TAKE A LOOK AT A SNAPSHOT FROM A MORMON FAMILY ALBUM.
In the photo is a handsome grouping of eight. They are smiling politely for the photographer because these are polite, earnest people. You can tell that just by looking at them. They are the sort of people who might take turns driving a sick neighbor to the clinic, which in fact they do, three times a week.
They are, of course, devout members of the church, which means that Dad serves on several committees in the local ward in addition to his full-time job. Mom is in charge of a committee in the women’s Relief Society. They each devote fifteen hours a week to church activities. They are as charitable with treasure as time, giving the church more than 10 percent of their gross income. The older family members work on a local Mormon welfare farm or at the local Bishop’s Storehouse stacking bags of food. No one in the family smokes or drinks anything stronger than milk. The oldest boy is about to embark on the expected two-year term as a missionary, heading for Taiwan. His two younger brothers are already Eagle Scouts. Everyone in the family is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. They value their family time together and faithfully participate in the weekly Family Home Evening program. They believe deeply in education, and all of them have either been to college or are heading there.
What’s wrong with this Hallmark picture? Very little, and that’s the point. Though no family is perfect—we’d have to add in the son who dropped out of Brigham Young University to play in a metal band in Fresno, or the daughter who smokes cigarettes, hates religion, and plans to pattern her life after William Burroughs novels—it’s remarkable how many Mormon families look at least something like the idealized group. In a way, there’s not much more to it. Mormon culture is simple, family-and church-dominated, and intensely practical. Families are at the heart of the system, perhaps even more than the local church. And for believers this is not just a matter of the here and now. Wards may pass away, but families are quite literally eternal, which is doubtless one of the faith’s most attractive evangelistic themes. Even God himself is married.
Our picture-book family is a fictional composite; an actual example is the thoroughly middle-class Dickson family of Cedar Park, Texas. They may not be the ideal American Mormon family, but they are close to it. Stewart and Lorraine Dickson, handsome thirtysomethings, live in one of Mormondom’s many boom areas. In just six years during the 1990s the regional stake in greater Austin, Texas, split once, and when membership exceeded 10,000, the two stakes were ready to give birth to a third. New meetinghouses are going up. Young missionaries are busily canvassing. LDS charities for tornado and flood victims are active. Though still a tiny minority in a metropolitan area of one million, the LDS flock is an extremely successful, confident organization that is hitting its stride. And the Dicksons are happily part of it.
Just off busy Route 183 is the chapel of the Anderson Mill ward, a typically plain, icon-free building adorned only with the occasional bouquet of ersatz flowers. The walls are largely undecorated, the ceilings high and white, the carpets pristine. It is Sunday morning, and the first of the three hours of combined town-hall meeting, hymn sing, testimony time, and Sunday school that constitute the certified Mormon sabbath. At the plain oaken lectern the Dicksons are addressing their congregation on the subject of—what else?—the family. Their five extremely cute children, ranging from thirteen to three, fidget quietly in the third pew. (The thirteen-year-old, Jeff, has just caused a mild sensation by returning from Scout camp with his hair “buzzed.”)
Mom and Dad plow earnestly through their plainspoken peroration. Lorraine speaks of her marriage, which is not just for life on this earth but has been “sealed forever” through secret ritual in a Mormon temple. Preaching the primacy of the family, she quotes liberally from a succession of LDS prophets. From Ezra Taft Benson, for example: “In the home we may experience a taste of heaven.” She exhorts the members to strengthen their families, to build tighter bonds. “The currents in the world,” she says, “are eating away at our children’s sense of values and self-worth.”
After she finishes, the worshipers sing, “Time doth softly, sweetly glide when there’s love at home.”
Next it is Stewart’s turn. He continues on in the same vein, then turns to a large stack of recommended materials, a family curriculum of parents’ guides, Family Home Evening guidebooks, the Gospel Principles manual, a book called Truth Restored by the reigning prophet himself, Gordon B. Hinckley, and some spiritual comic books for the kids.
Both of the Dicksons grew up in Idaho. Stewart earned two degrees from the University of Utah; Lorraine attended Utah State, Brigham Young, and the University of Utah but never finished. They moved to Texas in the 1990s to open a Great Harvest Bread Company franchise. Stewart has done very well with the business: he has opened a second office and sold a third in San Antonio to Lorraine’s brother, who now runs it. They live in an attractive, new, four-bedroom home and have a shiny new burgundy Chevrolet Suburban parked in the driveway.
