Religious Freedom According to Mormon Apostle = It’s Ok to be a Bigot!
From the Salt Lake Tribune:
LDS apostle: Prop 8 backlash against Mormons like civil-rights-era persecution of blacks
Noteworthy:
“During my lifetime I have seen a significant deterioration in the respect accorded to religion in our public life, and I believe that the vitality of religious freedom is in danger of being weakened accordingly,” Oaks said. “Atheists and others would intimidate persons with religious-based points of view from influencing or making the laws of their state or nation.”
Here’s a video on this story from the local Fox affiliate:
(free advice: Thanks for letting people embed the video! It’s a weird size. Aspect ratio should be closer to actual video source…)
Here’s the story from KSL, the church-owned television station.
[ Note: Video removed for sludgy load times. ]
I think it’s called “burying the lede“.
I wrote about how fringe conservatives do this all the time (here); they play a victim role out of one side of their mouth while similarly using the very tactics to act out the thing they claim is working against them. In this case, Mormons are free to discriminate against equal rights for gay citizens, but the backlash is infringing upon Mormons’ freedoms of religion.
While I don’t agree with people vandalizing churches or firing people because they fall on a particular side of an issue, if an organization takes a strong stand against something, it’s flat out naive to expect no backlash, including from within your ranks:
Reid rips LDS Church’s Prop. 8 support
Give ‘em hell, Harry! o
- 10.14.2009
- 12 Responses »
- culture, religion, video
- daily
Good post. A few additions/musings:
As I understood it, a lot of the criticism of the Church of Latter Day Saints wasn’t just the perceived double standard of claiming to be able to discriminate against others while decrying perceived discrimination against them, but also that the LDS church’s involvement in the campaign for Proposition 8 (money, media, and manpower) was a potential violation of the conditions of the church’s tax-exempt status. While critics of Mr. Reid in the story are replying that the church has both a freedom and a moral obligation to take an opinion on matters like gay marriage, it’s possible that by acting as a de facto PAC, the LDS church may have indeed broken the tax-exemption conditions. What’s your take on these claims?
That it would take a concerted effort to remove tax exempt status from any religion in the U.S. As much as I’d love to see that happen (most organized religion have business arms to help fund them), the climate in the U.S. is decidedly pro-religion.
The LDS church is careful in how it words things to the membership, but this one might have crossed the line, depending on local leadership and how things were handled/read/discussed in formal church meetings.
GAH.
It’s stuff like that that make this Onion piece not funny, only because it’s too real: http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/if_god_had_wanted_me_to_be?utm_source=most_pop_pop
Jessica
Great Post. The LDS Hypocrisy screams for more attention once again.
A Californian and an exMormon here–my wife who reads your wife’s blog sent me a link to your post. It’s ridiculous that the Mormon church plays the “poor me” card and to likens themselves to the blacks fight for their rights. This is the same group that told their members how to vote, telling members to donate money to this cause and gave out Prop 8 signs to all the members around in order to tell a group that they can’t have a certain right. Of course there’s a backlash! Funny how their right [to their beliefs] is valid while others’ rights are not.
Aspect ratio issue noted! Thanks for using our vid. Did you see the Deseret News article on Oak’s speech? They, of course, took the KSL route. Even the Trib was surprisingly passive about the whole thing. I was shocked to see the local coverage on this, specifically the lack thereof. Everyone just regurgitated Oak’s “Our Religious Freedoms are at Risk” angle and completely ignored the absolutely mindblowing analogy to blacks in the south. Whole thing really gave me a bad case of The Zion Curtain Blues. Harry Reid is the one bright spot. And someone told me Keith Olbermann, bless him, was raging about Oaks today. We can only hope Stewart or Colbert get their hands on this one… but it’s almost too easy for them.
As a Californian, gay activist, ex-BYU student, and ex-Mormon, I find Oak’s rhetoric laughable. He compares the persecution of the LDS church to that suffered by blacks during the civil rights era? Wow!
In his example then, his church is both the oppressive white man AND the black man who was unjustly discriminated against. How can he have it both ways?
It is yet one more glaring example of hypocrisy from this archaic-minded organization.
Thank you for posting. I always enjoy your blogs.
Jinxi
The Trib’s initial online article I saw yesterday was passive, I meant. The one you link to here with the U of U professor’s comments is much better.
