The bloggernacle has been abuzz recently with renewed discussion over the Church, same-sex marriage, and the politics of dissent. Reporting of the rise and fall of Peter and Mary Danzig and the Church’s recent filing of a friend-of-the-court brief in California, along with other religious groups, in support of preserving marriage as union of a man and a woman, have sparked a range of conversation on the merits of same-sex marriage claims, of the appropriateness of the Church’s involvement in politics, and of the role of dissent and disagreement in the Latter-day Saint community. I don’t have much I want to weigh in with at the moment, but there’s plenty of opinions to be found in the bloggernacle at large. For now, I’ll just quote a relevant piece I was reading today from an article in The Salt Lake Tribune on the contributions of President Hinckley, “Gordon B. Hinckley: A lifetime of faithful service“:
And no one took a stronger lead in the church’s political efforts.
He built alliances with other Christian denominations to oppose same-sex marriages and defend religious liberties. In 1998, Hinckley announced a “Proclamation on the Family,” which laid out the church’s support for the sanctity of marriage, the significance of family and the importance of chastity.
That became the theological foundation for the church’s opposition to any effort to promote same-sex marriage. In 2000, the LDS Church defended the Boy Scouts’ right to exclude gays from leadership positions, and the church and its members in Alaska and Hawaii gave time and well over $1 million to thwart same-sex marriage initiatives; in 1999, members in California helped finance the push for a Protection of Marriage Act on that state’s ballot.
“What’s a church for if it isn’t to fight for values, to take a stand and face up to these moral issues?” Hinckley said in a February 2000 interview with The Salt Lake Tribune.
That defense of why the church actively participates in the advancement of moral legislation has just never fully made sense to me, that the church is to fight for values in the legal arena just to make its stance known. It seems erroneous.
Nevertheless, what the church does as an institution, I can deal with, but the insistence that all members quietly comply and get out of their way or face disciplinary action, lose their jobs, etc, I just don’t accept. Granted, I think many or most of the people who get exed or feel pressured to withdraw their membership already have a long history of vocal dissent and grandstanding and probably haven’t shown an abundance of humility, but when it comes to dissent over the legal application of gospel principles, it just doesn’t seem like teaching true principles and letting the membership “govern themselves”.