In fact, Protestant clergy, Catholic priests, Catholic bishops, and members of the Jesuit order even owned African-American slaves.84 Southern white churches also supported racial segregation in the American South afterwards.85 During the same time, the South African Dutch Reformed Church and the Rhodesian Anglican Church supported race-segregation by the white supremacist governments in their respective countries, either actively or by silence.86 Likewise, the Roman Catholic Church was allied with repressive regimes in Germany and Latin America.87 In such instances, the religious leaders sincerely and devoutly regarded the suppression of minorities as part of a divinely approved status quo. Utah Mormon Discrimination against Blacks Even after federal emancipation of America's slaves in the 1860s, LDS church president Brigham Young referred to African-American slavery as a religious necessity.88 Earlier, as both church president and governor, he had instructed the Utah legislature in 1852 to legalize the slavery of African-Americans.89 This directly contradicted Joseph Smith's proposal in 1844 "to abolish slavery by the year 1850" by financially compensating Southern slave-owners through the sale of federal lands in the West.90 Utah Mormonism's reversal of Joseph Smith's social policy toward Negroes was mirrored by the refusal of LDS presidents after 1844 to follow the founding prophet's example of giving the priesthood to blacks who were not slaves.91 For more than a century, Utah restricted African-Americans from patronizing white restaurants and hotels, prohibited them from public swimming pools, and required them to sit in the balconies of theaters.92 During World War II, African-Americans wearing their nation's uniform had to sit in the balcony of Utah theaters, while German prisoners-of-war sat on the main floor with white servicemen and civilians.93 Utah law also prohibited marriage between a white person and a black (including persons only one-eighth Negro).94 Utah's racial discrimination did not occur by happenstance nor did it continue into modern times by accident. It was promoted by the highest leaders of the state's dominant church. As late as 1941, Counselor J. Reuben Clark used the word "nigger" in his First Presidency office diary.95 In 1944, the First Presidency authorized local LDS leaders to join "as individuals a civic organization whose purpose is to restrict and control negro settlement" in Salt Lake City.96 A year later, LDS president George Albert Smith wrote: "Talked to Pres Clark & Nicholas [G. Smith, an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles] about the use of [LDS] meeting houses for meetings to prevent Negroes from becoming neighbors."97 The church president's diary did not indicate whether he endorsed or opposed this activity, but his brother Nicholas G. Smith described it as "race hatred."98
There was no mystery about why Utah law continued to prohibit interracial marriage. In 1947, the First Presidency wrote that "the intermarriage of the Negro and White races, [is] a concept which has heretofore been most repugnant to most normal-minded people from the ancient patriarchs till now."103 In other words, the First Presidency condemned interracial marriage as abnormal. In 1950, Counselor Clark added that "anything that breaks down the color line leads to marriage."104 Five years later, on behalf of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Joseph Fielding Smith wrote to the First Presidency about African-American members of the LDS church in Utah and referred to the "danger of intermarriage."105 In 1953, a First Presidency secretary also informed a white Mormon about the less-obvious extent of Utah's racial segregation: "The L.D.S. Hospital here in Salt Lake City has a blood bank which does not contain any colored blood."106 According to presidency counselor J. Reuben Clark, this policy of segregating African-American blood from the blood donated by so-called "white people" was intended "to protect the purity of the blood streams of the people of this Church."107 During this era of Utah's racial segregation, the First Presidency also repeatedly affirmed that no African-American could stay at the LDS church-owned Hotel Utah (which had maintained this exclusion since its opening in 1911). The LDS president was president of the hotel, and his counselors were its senior vice-presidents. The First Presidency explained this racial exclusion as simply "the practice of the hotel."108 Internationally renown singer Marian Anderson endured this racial discrimination in Utah. When she gave her first recital at the University of Utah's Kingsbury Hall, this African-American was denied entry to any of Salt Lake City's hotels and had to stay with one of the concert's promoters. When she returned in March 1948 to participate in a concert at the LDS church's Salt Lake Tabernacle, the First Presidency relented. America's beloved contralto "was allowed to stay at the Hotel Utah on condition that she use the freight elevator." This world-famous black woman was not allowed to use the main entrance and lobby.109 Likewise, invited to speak at the University of Utah, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Ralph Bunche was allowed to stay at the LDS church's hotel in 1951 only after this black man agreed to use the freight elevator, "have his meals in his room and not come to the dining room."110 Due to their international fame, Anderson and Bunche were exceptions to the Mormon rules of race. As Hotel Utah's senior vice-president, J. Reuben