I clicked through to the transcript of the Apostle Oaks’ remarks. The analogy to the civil rights movement is only the most obvious of his missteps.
http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/news-releases-stories/religious-freedom
Does he really mean us to believe that God instituted the Constitution of the United States? And that He did so ““that every man may act . . . according to the moral agency which I have given unto him”?
This is self-contradictory nonsense. A divine institution of our Constituion wouldn’t assign much “moral agency” of the various delegates to the Constitutional Convention, would it? Nor does it square well with Oaks’ own assertion that “the people are the source of government power”.
And, it’s stupidly ignorant of the flaws of a Constitution that recognized human beings as property, and protected slaveholders’ rights to such property. God, in His wisdom, would legislate better than that.
Nor is God so dull a pedant. That people have “moral agency”, the freedom to choose for themselves, is obviously discoverable to human reason. We don’t need revelation for that, any more than we need the Lord God to explain that 2 + 2 = 4.
The Founders were quite clear that the Constitution was designed according to an understanding of human nature developed by careful study of three millenia of human history, and according to precepts of justice discoverable to any thinking person. Oaks’ “divine establishment” is an exact negation of their work.
God gave us minds to think. It’s no surprise that their proper operation comports with His justice, as our reasoning only discovers principles that He established. We need revelations to discover those realities that are beyond human sense and experience, but we don’t need them to clumsily duplicate the conclusions of the instruments God already gave us. The consistency of reason and faith, and reason and Christianity, has been thoroughly established and re-affirmed by the greatest thinkers. There is no need for revelatory gymnastics to avoid crediting reason for its accomplishments.
So I’m deeply suspicious of any theology that would seek to discredit our own reason in so great an example of its powers as the U.S. Constitution. It’s almost as if Oaks is anxious that the Constitution’s architecture might inspire people’s curiousity and questioning, and so prefers to diminish the powers of reason by attributing this work of genius to divine intervention.
And I have to wonder why Apostle Oaks, would be so reluctant to encourage people to think.
Well said!
This “logic” is used deeply in Mormon dogma. The very notion of “moral agency” was from Joseph Smith’s notion of “free agency” which is, paraphrased, that “men are free to do as they choose, but if they don’t choose the way I said God told me, they are going to a place worse than hell.”
It’s very messed up and wrong-headed. Like I said, Mormons love to believe that Jesus was right there with a guiding hand on the pen of the authors of the Constitution. My continued writing about these kinds of things is that I feel it’s dangerous to think in those terms.
To be clear, I believe in “moral agency” and God’s judgement of our use of it.
If this is the sort of theology you associate with religion, I can see why you’d find religion generally pretty alarming. As a religious man, I find Apostle Oaks’ approach embarrassing. But you should understand that this sort of thinking is downright peculiar when compared with that of the widespread religions. I suppose some strict fundamentalists might have similar problems in their handling of faith and reason. But most religious people, and certainly most conservatives, would have nothing to with a religious authority making claims like Apostle Oaks.
My own Catholic Church is famously hierarchical, but its authority extends only to the interpretation of an established set of Scriptures and a thoroughly documented theology. And that theology must satisfy the demands of reason, given the premises revealed to us by faith. The idea of God becoming man may seem crazy, and is certainly not demonstrable to reason. But the theological implications of that fact, once accepted, must be comprehensible to human reason. And the Church can’t plaster over inconsistencies by citing some new revelation. The moral authority of Jewish and Muslim clergy is likewise rooted in their interpretation of an established scripture.
I’m not saying these figures don’t have great power, or they can’t abuse it, or they don’t make mistakes. But their scope is fundamentally circumscribed by the fixture of their texts and the recognition of the role of reason. The amount of damage done by such authorities, even within those limits, is already sobering. The thought of an authority that can re-write its scripture, and so dismiss reasonable questions, is sort of alarming in its possibilities.
I don’t for a moment imagine that Apostle Oaks means anyone harm. I can easily imagine that he is a sincere and generous man. But the danger lies in what someone else may someday with this kind of authority, and in the implications of such ideas for how we should use our minds.
So please, don’t imagine that faith requires the sort of trust in human agents required by Apostle Oaks’ doctrine. There is no true conflict between faith and reason, and any dismissal of either on behalf of the other must be false.
Missing The Oaks For The Trees
City Weekly done good, as usual.
http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/blog-2345-missing-the-oaks-for-the-trees.html