Apologists extend the broadest possible latitude to sources they agree with, yet impose the most stringent demands on sources of information the apologists dislike. D Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View p47
The tragic reality is that there have been occasions when Church leaders, teachers, and writers have not told the truth they knew about difficulties of the Mormon past, but have offered to the Saints instead a mixture of platitudes, half-truths, omissions, and plausible denials. Elder Packer and others would justify this because ‘we are at war with the adversary’ and must also protect any Latter-day Saint whose ‘testimony in seedling stage’. But such a public-relations defense of the Church is actually a Maginot Line of sandy fortifications which ‘the enemy’ can easily breach and which has been built up by digging lethal pits into which the Saints will stumble. A so-called ‘faith-promoting’ Church history which conceals controversies and difficulties of the Mormon past actually undermines the faith of Latter-day Saints who eventually learn about the problems from other sources. D Michael Quinn, church historian, cited Jon Krakauer
Just as [Mormon] President Gordon B Hinckley has said that same-sex marriage has no legitimate claim as a ‘civil right’ in Utah or anywhere else, previous First Presidencies also stated that African-Americans had no legitimate right to unrestricted access to marriage, nor to unrestricted blood transfusions, nor to rent a room in the LDS church’s hotel, nor to reside in Utah’s white neighborhoods, nor to live near the Los Angeles Temple, nor to be in a hospital bed next to a white patient. Just as the First Presidency previously condemned interracial marriages as abnormal, it has recently condemned same-sex marriages as abnormal.
The LDS church’s opposition to gay rights is consistent with its historical opposition to African-American rights.
Even when a General Authority publicly apologized in September 2000 for ‘the actions and statements of individuals who have been insensitive to the pain suffered by the victims of racism’, he claimed that the LDS leadership had an admirable history of race relations. Elder Alexander B Morrison said: ‘How grateful I am that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has from its beginnings stood strongly against racism in any of its malignant manifestations.’
This was a by now familiar smoke-screen for the previous behavior of Mormon prophets, seers, and revelators. LDS headquarters has never apologized for the legalization of Negro slavery by Brigham Young in pioneer Utah, nor for the official LDS encouragement to lynch Negro males, nor for the racial segregation policies of the First Presidency until 1963, nor for Ezra Taft Benson’s 1967 endorsement of a book which implied that decapitating black males was a ‘White Alternative’. ibid.
LDS president Gordon B Hinckley has dismissed Mormonism’s earlier race-based policies as ‘those little tricks of history’ which are irrelevant now. However, his twenty-five years of promoting political campaigns against the possibility of gay rights is one more example of the LDS hierarchy’s discrimination against minorities who are not its ‘kind of people’. ibid.
[A]lthough the Utah press reported hundreds of ‘hate’ attacks annually against gays and lesbians, the First Presidency in 1992 orchestrated the defeat of proposals to include ‘sexual orientation’ as a protected category in Utah’s law against hate crimes. ibid.
While President Hinckley ... condemned hatred and violence against ‘those who profess homosexual tendencies’, the First Presidency from 1976 onward has also repeatedly published Apostle Boyd K Packer’s talk praising a Mormon missionary for beating up his homosexual companion.
This official church pamphlet, titled ‘To Young Men Only’, encourages teenage boys to assault any males ‘who entice young men to join them in these immoral acts’. Yet President Hinckley (who was a senior apostle in 1976) expresses bewilderment regarding the literally thousands of violent attacks against gay males in Utah during the decades since the First Presidency began publishing Apostle Packer’s talk.
This endorsement of gay bashing continues to be printed in pamphlet form and is currently distributed by LDS headquarters. From 1976 to the present, local LDS leaders have been encouraged to give this pamphlet to young males in their teens and twenties, those most likely to commit hate crimes against gays and lesbians.
LDS headquarters has never promoted a similar distribution of statements opposing violence toward homosexuals. Recent public statements by LDS leaders against gay bashing have the appearance of a smoke-screen to conceal the ongoing private endorsement of gay bashing in Apostle Packer’s pamphlet. In fact, because it has officially promoted this endorsement of violence against homosexuals for twenty-five years, I [Quinn] believe the First Presidency has been morally responsible whenever LDS young men have attacked or killed homosexuals from 1976 to the present. This includes the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1998.
Moreover, by repeatedly issuing this pamphlet and other homophobic statements since the beginning of the anti-ERA campaign in 1975, the Mormon church has encouraged a climate of revulsion which fills most LDS families. ibid.
