Mormon Apostle Dallin Oaks chose a friendly audience deep within the Book-of-Mormon-belt for his now controversial October 13 speech in defense of the Mormons’ ongoing fight against same-sex civil marriage. Speaking to students at Brigham Young University-Idaho, Oaks decried the continuing erosion of religious freedom and the declining influence of religion in the public sphere, before mounting a strongly-worded defense of “the ancient order” of marriage against the “alleged ‘civil right’ of same-gender couples to enjoy the privileges of marriage.”
Elder Oaks recalled expressions of outrage directed at Mormons and acts of vandalism against Mormon temples and wardhouses committed after the November 2008 passage of Proposition 8 outlawing same-sex marriage in California. (Mormons, who make up 2% of California’s population, contributed more than 50% of the individual donations to the Proposition 8 campaign and a sizeable majority of its on-the-ground efforts.) The post-Proposition 8 backlash was, he stated, comparable to Civil Rights Movement-era “voter intimidation of blacks in the South.”
Oaks, a former University of Chicago law professor who clerked for United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1957 and 1958 in the aftermath of the Warren court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) desegregation decision, knew that his black-Mormon comparison would draw public attention. In fact, when he previewed his speech for an AP reporter on October 12, he speculated that it might “be offensive to some.”
Sure enough, commentators from within (and without) the world of Mormonism have questioned the soundness of Oaks’ analogy, asking whether Mormons in their effort to eliminate same-sex marriage are more justly characterized as proponents of religious freedom or opponents of gay human rights. In fact, four Mormon gay rights groups issued a joint statement on October 16 urging the Apostle to consider how the Mormon anti-gay marriage effort might paradoxically compromise religious freedom for members of faiths that recognize the sanctity of committed same-sex relationships.
But most of Oaks’ respondents politely sidestepped an even deeper paradox troubling his black-Mormon analogy: the fact that Mormons have our own long and peculiar history of discrimination against African Americans.
MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann alluded to this history when he gave Oaks his daily “worst person in the world” award on October 14. Comparing the Proposition 8 Mormon backlash and the harassment of black voters was especially inappropriate, Olbermann argued, because Mormons had been “on the wrong side of integration.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prohibited individuals of African descent from joining the Church’s lay priesthood (open to all devout Mormon men over the age of twelve), serving as missionaries, or participating in Mormon temple ordinances from 1849 until 1978, a fact that many Mormons today find difficult to talk about or explain.
In the earliest years of Mormon history, during the 1830s and 1840s, six or seven African-American men including Elijah Abel (1808–1885) and Walker Lewis (1798–1856) were ordained to the Church’s priesthood. But under the leadership of Mormon Church president Brigham Young, the ordination of African-American men ceased, African-American men and women were prohibited from temple worship, and intermarriage was officially discouraged.
Some historians believe that Young’s about-face on the status of African Americans may have been motivated by embarrassment stemming from an 1847 scandal involving an excommunicated African-American Mormon named William McCary, or by political pressures surrounding the extension of slavery to Utah territory.
Whatever the actual motivation for the priesthood ban, Mormons soon articulated a number of working theological narratives to legitimate anti-African American discrimination, drawing liberally from European and European-American folk theologies that identified Africans and African Americans as the descendents of Cain or Ham.
According to some Mormons, the priesthood ban was an element of the curse placed upon Cain for killing his brother Abel (Genesis 4), or the curse levied on Ham’s son Canaan to punish Ham’s humiliation of his father, Noah (Genesis 9:20-27). The Pearl of Great Price, a Mormon book of scripture, described the people of Canaan as being cursed with “blackness” (Moses 7:5-8) and indicated that descendents of Ham and his wife Egyptus were “cursed... as pertaining to the Priesthood” (Abraham 1:21-26).
In 1849, Brigham Young declared that “the Lord had cursed Cain’s seed with blackness and prohibited them the Priesthood,” a position he reaffirmed in a January 16, 1852 statement to the Utah territorial legislature:
Any man having one drop of the seed of [Cain]… in him cannot hold the priesthood and if no other Prophet ever spake it before I will say it now in the name of Jesus Christ I know it is true and others know it.
Tags: african american, brown v. board of education, church of jesus christ of latter-day saints, civil rights movement, dallin oaks, keith olbermann, lgbt, mormon, mormonism, mormons, race, racism, same-sex marriage
