Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences by Gregory A. Prince (review)

Gregory A. Prince wants his book, Gay Rights and the Mormon Church, to save lives. From the first to the last pages, Prince makes clear that he hopes the book will move the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to a more accepting place of LGBT Mormons and, by extension, prevent LGBT Mormons from attempting suicide. Although Prince, a heterosexual Mormon, explicitly advocates for Mormon leaders to welcome LGBT people as equals, religious studies scholars should not dismiss this book as an activist manifesto. Rather, Prince has made an important contribution to the history of religion and sexuality. The book features interviews with more than one hundred people, and his textual sources include diverse archives that track the LDS Church's historical and contemporary positions on homosexuality.

According to Prince, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did not have an official stance on homosexuality until 1968 when the church condemned homosexual acts as sins. Earlier Mormons, Prince discovered, taught that monogamy led men to commit "sins against nature," a nineteenth-century euphemism for same-sex sexual relations. But by the twentieth century, most Mormons had abandoned plural marriages and embraced monogamous ones. Nevertheless, after gay Americans became more noticeable in the 1970s, the LDS Church aggressively condemned homosexuality.

Since the rise of gay political visibility in the second half of the twentieth century, most American religious communities have debated their positions on homosexuality. As Prince points out, though, Latter-day Saints have distinct theological beliefs that help explain their ongoing concerns with homosexuality and LGBT people. For one, Mormons hold that God creates spirit children who are waiting to take bodies on Earth. Those souls awaiting bodies have a gender. Because God does not make mistakes, nor create sinful spirit beings, God would not create children who are inclined to reject their eternal gender or feel attracted to others of the same sex. This belief also helps explain why Mormon leaders have opposed same-sex marriage, namely because gay couples are unable to procreate "naturally," which means they will not be able to give a home to God's spirit children. Furthermore, Mormon theology holds that the highest levels of the afterlife are reserved for married (heterosexual) Mormons. Consequently, the LDS Church would have to alter its ideas about the afterlife radically if it were to permit same-sex marriages.

Prince dedicates the bulk of the book to exploring the Mormon Church's role in opposing LGBT civil rights, especially same-sex marriage. The church first became invested in political debates about homosexuality in 1993 when the Hawai'i Supreme Court ruled that the state did not have a compelling reason to prevent same-sex couples from obtaining civil marriages. Following that decision, the LDS Church, for the first time, established a political alliance with the Roman Catholic Church and lobbied Hawai'i state legislators to amend the state constitution to define marriage as the exclusive union of one man and one woman. Their efforts were successful, and the LDS Church then lobbied other states to do the same. Prince argues that throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the mainstream media did not pay much attention to the LDS Church's role in excluding gays from civil marriage.

In 2008 the country became aware of the LDS Church's significant investment in preventing civil same-sex marriages. The church took the lead in a ballot initiative in California, Proposition 8, which asked voters to end civil same-sex marriages throughout the state. According to Prince, the LDS Church leadership pressured lay Mormons across the country to contribute to California's "Yes on 8" campaign. Lay Mormons donated more than twenty million dollars, and they made up the bulk of volunteers who went door to door to lobby voters. Following their narrow victory, the national media and LGBT activists turned their attention to the LDS Church's disproportionate role...