Clark explained: "Since they are not entitled to the Priesthood, the Church discourages social intercourse with the negro race... ." Therefore, African-Americans were denied equal access to the LDS church's hotel in order "to preserve the purity of the race that is entitled to hold the Priesthood."111 With such beliefs, the LDS First Presidency did what it could to block national efforts for the civil rights of African-Americans. As previously noted, Counselor McKay in 1949 instructed an Arizona stake president against that state's proposed legislation to "guarantee rights of Negroes." Making specific reference to the desegregation controversy in Little Rock, Arkansas,112 Counselor Clark in 1957 instructed Belle Smith Spafford "that she should do what she could to keep the National Council [of Women] from going on record in favor of what in the last analysis would be regarded as negro equality." At that time, Spafford was a vice-president of the National Council of Women.113 As American views began changing toward race relations from the 1940s onward, the Mormons of Utah continued to follow the example of LDS leaders against civil rights for African-Americans. There was widespread use in all-white neighborhoods of Utah's Uniform Real Estate Contract, Form 30, which prohibited the purchaser of real estate and his/her heirs from reselling the property "to any person not of the Caucasian race."114 The Salt Lake City School District prohibited blacks from being teachers and from fulfilling student-teaching requirements of their university training.115 In addition, 40 percent of Utah's employers refused to hire Negroes. Employers who did hire blacks also discriminated against them in job assignment, promotion, and salary.116 Blacks were prohibited from eating at the lunch counter of Salt Lake's City-County Building. All of Utah's bowling alleys excluded African-Americans, and LDS hospitals segregated black patients, sometimes requiring them to pay for private rooms. This was also the policy at Utah's Catholic hospitals.117 In these respects, Utah and the Mormons were representative of the rest of America's white society until the 1960s.118 In 1961, a survey of Salt Lake City by the NAACP showed that 12 percent of cafes, restaurants, and taverns declined to serve blacks, while 80 percent of the city's beauty shops and barber shops refused to do so. Likewise, 72 percent of Salt Lake City's hotels and 49 percent of its motels refused accommodations to African-Americans that year.119 After Counselor Clark's death in 1961, Apostle Ezra Taft Benson became the Mormon hierarchy's strident voice against the national crusade for African-American civil rights. Benson's Negrophobic rhetoric intensified after the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 drastically changed Utah's patterns of racial discrimination.120 In 1965 and 1967, he stated in televised meetings on Temple Square in Salt Lake City that "the so-called civil rights movement as it exists today is a Communist program for revolution in America."121 In 1967, Apostle Benson also approved the use of one of his talks as the forward to the overtly racist book Black Hammer, which featured the decapitated (and profusely bleeding) head of an African-American male on its cover. Subtitled White Alternatives, this book warned about the "well-defined plans for the establishment of a Negro Soviet dictatorship in the South."122 In 1968, Apostle Benson also instructed BYU students about "black Marxists" and "the Communists and their Black Power fanatics."123 At this time, LDS president David O. McKay had a Democrat (Hugh B. Brown) as a counselor, who was mystified that McKay allowed Benson to endorse the speeches and activities of nationally known segregationists. This politically liberal counselor was unaware of the LDS church president's private views about "insolent" African-Americans who wanted equal rights.124 In 1963, Utah ended its restrictions on interracial marriage, and Counselor Brown officially endorsed civil rights for persons of all races that year.125 However, until that year, every living prophet of the LDS church since Brigham Young either actively opposed the civil rights of African-Americans or passively endorsed the existing civil discriminations against them in Utah. In that same year, Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith told Look magazine's editor: "'Darkies' are wonderful people, and they have their place in our Church."126 At best, this revealed the racial paternalism that governed LDS headquarters. However, this platitude was also a smoke-screen for the worst of what Utah Mormon leaders had done against African-American rights for the previous 116 years. From Anti-Black to Anti-Gay Just as President Gordon B. Hinckley has said that same-sex marriage has no legitimate claim as a "civil right" in Utah or anywhere else, previous First Presidencies also stated that African-Americans had no legitimate right to unrestricted access to marriage, nor to unrestricted blood transfusions, nor to rent a room in the LDS church's hotel, nor to reside in Utah's white neighborhoods, nor to live near the Los Angeles Temple, nor to be in a hospital bed next to a white patient. Just as the First Presidency previously condemned interracial marriages as abnormal, it has recently condemned same-sex marriages as abnormal. The LDS church's opposition to gay rights is consistent with its historical opposition to African-American rights. Even when a general authority publicly apologized in September 2000 for "the actions and