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Shifting Talk on Mormon Racism Reveals Divisions within LDS Church

By Joanna Brooks

…ssor of Joseph Smith. (Brigham Young’s anti-black racist statements to the Utah legislature in the 1850s are a fact of historical record.) And these new March 2013 headnotes seemed to continue a trajectory away from defensive apologetics and towards greater historical responsibility and openness set when LDS Church Public Affairs officials sprung into action to denounce an overtly racist defense of the priesthood ban made by BYU professor Randy Bo…

‘Nones’ ≠ Nonreligious

By Elizabeth Drescher

…preference, or the like. As sociologist Glenn Vernon of the University of Utah wrote in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion in 1968, “It provides a negative definition, specifying what a phenomenon is not, rather than what it is. Intentionally or not, such a use implies that only those affiliated with a formal group are religious.” (p. 7) Pew researchers attempted to sidestep the difficulties of the term “Nones,” as I noted here, by…

Romney Braces for Perry Testosterone Challenge; Huntsman Reboots

By Joanna Brooks

…didn’t file a quarterly report with the FEC, but his reported fundraising numbers (about $4 million, with Huntsman reportedly pitching in about half of that himself) suggest that Republican donors haven’t jumped on board the way his campaign might have hoped. Weeks ago, as his campaign bathed in a luminous media spotlight, Huntsman fancifully compared his chances to catching “lightning in a bottle,” a phrase that sounds like something he fished f…

How Many Ways to be Mormon and Gay?

By Joanna Brooks

…ed for marrying LGBT couples, as well as LDS LGBT ally Carol Lynn Pearson. Utah State University professor Renee Galliher will present the findings of an unprecedented survey of thousands of LDS LGBT/SSA individuals, while conference co-organizer Julia Hunter will film “It Gets Better” videos by and for Mormons. “That this conference is even happening is hard evidence that things are getting better,” says Hunter. “I hope that the energy generated…

America, Religious Values, and the Death Penalty; Or, If it Was Good Enough for Jesus and Socrates…

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…January 1977, Gary Gilmore became the first US citizen to be executed (in Utah) since the Witherspoon decision nearly a decade earlier. Gilmore, like Jesse Walter Bishop (who was the third person to be executed, on 22 October 1979 in Nevada) was executed voluntarily, causing Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to complain that the death penalty was fast becoming “state-sponsored suicide.” The history of the death penalty since the landmark Gr…

“The Lord’s Standard of Morality” Promotes LDS Rape Culture

By Holly Welker

…members.” Last week the conversation moved off Mormon blogs and onto local Utah news, where it was critiqued for the way it dismisses the wisdom of professional studies of human sexuality, promotes rape culture, and “set women back some 35 years.” Given that I think The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does participate in rape culture, I was heartened by the development: it means that objections to rhetoric like Callister’s might finall…

NBA Player Jason Collins Comes Out

By Peter Montgomery

…arents made a point to expose us to new things, religious and cultural. In Utah, we visited the Mormon Salt Lake Temple. In Atlanta, the house of Martin Luther King Jr. That early exposure to otherness made me the guy who accepts everyone unconditionally. Of course it didn’t take long for religious right leaders to bring a different Christian persepctive to the conversation. Liberty Counsel’s Matt Barber tweeted that it was “sad” that Collins was…

Homophobia an “Atrocity,” LDS Bishop Tells Gay Mormon Conference

By Joanna Brooks

…age and family. Then, I heard about the three recent attacks on gay men in Utah, and when I heard that one of them basically got his jaw broken on the side of a curb, something inside me . . . my heart broke. I realized that I could no longer sit on the fence, or shake my head and walk on the other side of the road, like a Levite or a priest, but I needed to be a good Samaritan. I feel that covenant I made at baptism to take upon myself the name o…

Don’t Be Fooled By Trump’s Acceptance of Marriage Equality: Here’s What to Expect

By Sunnivie Brydum

…p has promised to sign the odious First Amendment Defense Act sponsored by Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador. Although Rep. Labrador amended the legislation in an effort to protect all religious beliefs about marriage and sexuality, Desanctis frames the Act as one that would “protect from government discrimination those religious Americans who believe that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.” She makes no mention of th…

BYU Honor Code Used to Harass Black Atheletes

By Joanna Brooks

…, then expecting young men to fend for themselves in a highly conservative Utah town where trouble finds black folks fast. It’s a picture not at all surprising to those of us who have attended BYU and witnessed both the differential status accorded to BYU athletes as well as the potential for honor code enforcement abuse. Twenty years ago, when I worked for the independent BYU student newspaper Student Review, we regularly ran exposés on honor cod…