Mormons Set to Quit Church Over Policy on Gay Couples and Their Children
13th November 2015
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is facing a growing backlash from Mormons upset about a new policy that bars children of same-sex parents from baby-naming ceremonies and baptisms, and declares members in gay marriages to be apostates subject to excommunication.
The policies have hit hard in a church that considers family bonds central in this life and eternal in the afterlife. While church members are pouring out their pain and confusion at family dinners and on Mormon blogs, critics are planning a “mass resignation” in a park adjacent to the church’s headquarters in Salt Lake City on Saturday.
Pain there may be, but confusion only afflicts the clueless. The LDS church has a structure of authority based on revelation, just like Real Christianity, and its principles are not subject to the whims of fashion. The children aren’t being permanently excluded from the church, they just have to demonstrate that they conform to the church’s teachings rather than to their ‘parents’. There comes a time when an organization has to step up to the plate or go home, and it would appear that this is the point to which the LDS church has come.
Fortunately they don’t depend for their revelations on the editorial board of the New York Times, or there’s no telling what they’d be expected to believe.