statements of individuals who have been insensitive to the pain suffered by the victims of racism," he claimed that the LDS leadership had an admirable history of race relations. Elder Alexander B. Morrison said: "How grateful I am that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has from its beginnings stood strongly against racism in any of its malignant manifestations."127 This was a by now familiar smoke-screen for the previous behavior of Mormon prophets, seers, and revelators. LDS headquarters has never apologized for the legalization of Negro slavery by Brigham Young in pioneer Utah, nor for the official LDS encouragement to lynch Negro males,128 nor for the racial segregation policies of the First Presidency until 1963, nor for Ezra Taft Benson's 1967 endorsement of a book which implied that decapitating black males was a "White Alternative."
Moreover, by repeatedly issuing this pamphlet and other homophobic statements since the beginning of the anti-ERA campaign in 1975, the Mormon church has encouraged a climate of revulsion which fills most LDS families. Therefore, I believe the First Presidency has also been morally responsible whenever Mormon parents have rejected their children for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. Even when the LDS church's Ensign magazine published a statement in 1997 advising parents not "to disown" their homosexual children, the general authority merely noted that such tactics "do not help."136 Public-relations statements of such timidity have little hope of undoing the spiritual damage to families caused by decades of stridently homophobic indoctrination by LDS headquarters.137 For example, in its official editorial against allowing Utah's high schools to have clubs for gay and lesbian students, the Deseret News commented in 1996: "It is still appalling that more than half the identified hate crimes in Utah are aimed at homosexuals."138 Again, this has the appearance of a smoke-screen to conceal the anti-gay agenda of LDS headquarters. Four years earlier, the same newspaper had successfully persuaded Utah's legislature not to include gays and lesbians in the state law against hate crimes.139 Moreover, the 1996 editorial then adopted the very attitude which propels these hate crimes it professed to regret: "homosexual activities and practices are an abomination, not just some 'alternative lifestyle' no better or worse than others."140 Echoing the role of LDS headquarters in preventing Utah from giving homosexuals legal protection from hate crimes, the Deseret News in June 2000 regretted that Utah Senator Orrin G. Hatch was "unable to stop hate-crime legislation" in Congress.141 There is yet another example of the LDS church's official homophobia, which subverts its public platitudes about loving those who regard themselves as gay or lesbian. Since 1998, church headquarters has instructed all local LDS leaders to put notations on the membership record of every Mormon who receives church discipline for homosexual behavior. Applicable even to teenagers, this ecclesiastical stigma will follow young men and women into every LDS congregation for the rest of their lives.142 For persons who believe that these various actions of the LDS First Presidency were God's will for suppressing minorities, I suggest they rethink a passage in The Book of Mormon: "For none of these iniquities come of the Lord; for he doeth that which is good among the children of men; and he doeth nothing save it be plain unto the children of men; and he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile" (2 Nephi 26:33).
In fact, when an end came to the various tyrannies of the majority against racial groups in America, LDS policies changed as well. What various "living prophets" had defined as God's doctrine turned out to be a Mormon social policy which reflected the majority's world view. I submit that the same applies to the LDS church's campaign against any law which benefits or protects gays and lesbians. LDS president Gordon B. Hinckley has dismissed Mormonism's earlier race-based policies as "those little tricks of history" which are irrelevant now.146 However, his twenty-five years of promoting political campaigns against the possibility of gay rights is one more example of the LDS hierarchy's discrimination against minorities who are not its "kind of people."147 The Sincerity of Prejudice and Civil Discrimination LDS leaders have repeatedly opposed civil rights for blacks and gays while denying that such action is "anti-Negro" or "racist," "anti-gay" or "homophobic." The previous quotes show that First Presidency counselor J. Reuben Clark, for one, defended wholesale restrictions against the civil rights of African-Americans. Nevertheless, at the same time, he regarded himself as compassionate toward blacks.148 In this paper I have tried to acknowledge the sincere beliefs and fears of those who oppose same-sex marriage. However, an "Appeal to Sincerity" is legitimate only when attempting to understand the personal motivation for various behaviors. Sincerity cannot logically be invoked to assess the legitimacy or ethical value of those behaviors.149 The past and present are filled with actions which most of us condemn, despite the fact that their perpetrators claimed they acted out of their sincere beliefs in a religion, or race, or social class, or country. If we regard slavery as wrong, the sincerity of slave-owners is irrelevant to the issue, even when the slave-owners were our revered national leaders, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.150 