The ideal Mormon is deeply committed to work, and Stewart is no exception. He quit his earlier career as the director of human resources at a Utah company and later as a consultant because, he says, all that his kids knew about his work was that “I carried a briefcase.” He says he wanted to make it on his own; he also wanted his kids to understand what he did for a living.
“Each of the children has been down to the shop and kneaded bread,” he remarks with satisfaction. “Jeff and Paul [age twelve] have worked at the counter. It gives me an opportunity to translate work into sensory experience.” Stewart says he runs his business “with integrity,” and that extends to strict rules about the sort of language employees may use on the job. Like the good Mormon mom, Lorraine stays home with the kids, but she also pitches in at the bakery shop on holidays, as do the kids.
Leaving the church fastness of Utah was difficult, but Lorraine says she thinks their minority status in Texas has actually been good for the kids. “It has really helped the children cement their testimony and cement their beliefs, and when they have to stand up and be a little bit different, I think that is great,” she says. “And they have many friends in different religions.”
(Interestingly, a churchgoing Protestant, former University of Utah law professor Michael McConnell, now a federal appeals judge and one of the nation’s leading experts on the First Amendment religion clauses, agreed with the Dickson perspective. He said he was glad to be in a location where “our religious views are in a distinct minority. I think that’s all to the good. It would be very difficult to raise children when the culture around you is the same as your faith. It’s so hard to distinguish between what you believe and what is just cultural coloration. It would be very hard to grow up Mormon in Utah because so much around you is Mormon that it doesn’t force you to think about why you believe what you believe.”)
Several years before the Dicksons landed in Texas, in 1986, Bruno and Cari Vassel made the opposite decision, moving with their five school-age children from New Jersey to a sprawling Utah Tudor home within the gated Pepperwood community in Sandy in the Mormon heartland and a half-hour drive from Salt Lake City. Bruno, a bishop in his New Jersey ward, left his career as an Avon executive to run a consulting business from his home in the Northridge ward. They still miss New York sometimes, but in Utah their teenagers did not have to tumble out of bed to attend the daily 6:00 a.m. religion classes (called “seminary”) before school. They were able to attend these readily as “released time” during the normal public school day. Cari’s aging mother lived with them for five years before she died, with Bruno’s mother nearby. It became easy for their children to socialize with lots of other Mormon children because the Pepperwood community is 90 percent Mormon.
Both husband and wife are Mormon converts. Cari, who grew up in New Mexico, was a child when she and her mother were baptized; her sisters and father never converted. Bruno, fourteen, was impressed by Mormon missionaries he met on the boat when his family was en route to a new home in Brazil. He and his mother were baptized in São Paulo; his father, a Johnson & Johnson executive, never converted. Later, Bruno served a mission in Italy and Germany, and a quarter-century later his son Bruno IV served his mission in Brazil. Cari and Bruno are both graduates of Brigham Young University, and Cari taught elementary school until the babies began to arrive.
The Vassels’ church engagements are similar to those of the Dicksons. They are the sort of true believers who subscribe to the church-owned Deseret News and not the Gentile daily, the Salt Lake Tribune. They carefully file back issues of Ensign, the church’s official monthly magazine. They have never even heard of the independent magazine Sunstone. Bruno is the ward’s Boy Scout leader, an important assignment of trust within a Mormon congregation. With her Relief Society friends, Cari enjoys social activities like progressive dinners and hobbies such as tying quilts for refugees in Bosnia.
Temple work is an important priority. Back in New Jersey, temple duties meant arduous twenty-hour days for the monthly trips down to the Washington, D.C., temple. In Utah there is a temple nearby. Both Bruno and Cari performed vicarious temple baptisms for their non-Mormon fathers after they died, in hopes that they can be united with both parents in eternity. In fact, Cari has done ordinance work for about 165 forebears. Genealogy is theology for Mormons, who operate the largest genealogical archive on earth. The assiduous attention to family trees is part of an elaborate effort to offer the possibility of salvation to past family members by performing such baptisms for the dead.
Early in the third millennium the Vassels fulfilled a long-held dream. With their youngest child launched in life, they served four years as adult missionaries in Utah’s Hispanic community. They sold their large Pepperwood house in 2006. But during the 1990s, another vocation prevailed in their lives. The Maytag was constantly humming, laundering linens for the stream of short-term and long-term visitors who passed the impressively antlered caribou head in the foyer (Bruno enjoys big-game hunting) and climbed the circular staircase to one of the seven bedrooms upstairs. One of those visitors who enjoyed the Vassels’ warm hospitality was a young man named David Denniston, who came and ended up staying a full year. He arrived a Protestant and left a Mormon.
