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Show 231 Racial comparisons seemed especially salient after the LDS Church reversed its ban on black priesthood membership in 1978. The church's policy change on race, like its renunciation of polygamy, demonstrated a grudging evolution under social pressure, since the decision occurred amidst civil rights protests that threatened to tarnish the church's international image. Using race as an example, LDS gays defended their sexuality as natural, indelible, and God-given. When defined as innate, homosexuality assumed the permanence of skin color and the solidity of doctrine, ruling out genuine change; even if gays purportedly changed under duress, it did not alter the fundamental nature of their sexuality. Hence, Bill Cloward's phrase regarding LDS family expectations, "the script was written before I was born," could also apply to an understanding of homosexuality as something one was born with. However, claiming an innate basis for homosexuality did not insulate gays from pressure to suppress it or, to use the polygamy analogy, change the "policy" of homosexual behavior even if they could not change the underlying "doctrine" of sexual orientation. As long as homosexuality lacked the broad social consensus favoring black civil rights during the 1970s, the church's ultimate concession on race did not translate into a similar breakthrough for gays. Furthermore, LDS leaders steadfastly presented their decision to lift the racial ban as revelation rather than a concession to political realities, suggesting they had no control over the church's decades-long reluctance to address racism, let alone homophobia." Like polygamy, church leaders defined race as a doctrinal matter and therefore, the church's ultimate positions on the two issues validated 85Gottlieb and Wiley, 180-5. |