If denial of rights and protections for African-Americans was wrong, the sincerity of the oppressors is irrelevant to the issue, even if we otherwise admire the oppressors as religious leaders. Likewise, the sincerity of the heterosexual majority's anxieties and fears is not an ethical justification for denying rights and protections to the homosexual minority. The recent success of the Defense of Marriage Act in California (America's most populous state) was yet another example of the tyranny of the majority, but there is a silver lining to this dark cloud: Thirty-nine percent of California's electorate voted against DOMA.151 While most gays and lesbians believe we counted for 10 percent of the vote,152 many homophobes claim that no more than one percent of humanity has homosexual feelings.153 Therefore, LDS leaders and their religious allies in the political sphere must acknowledge that about a third of California's heterosexual electorate voted against their campaign of fear, social hysteria, prejudice, and minority exclusion. This is nearly three times higher than the percentage of white Southerners who opposed segregation in the decades before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,154 yet minority rights eventually triumphed there. In view of the fears, prejudices, and hatreds which existed both then and now, American society's sense of fairness is far greater today than it was fifty years ago. As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1996 when Romer v. Evans invalidated the LDS church's behind-the-scenes victory against civil rights for gays and lesbians in Colorado, "a state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws."155 This Colorado case had nothing to do with marriage. LDS leaders and their allies were attempting to invalidate those laws which protected gays and lesbians from hate crimes, as well as from civil discrimination in housing and employment.156 Gays and lesbians are the glaring exception to President Hinckley's public-relations statement to the LDS general conference in 1995: "We must be willing to defend the rights of others who may become the victims of bigotry."157 With regard to homosexuals, this is a slogan which LDS headquarters tries to subvert in every possible way.
The climate of homophobic antagonism in Mormon-dominated Utah creates constant anxiety for many gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender persons. It is historically similar to being a Christian in pagan Rome, a Protestant Huguenot in Catholic-dominated France, a Quaker in Puritan Massachusetts, a black in Klan-dominated Mississippi, a Jew in Nazi Germany, a Catholic in Protestant-dominated Belfast, a Muslim in Hindu-dominated Kashmir, or a Hindu in Muslim-dominated Islamabad. Its familiarity makes this pattern even more tragic in cultures which claim divine approval for exerting social oppression against their minorities. Just as Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons once claimed righteousness and God's blessing in denying basic rights to African-Americans and Asian-Americans, they are now claiming righteousness and God's blessing for denying basic rights to gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender persons. It takes a peculiar kind of blindness to currently affirm that the majority's historical discrimination against despised racial minorities was ethically and civilly wrong, yet argue that it is now ethically and civilly right to discriminate against the despised minority of homosexuals and transgender persons. "The Right of Each Individual to Be Free" Ironically, through its general authorities, its lesson manuals, and its church-owned newspaper, LDS headquarters has condemned other churches and religious leaders for limiting freedom or civil rights. During the entire twentieth century, the LDS church has criticized leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, of Iran's Shiite Islam, and of the Russian Orthodox Church for limiting the civil rights of various minorities.163
This principle of free agency and the right of each individual to be free[,] not only to think but also to act within bounds that grant to every one else the same privilege, are sometimes violated even by churches that claim to teach the doctrine of Jesus Christ. The attitude of any organization toward this principle of freedom is a pretty good index to its nearness to the teachings of Christ or to those of the evil one.164Should the LDS church and its leaders be exempt from McKay's standard to guarantee freedom and civil rights? As discussed earlier, McKay's public statement here actually contradicted both his private statements as well as his actions as an executive in the racially segregated Hotel Utah. However, McKay's equivocation has a parallel that is faith-promoting. When slave-owner Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal," this also did not describe the reality of his own life and culture.165 Yet later Americans and U.S. presidents found inspiration in Jefferson's idealized statement, and they struggled to change their culture in order to achieve the reality of full civil rights for all its minorities. That struggle continues today. Likewise, President McKay stated an ideal in 1950 that can continue to inspire LDS members and leaders to change their culture in order to grant full civil rights to all its minorities. Some will claim that the historical parallel of legal discrimination against race and religion has nothing to do with today's legal restrictions against social