The Mormon Surprise (Updated)

Well, color me flummoxed. Andrew Sullivan has a sensible reaction, and if I can get over my shock I may subscribe to it:

It is possible to be cynical or begrudging in reacting to the LDS Church's unprecedented public decision to support civic protections against discrimination in employment and housing with respect to homosexuals in Salt Lake City. I think that is a temptation to be resisted.

What the LDS church has done in Utah is an immensely important and positive step and places the SLCGeorgeFrey:Getty Mormon church in a far more positive and pro-gay position than any other religious group broadly allied with the Christianist right. They have made a distinction - and it is an admirable, intellectually honest distinction - between respecting the equal rights of other citizens in core civil respects, while insisting - with total justification - on the integrity of one's own religious doctrines, and on a religious institution's right to discriminate in any way with respect to its own rites and traditions.

The key issue here is the recognition of the separation between civil law and religious doctrine, which is almost totally lacking on the religious right. (And then they bristle at the idea that they are trying to establish a theocracy.)

I'm not so sure about this:

The other thing to say about this is that it speaks very highly of the strategy of Equality Utah, the state's main gay group, who decided to call the LDS bluff when the church said it was merely opposed to civil marriage - and not other protections for gay and lesbian citizens. Equality Utah immediately tried to get the church to endorse civil unions. That was a non-starter, but in response, we have this support for an anti-discrimination ordinance.

Of course, establishing dialogue is always the preferred method of reconciling differences, but as Sullivan acknowledges farther along in this paragraph, that strategy has been resoundingly unsuccessful with the religious right at large: you can't talk to people who refuse to hear you.

I also suspect that the LDS leadership was not prepared for the backlash from their support of Prop 8 -- I think they got blindsided and were forced to reconsider their stance, which is probably what created the chance for dialogue to begin with. Sorry, but I am not as sublimely confident in human nature as Sullivan is. The basic human impulse is to leave things alone as long as they're not completely intolerable, and that applies to political positions as much as anything else. My take is that the LDS Church got whacked, and whacked hard, and had to rethink its position on gay rights real fast in order to avoid a complete PR disaster -- and remember, the LDS Church is not one that most people in this country accept without misgivings. And I don't think the Mormon leadership is so naive as to think an alliance with the Pope and the likes of Rick Warren is going to last very long -- talk about a nest of vipers.

(Update: There's some support for my view in this post from a reader at Daily Dish:

Third, the LDS Church is extremely sensitive about its public image and wants to be accepted in the mainstream of American life.

There's a reason why the LDS Church spends millions of dollars each years on sappy commercials. There's a reason why an LDS prophet accepted blacks into full membership of the Church after the tide had turned in the Civil Rights Movement. And now, at a time when the Catholic Church should be afraid that it's becoming all about abortion, the LDS Church had rightly become concerned that it was becoming synonymous with homophobia at a time when the arc of history was moving in the other direction. There's reason (and public relations) behind this week's revelation.

The writer also mentions the Mormons' pragmatism and openness to being persuaded by evidence, something that you won't find among the evangelicals and the Catholic hierarchy. Interesting take -- read it.)

That said, whatever the motivations, this is a very welcome development, and one that I hope other conservative religious institutions will take a good look at. I've about lost hope for the Catholic hierarchy -- I think it was the current pope who remarked at one point that separation of church and state was a myth, and any organization that can calmly threaten to close its social service operations -- for which it has no problem accepting taxpayers' money, no matter their religious affiliation -- if D.C. legalizes same-sex marriage doesn't look like it's really capable of the kind of compartmentalization necessary to accept civil law as a separate realm -- but there are possibilities among other groups. I think.