“Divisiveness is a result of unrighteousness,” declares the Book of Mormon Student Manual, before discussing how foolish it is for a group of people to insist on a particular name—an odd complaint coming from an organization that really wants you to call it The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and gets annoyed if you capitalize the d in day or forget the hyphen, or if you apply its nickname, Mormon, to someone it thinks doesn’t deserve the name even if they share a lot of Mormon history and belief.
In LDS discourse, divisiveness is never the responsibility of church leadership. The church’s support of Proposition 8 in California, for instance, split families and congregations, but that wasn’t a divisive move: that was the church doing God’s will. Any ensuing division was the fault of people who were simply too hard-hearted or cowardly to support God’s righteous decrees.
This is the context in which to read the church’s March 17 response to Ordain Women (wonder if they realized it was the anniversary of the Relief Society?):