protections and marriage options for gays and lesbians. Such denial seems intended to privilege the current campaign in two ways: First, by denying that homosexuals constitute a minority as legitimate as the minorities of race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion; and second, by denying that legal limitations on this embattled group's social opportunities involve "prejudice," or "discrimination," or "denial of rights." By contrast, various authors have regarded prejudiced discrimination as the unifying characteristic of America's negative responses toward minorities of race, of ethnic group, of physical disability, of religion, and even of Masonic affiliation.166 To exclude sexual orientation from the category of embattled minorities is itself a sign of heterosexism and homophobia. Thus, the African-American documentary All God's Children has stated: "African Americans were accused of seeking 'special rights' during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Now, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people are accused of seeking 'special rights.' Both populations are simply seeking equal justice under the law." With supporting statements by African-American Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend Cecil L. Murray, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, and theologian Cornel West against discrimination based on sexual orientation, the documentary adds: "These systems of oppression are all cut from the same cloth of dominance and power over others."167
To deny any minority the full access to marriage is to deny the Declaration of Independence statement that the purpose of government is "to secure" the right of all its citizens to "the pursuit of Happiness." As with the pre-1967 limits on the marriage rights of racial minorities, it also violates the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment provision for "equal protection of the laws" when Congress or any state has denied marriage rights to lesbians and gay males. 169 Nevertheless, to me, the fact that 39 percent of Californians voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in March 2000 is FAITH-promoting. I can only HOPE that Congress and the Supreme Court will again guarantee a minority the rights which America's majority refuses to confer. In the meantime, I applaud the CHARITY which individual states (like Vermont) have begun to demonstrate in guaranteeing the civil rights of gays and lesbians.170 As the Apostle Paul wrote, "The greatest of these is charity" (I Cor. 13:13). This is a civil manifestation of the religious perspective expressed in the Anglican Theological Review: "When marriage is properly understood--as Martin Bucer argued over four centuries ago--as being primarily for companionship, not for procreation or parenting or 'the avoidance of fornication,' then its grace is operative equally for all couples who wish to enter into a covenanted relationship, whether they are a man and a woman, two women, or two men."171 The New Dictionary of Christian Ethics has also commented: "It is particularly disturbing to find churches which intensify the homosexual's sense of loneliness and isolation by their judgmental attitudes." While not endorsing ministerial ceremonies for same-sex couples, this ethical dictionary was emphatic about the denial of civil rights to homosexuals: "Whenever men and women are victimized because of their sexual orientation, whether formally in the law courts or less formally. . .the Christian duty is clearly to stand alongside the oppressed minority in their struggle for justice."172 As a gay male and Christian, I hope this kind of religious ethic will eventually triumph for America's minority of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender persons. Notes 1. This essay was supported by a grant from the Institute for the Study of Human Resources and also involved research support at ONE Institute & Archives: The International Gay and Lesbian Heritage/Research Center, which is affiliated with the University of Southern California. The Internet was used to locate many of the periodical references cited herein. I assumed that page numbers listed on Internet web sites were the same as for print references. However, some Internet sites did not provide page numbers. 2. As I have previously observed: "Every state has its own laws, and each new session of a state legislature is a new opportunity for the losing side to renew the battle over a sexual minority's civil rights or 'special rights.' This is equally true for every county, city, and town. ...Even a U.S. Supreme Court decision will not end the conflict if the LDS church and its interfaith allies are on the losing side of legalizing same-sex marriage… if pressed, the next step of the LDS interfaith coalition will be to mount a national campaign to ratify a U.S. constitutional amendment against 'special rights' for the small minority of Americans who define themselves as homosexual" (D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power [Salt Lake City: Signature Books/Smith Research Associates, 1997], 405). For anti-gay claims about "special rights," see note 167. 3. D. Michael Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 7. 