This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Re "Black Mormon panelists: LDS Church must face its racial history" (Tribune, June 12):
Some Mormons want their church to go beyond allowing black men to hold the priesthood; they want it to "clean up the debris" by acknowledging that the former ban was due to racist views held by Mormons and that it had nothing to do with God.
This year, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ended its ban on women praying in General Conference, which followed a decades earlier decision to allow them to pray in local sacrament meetings. Must the church confess also that those policies were relics of its 19th-century sexist leaders and were "not of God"?
If so, what next? Removing the purely cultural ban on women holding the priesthood? Whoa there!
If you start down that road of cultural relativism, you'll be seeing the Mormon homophobia as merely an inherited human prejudice and not of God. And then that the Mormon prohibitions on wine, coffee and tea are merely a faulty 19th-century understanding of humors and health before the discovery of germs?
What then is truly God-authored?
Acknowledging facts is a slippery slope. When God has spoken, there is no need for thinking.
Adam Gold
Salt Lake City