Therefore, I [Quinn] believe the First Presidency has also been morally responsible whenever Mormon parents have rejected their children for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. Even when the LDS church’s Ensign magazine published a statement in 1997 advising parents not ‘to disown’ their homosexual children, the General Authority merely noted that such tactics ‘do not help’. Public-relations statements of such timidity have little hope of undoing the spiritual damage to families caused by decades of stridently homophobic indoctrination by LDS headquarters. ibid.
[I]n its official editorial against allowing Utah’s high schools to have clubs for gay and lesbian students, the Deseret News commented in 1996: ‘It is still appalling that more than half the identified hate crimes in Utah are aimed at homosexuals’.
Again, this has the appearance of a smoke-screen to conceal the anti-gay agenda of LDS headquarters. Four years earlier, the same newspaper had successfully persuaded Utah’s legislature not to include gays and lesbians in the state law against hate crimes. Moreover, the 1996 editorial then adopted the very attitude which propels these hate crimes it professed to regret: ‘homosexual activities and practices are an abomination, not just some 'alternative lifestyle’ no better or worse than others’. Echoing the role of LDS headquarters in preventing Utah from giving homosexuals legal protection from hate crimes, the Deseret News in June 2000 regretted that Utah Senator Orrin G Hatch was ‘unable to stop hate-crime legislation’ in Congress. ibid.
There is yet another example of the LDS Church’s official homophobia, which subverts its public platitudes about loving those who regard themselves as gay or lesbian. Since 1998, church headquarters has instructed all local LDS leaders to put notations on the membership record of every Mormon who receives church discipline for homosexual behavior. Applicable even to teenagers, this ecclesiastical stigma will follow young men and women into every LDS congregation for the rest of their lives. ibid.
Mormon leadership [has] successfully opposed adding sexual orientation to Salt Lake City’s anti-discrimination ordinance. This is understandable in light of reports that LDS headquarters actively discriminates against gays and lesbians in employment. With no claim of due process, this discrimination extends to completely secular jobs and requires no proof of ‘inappropriate sexual behavior’.
For example, when the Joseph Smith Memorial Building opened in 1993 as added office-space for the LDS bureaucracy at headquarters, this multi-storey building had two fine-dining restaurants for the general public. The human resources director instructed the manager of these Church-owned restaurants not to hire as waiters any males who ‘seem gay’.
Similar to visual profiling for racial discrimination, LDS headquarters apparently denies employment on the basis of stereotypical views about masculine appearance and homosexual characteristics, or stereotypical views about feminine appearance and lesbian characteristics.
As indicated in the above example, this has nothing to do with ‘morality’ or the actual sexual behavior of persons who are subjected to this discrimination. In fact, completely heterosexual persons may also be misidentified as lesbian or gay on the basis of speech or appearance, and then suffer employment discrimination in Utah. This contributes to the climate of fear, which is why anti-discrimination laws are necessary. ibid.
[T]he US Supreme Court invalidated Romer v Evans, 1996 ... The LDS church’s behind-the-scenes victory against civil rights for gays and lesbians in Colorado, [declaring that] ‘a state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws’. ibid.
This Colorado case had nothing to do with marriage. LDS leaders and their allies were attempting to invalidate those laws which protected gays and lesbians from hate crimes, as well as from civil discrimination in housing and employment. Gays and lesbians are the glaring exception to President Hinckley’s public-relations statement to the LDS General Conference in 1995: ‘We must be willing to defend the rights of others who may become the victims of bigotry’. With regard to homosexuals, this is a slogan which LDS headquarters tries to subvert in every possible way. ibid.
Clark told the General Conference of April 1940 that the First Presidency ‘is not infallible in our judgment, and we err’. He also instructed LDS educators in 1954 that ‘even the President of the Church has not always spoken under the direction of the Holy Ghost’. I believe this applies to the statements and actions of several ‘living prophets’ and First Presidencies in restricting the civil rights of African-Americans and other minorities. According to LDS doctrine, the statements and actions of the Church’s president can be wrong, even sinful, and historically the LDS First Presidency has often been profoundly wrong with regard to the civil rights of American minorities.
In fact, when an end came to the various tyrannies of the majority against racial groups in America, LDS policies changed as well. What various ‘living prophets’ had defined as God’s doctrine turned out to be a Mormon social policy which reflected the majority’s world view. I submit that the same applies to the LDS Church’s campaign against any law which benefits or protects gays and lesbians. ibid.
LDS leaders have repeatedly opposed civil rights for blacks and gays while denying that such action is ‘anti-Negro’ or ‘racist’, ‘anti-gay’ or ‘homophobic’. First Presidency counselor J Reuben Clark, for one, defended wholesale restrictions against the civil rights of African-Americans. Nevertheless, at the same time, he regarded himself as compassionate toward Blacks. ibid.