4. "Thanks A Lot: The Personal Sting of Proposition 22," Frontiers Newsmagazine 18 (31 March 2000): 12. For the role of the LDS church in the mass distribution of these "Yes on Prop. 22" signs in every city and town of California, see letter from the North America West Area Presidency (John B. Dickson, William R. Bradford, Richard H. Winkel) to 'All Stake Presidents and Bishops in California, to be read in Sacrament Meeting Sunday, January 16," dated 11 Jan. 2000: "We would greatly appreciate it if all would continue contacting friends and neighbors as directed by the local coordinator about this issue and distribute, as well as put on your own lawns, the provided yard signs [emphasis added]" ("News: Proposition 22 Dominates California Wards' Attention, Divides Members," Sunstone 118 [April 2001]: 92). Official church positions of Dickson, Bradford, and Winkel listed in "General Authorities of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," Ensign 29 (November 1999): [57]. See also David Bruce Combe, "Proposition 22, California, and the Mormon Church: A Chronology" in Case Reports of the Mormon Alliance: Volume 5, 1999, eds., Lavina Fielding Anderson and Janice Merrill Allred (Salt Lake City: Mormon Alliance, 2000). 5. The three were Henry Stuart Matis, D. J. Thompson, and Clay Whitmer. See "Gay Mormon Hoped Suicide Would Help Change Church," San Francisco Examiner, 2 March 2000; "Gay Mormon Kills Self on Church Steps: California Man Had Expressed Anguish over Anti-Gay-Marriage Proposition 22," Salt Lake Tribune, 3 March 2000, A-1; "Bloody Hands: Friends Blame Mormon Church's Support of Proposition 22 for Death of Two Gay Men," Frontiers Newsmagazine 18 (31 March 2000): 20; "To Be Gay--and Mormon," Newsweek, 8 May 2000, 38-39; Combe, "Proposition 22, California, and the Mormon Church" (with quotations from the pre-suicide letters of Matis and Thompson). See also Christopher J. Alexander, "Suicidal Behavior in Gay and Lesbian Mormons," in Peculiar People: Mormons and Same-Sex Orientation, eds., Ron Schow, Wayne Schow, and Marybeth Raynes (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1991), 257-63; "No More Deaths, No More Silence: Gay Mormons Have Higher Suicide Rate Than the Entire Nation," Las Vegas Bugle, 12 May 2000, 18-19. In my "Selected Chronology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1848-1996" (Quinn, Extensions of Power, app. 5), I noted in the June 19, 1995, entry that Utah was attempting an analysis of its high suicide rates: "Salt Lake Tribune reports that Utah state task force is trying to understand why suicide is second leading cause of death for Utah's teenage males and young men, and why Utah's suicide rate is sixth highest in the nation. Article downplays alleged role of LDS church's 'too high expectations on young people,' by pointing out that five states (all surrounding Utah) with higher suicide rates have lower percentages of Mormons. However, this is a statistical error ('ecological fallacy') because states have not identified religious affiliation of suicides who might actually be disproportionately Mormon. Tribune refers to U.S. Health Department's 1989 estimate that homosexual orientation is a factor in 30 percent of teenage suicides. Deseret News excluded that estimate from its analysis of federal report on 21 Aug. 1989 and has said little about this current Utah task force" (894). 6. Patricia Beattie Jung and Ralph F. Smith, Heterosexism: An Ethical Challenge (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993), 13, 14. See also Beverly Wildung Harrison, "Misogyny and Homophobia: The Unexplored Connections," in Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985); James T. Sears and Walter L. Williams, eds., Overcoming Heterosexism and Homophobia (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997). 7. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, 2nd ed., s.v. "homophobia...unreasoning fear of or antipathy toward homosexuals and homosexuality"; see also Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. "homophobia ... irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexual--homophobic." However, see following discussion and note 9 concerning these inaccurate assumptions of "unreasoning" and "irrational," which dictionaries do not assume for Negrophobia (see note 8). 8. Random House Dictionary, s.v. "Negrophobia...strong fear or dislike of black people"; The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed., s.v. "Negrophobe...one who fears or dislikes Black people and their culture--Negrophobia." 9. Wayne R. Dynes says: "Care should be taken, therefore, to identify homophobia as a prejudice, comparable to racism and anti-semitism, rather than an irrational fear similar to claustrophobia or agoraphobia" (Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, 2 vols. [New York: Garland Publishing, 1990], 1:552). Likewise, without the unnecessary assumption of irrationality, American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines homophobia as an "aversion to gay or homosexual people or their lifestyle or culture" (contrast this with notes 7 and 8). Given these definitions, I disagree with John Charles Duffy, who equates homophobia with irrational fear: "Homophobia is not synonymous with opposition to gay rights. There are plenty of gay rights activists who suffer from internalized homophobia. And one can be opposed to gay rights without suffering from an irrational fear of gay people. [emphasis added] "Take [BYU law professor] Lynn Wardle, whom we all love to hate. Is Wardle homophobic? "Certainly he's 'heterosexist,' meaning he believes that heterosexuality is better than homosexuality... . *** "If in calling Wardle a homophobe, you're implying that he's motivated by hysterical fear...I don't see it. [emphasis added] "He's motivated by a set of beliefs about God's will which I believe are