Back in New Jersey some years earlier, David’s musician mother had taught cello to a Vassel daughter. Around the same time David, a French horn player, left the Manhattan School of Music, one course shy of his master’s degree, to join the pit orchestra for the touring production of Broadway’s Phantom of the Opera. After nearly four years on the road, and earning good money, David landed with the troupe at Salt Lake City. The job’s glamour had worn thin. He had enjoyed the Presbyterian and Methodist churches of his youth, and his own family is loving and supportive. But years had passed; David was lonely and burned out, and his family was more than 2,000 miles away. When the Vassels opened their home to him during Phantom’s Salt Lake run of several months, he was happy to accept.
The Vassels “never put a Book of Mormon on my pillow,” says David. But over time, watching the family members’ interactions with one another, the central role of church and prayer in the home, and the broad church support for a close family lifestyle, he decided he wanted to appropriate all that for himself. So in 1996 David was baptized a Mormon. He worked odd jobs for a time and then went to BYU to begin working all over again on a master’s degree in music.
At BYU another Mormon family began. David met nineteen-year-old Tara, another French horn major, and she became his bride in August 1998. Two weeks before the wedding David testified to his newfound faith at a Northridge ward Sunday meeting. He spoke of witnessing to his brother, who had recently visited Utah and “was able to see that I was a happier person and at peace.” Sharing the eager anticipation for his approaching wedding day, he testified, “Never before have I had such hope that I could have a strong and happy family…. The Book of Mormon has changed my life, has saved my life.” All this, he said, was “brought forth by the hand of God.”
Twelve days later David and Tara were sealed “for time and eternity” in a temple marriage, then treated to a festive reception prepared by Cari with decorated tables set around the Vassels’ backyard trout pond and waterfall, the majestic Wasatch rising behind. David’s parents, two brothers, grandparents, some aunts and uncles, all new to Utah, flew in from New England, California, and the South for the wedding.
But none of David’s kin could attend the actual wedding. Gentiles are not permitted in temples, not even for the marriages of close relatives or friends. (Also barred are all children and Mormons who lack temple recommends from their bishop.) The awkwardness of this has led many Mormons to hold external ring ceremonies after temple sealings in order to share a nuptial ritual with non-Mormon friends and relatives on the wedding day. Church officialdom opposes this practice. Its 1989 Handbook of Instructions stated that couples may arrange with their bishop for a “special meeting” involving those not allowed in the temple. But at such occasions “no ceremony should be performed, and no vows should be exchanged.” The 1999 Handbook allows rings to be exchanged outside the temple, but warns that this “should not appear to replicate any part of the marriage ceremony, and the couple should not exchange vows.”
The eternal significance of the nuclear and extended family is one of the most fundamental and powerful messages in Mormon doctrine. By contrast, classic expressions of traditional Christian orthodoxy give an austere view of heaven. The Westminster (Presbyterian) Shorter Catechism begins with the question, “What is the chief end of man?” Answer: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Traditional Christians generally assume that “forever” includes earthly family and friends, but the Bible gives no flat assurances of that. Joseph Smith’s latter-day revelations, however, did. The Mormon heaven is a far cozier place.
The Mormon focus is on the human family. Church rules require that ward bishops be married. Marriages are sealed for time but also exist forever through marriage in the temple. Marriages populate the earth by giving the opportunity of mortal birth to preexistent souls waiting to be born, and children are sealed to their parents for eternity; all this produces family reunions that go on and on, world without end. It is an appealing picture in a contemporary culture of disintegrating human relationships and lonely individuals seeking to connect. Playing to this central concept, Mormons produce a stream of pamphlets, books, and videos with titles such as “Family First,” “Together Forever,” and “Family Answers,” aimed at both members and Gentiles. The illustrations show relentlessly smiling family groups, couples headed hand in hand toward the horizon, the scenes romantically backlit.
In Mormon manuals, art, and articles, traditional gender roles dominate. The Hinckley First Presidency and Twelve Apostles issued a 1995 “Proclamation to the World” on the family specifying that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual pre-mortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” In this life fathers are to “preside over their families in love and righteousness and are to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.” However, within marriage men and women are “obligated to help one another as equal partners.” The decree reiterates the Mormon doctrine that with the help of sacred temple ordinances family relationships will be “perpetuated beyond the grave” and families will be “united eternally.” Marriage, the proclamation continues, is not only ordained of God but “essential to His eternal plan.”