gravely wrong. But that's not homophobic. Heterosexist, yes. Homophobic, no. "It's precisely because Wardle is not irrational that he is so dangerous....When he speaks, legislatures listen." ("Homophobia: Calling It as It Is," Pillar of the Gay and Lesbian Community: Utah's True Alternative Newspaper, May 2000, 23. See also note 156.) While Duffy's argument encourages the Utah gay community to avoid inappropriate name-calling, his logic would invalidate the use of "Negrophobia" to describe white Southerners who used calmly rational arguments against the racial integration of transportation, housing, and schools. The "Jim Crow" South had its articulate defenders of segregation, and a person does not need to be irrational, hateful, or violent to be fearful concerning a minority and its perceived threats to the majority. Like any labels, those of racism, Negrophobia, anti-Semitism, bigotry, and homophobia can be misapplied. However, contrary to Duffy's claim that "homophobia is not synonymous with opposition to gay rights," opposition to gay rights is based on homophobia and Lynn Wardle would thus be homophobic. For Wardle's recently published statements, see "Church Delegates Attend World Congress of Families," Ensign 27 (June 1997): 75; "Families, Law Are Victims of Vermont Justices' Marriage Ruling," Deseret News, 9 Jan. 2000; "LDS Have Right to Fight Gay Marriage, 2 Say: But ACLU Lawyer, BYU Professor Far Apart on Ideology," Deseret News, 17 Feb. 2000; "3 BYU Professors Sign paper Upholding Traditional Marriage," Deseret News, 14 July 2000. 10. Letter to the editor by Warren N. Hardy, "Even God May Be a Bigot," Daily Herald [Provo, UT], 24 August 1999. See also Letter to the editor, "God Hates Gays," Daily Utah Chronicle, 27 January 1976, 2. 11. Robert Williams, "Toward a Theology for Lesbian and Gay Marriage," Anglican Theological Review 72 (Spring 1990): 142. 12. Concerning an unnamed teenager who committed suicide after a confrontation with his father during the teenager's telephone call to the Gay Help Line, see Mark A. Taylor, "The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name," Utah Holiday 15 (September 1986): 43. See also the narrative of Justen Michael Bennett-Maccubbin, who took the names of his adoptive gay fathers after his Mormon father tried to kill him when he told his parents he was gay, in Anderson Jones and David Fields, Men Together: Portraits of Love, Commitment, and Life (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1997), 38-39. See also Jolynn Moore, "Life As a Mormon," Love Makes A Family: Creating a Family Voice for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered People 9 (Fall/Winter 1997): 9. 13. Mike Glatze, ed., "Thrown Out," XY Magazine 22 (October-November 1999), 23, 31 (for the experiences of Jeremy, 17, and Justin, 19, both of Salt Lake City).This article also included the experience of Steve May: "Thrown out of the Army for being an out gay legislator: Steve May, Phoenix, Arizona." May's experience as a Mormon gay has been mentioned elsewhere, including: "GOP Shoots Self in Foot Over May," Arizona Republic, 17 November 1996; "Voters' Choices Break New Ground: Latina, Gay Republican Would Be Firsts," Arizona Republic, 9 September 1998; "Serving out Loud," The Advocate, 26 October 1999; "Gay Legislator Fighting Military: Refuses to Resign His Commission," Arizona Republic, 28 April 2000. For the favorable outcome of May's case, see the following articles which did not refer to his Mormon background: 'Army Ends Effort to Boot May: Gay Reservist Celebrates Win," Arizona Republic, 16 January 2001 (local story); 'Army Drops Efforts to Expel Gay Reservist," Deseret News, 16 January 2001, A-8 (wire-service story); "Army Ends Case against Gay Reservist," New York Times, 16 January 2001, A-16. 14. Williams, "Toward a Theology for Lesbian and Gay Marriage," 142. See also "N.J. Episcopal diocese gives OK to gay couples," San Francisco Examiner, 31 January 1988, A-2; "Northern California Convention: Episcopalians Endorse Gay Marriages," San Francisco Chronicle, 26 October 1988, A-8; "New Bishop Tells of Many Blessings Uniting Gays: Lutherans," Los Angeles Times, 28 January 1995, B-4; "Barred once, gay couple receives blessing in Seattle cathedral," Episcopal Life, July/August 1996, 11; "95 Ministers Risk Jobs, Bless 'Holy Union' of Lesbian Couple--Religion: Action flouts United Methodist Church prohibition. 'We are on the right side of history and the right side of God,' pastor says," Los Angeles Times, 17 January 1999, A-11; "N.Y. Presbytery Oks Gay Holy Unions," Los Angeles Times, 13 February 1999, B-7; "Reform Rabbis OK Blessing Gay Unions," Dallas Morning News, 30 March 2000, A-5; and "Episcopalians Recognize Unmarried Couples: No Distinction Made on Sexual Orientation," San Francisco Chronicle, 14 July 2000. By contrast, Mormons believe that same-sex marriage would be catastrophic for society. After my presentation at Salt Lake City's 2000 Sunstone Symposium ("Prelude to the National 'Defense of Marriage' Campaign: Civil Discrimination Against Feared or Despised Minorities"), one member of the audience stated his belief that ratification of same-sex marriage would duplicate the sin of Sodom in the U.S., which God would then similarly destroy. Traditional Christianity, of course, holds that Sodom was destroyed because of its homoerotic behavior. (See Richard Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death, and Punishment: Attitudes toward Sex and Sexuality in Britain since the Renaissance [London: Collins, 1990], 101.) However, Mormonism's founding prophet apparently rejected the traditional Christian view of Sodom's sin. In his only sermon about the matter, Joseph Smith said that God destroyed Sodom "for rejecting the prophets," and he did not mention sexual conduct at all. See the following: Scott G. Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff's Journal, 1833-1898 Typescript, 9 vols. (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1983-85), 2:213 (22 January 1843); Joseph Smith, Jr., et al., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts, 2nd ed. rev., 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1960), 5:237 (hereafter History of the Church); Joseph Fielding Smith, ed., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1938), 271; Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young Univ., 1980), 156; Richard C. Galbraith, ed., Scriptural Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1993), 6. See also the following reference to "sodomite" in the footnote to Deut. 23:17 in The HOLY BIBLE Authorized King James Version With Explanatory Notes and Cross References to the Standard Works (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1989): "HEB a professional ,ale or female prostitute, or cultist." Just as it rejected Joseph Smith's intentions for African-Americans (see notes 81 and 90), so also did the Utah Mormon leadership reject the founding prophet's view of Sodom's destruction. Ironically, the views of other Christians are now changing. Beginning in the early 1900s with a scholar who was neither homosexual nor Mormon, some Bible analysts began reinterpreting Sodom's destruction more along the lines indicated by the Mormon prophet. George A. Barton noted that "the wickedness which Lot is said to have anticipated that the men of Sodom contemplated may have been no more than to give the strangers a beating" ("Sodomy," in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 12 vols. plus index, ed. James Hastings [Edinburgh, Scotland: T. & T. Clark; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908-261 11:672). At greater length, Derrick Sherwin Bailey argued in 1955 that the "inhospitality" of the Sodomites toward Lot's angel-guests was the actual cause of Sodom's destruction: "The story does not in the least demand the assumption that the sin of Sodom was sexual let alone homosexual--indeed, there is no evidence to show that vice of the latter kind was prevalent there." (Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition [London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1955], 5; see also the extensive discussion in later pages concerning the historical development of the "Homosexual Interpretation of Sodom"). See also Victor Paul Furnish, "The Bible and Homosexuality: Reading the Texts in Context," in Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate, ed. Jeffrey S. Siker (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), 18-35, with discussion of Sodom on 19-20. 15. "Recent polls of gays and lesbians have shown that over 80% of them would marry if legally able to do so" (Kevin H. Lewis, "Equal Protection after Romer v. Evans: Implications for the Defense of Marriage Act and Other Laws," Hastings Law Journal 49 [November 19971: 22n224). For examples of recent publications about relationship-oriented gays and lesbians, see Tina Tessina, Gay Relationships: How to Find Them, How to Improve Them, How to Make Them Last (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 1989); Betty Berzon, Permanent Partners: Building Gay & Lesbian Relationships That Last (New York: Plume Book/Penguin, 1990); Charlotte J. Patterson, "Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents," Child Development 63 (1992): 1025-42; Patterson, "Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children," in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Identities over the Lifespan: Psychological Perspectives, eds., Anthony R. D'Augelli and Charlotte J. Patterson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 262-90; Richard A. Mackey, Bernard A. O'Brien, and Eileen F. Mackey, Gay and Lesbian Couples: Voices from Lasting Relationships (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997); Anderson Jones and David Fields, Men Together: Portraits of Love, Commitment, and Life (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1997); Andrew K. T. Yip, Gay Male Christian Couples: Life Stories (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997); Michael J. Sweet, "Together on the Path: Gay Relationships in a Buddhist Context" and Susan Talve, "'With This Ring You Are Made Holy unto Me According to the Laws of Moses': Celebrating and Sanctifying Lesbian and Gay Relationships and Families," both in Our Families, Our Values: Snapshots of Queer Kinship, eds., Robert E. Goss and Amy Adams Squire Strongheart (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1997), 115-27, 129-35; Jane Drucker, Families of Value: Gay and Lesbian Parents and Their Children Speak Out (New York: Insight Books/Plenum Publishing, 1998); Richard P. Hardy, Loving Men: Gay Partners, Spirituality, and AIDS (New York: Continuum, 1998); Ellen Lewin, Recognizing Ourselves: Ceremonies of Lesbian and Gay Commitment (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998); Janet M. Wright, Lesbian Step Families: An Ethnography of Love (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1998); Hero Magazine (1998-present.); Eric Marcus, Together Forever: Gay and Lesbian Couples Share Their Secrets for Lasting Happiness (New York: Anc |