Marriage, therefore, is not just the “holy estate” traditional in Christendom; it is a sacred duty in Mormonism. Preparation for it, accompanied by strict chastity standards, is stressed throughout the Aaronic priesthood manuals for boys aged twelve to eighteen as well as in the daily four-year religion classes required of high school teenagers. Junior high boys are taught lessons in “Respect for Mothers and Their Divine Role,” “Sexual Purity,” “Pure Thoughts and Clean Language,” and “The Sacred Power of Procreation.” The high school priesthood curriculum includes sessions on “The Eternal Importance of Families,” “Understanding Women’s Roles,” and “Advance Preparation for a Temple Marriage.” Lessons for the late teens include classes on “Choosing an Eternal Companion” and “Celestial Marriage—A Preparation for Eternity.”
Coed high school seminary classes teach that without temple marriage one cannot achieve the highest status within the “celestial” or highest level of Mormonism’s three-tiered heaven. The eternal family, then, is a reward for the spiritual progress that Mormons call “exaltation,” which continues throughout eternity. The college-level institute textbook Achieving a Celestial Marriage states in the very first paragraph that God is married. “Our Heavenly Father and mother live in an exalted state because they achieved a celestial marriage. As we achieve a like marriage, we shall become as they are and begin the creation of worlds for our own spirit children.” Exaltation is available only in family units, and with celestial marriage one can “procreate the family throughout eternity.”
The same chapter of Mormon scripture that lays out the now-abandoned polygamy principle promises exaltation and godhood in eternity through marriage sealed in the covenant (D&C 132:19–20). Putting it another way, a woman’s spiritual fulfillment and her rewards in the hereafter come through her husband’s priesthood. There is no other path to the highest level of exaltation in the celestial kingdom. As the Apostle Dallin Oaks stated, “There is no fulness of joy in the next life without a family unit, including a husband, a wife, and posterity.” That is tough news for singles. As a practical matter, Protestant and Catholic churches often have difficulties ministering to singles, too, but no other church relegates never-married singles to a permanently and officially inferior spiritual status. The LDS Church has established some special singles wards to meet the recreational and spiritual needs of never-married young Mormons. There are also student wards.
Church presidents have not been insensitive to the pastoral difficulty the Mormon scriptures present. Spencer W. Kimball once addressed the issue in Ensign, writing, “We promise you that insofar as eternity is concerned, no soul will be deprived of rich and high and eternal blessings for anything which that person could not help,” and that such a person, if righteous, would “eventually” receive all the blessings to which he or she was “entitled.” He went on with paternal advice to the lovelorn, counseling young people to be desirable catches on the marriage market. “We encourage both men and women to keep themselves well-groomed, well-dressed, abreast of the times, attractive.”
It can also be difficult for the divorced in this world of happy poster families. Eternally sealed marriages may become a less-than-appealing tenet to Mormons who are caught in unhappy marriages. Utah has always had a high divorce rate overall, but the divorce rate for temple marriages is quite low. The church has never actually forbidden divorce, but with its “families forever” doctrines, divorce carries an eternal significance. Divorced men and women can apply to have sealings broken, but the matter of children’s sealings is complex. Legally adopted children are ritually sealed to their adoptive parents. Children born within a sealed union are automatically sealed to their parents, and in the case of divorce, they remain sealed to both parents. The sealings regulations in the church handbook stipulate that children cannot be sealed to one parent only. Sticky cases are appealed all the way to the First Presidency and decided on an individual basis.
Mormons have traditionally had large families, to provide “mortal bodies for the spirit children of God” waiting in a preexistent state and to bestow on themselves eternal increase, exaltation, and big family gatherings in the celestial kingdom. The church maintains an unwavering theological stance against abortion. “The only possible exceptions,” according to the 1999 Handbook, are cases involving rape, incest, “serious jeopardy” to the life or health of the mother, or a determination by a physician that there are “severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth.” And even those conditions do not automatically justify abortion. Those who submit to, perform, or facilitate an abortion may be subject to church discipline. The church, however, says it “has not favored or opposed” specific abortion legislation, it has taken no position on the related issue of stem-cell research that destroys human embryos. Although stillborn children had lives in the Mormon preexistence, temple ordinances are not performed for them because “there is no direct revelation on when the spirit enters the body.”
The First Presidency members have stated that they “deplore” surgical sterilization to limit births, and the church “strongly discourages” the practice. But the policy is looser than that of the Roman Catholic Church and allows sterilization to be considered in cases of mental incompetence or serious danger to life or health through childbearing.
On birth control, the church has softened its position. The 1999 Handbook says that the number of children a couple has is “extremely intimate and private and should be left between the couple and the Lord.” Sex is not merely for procreation but is also “a means of expressing love and strengthening emotional and spiritual bonds between husband and wife.” This is a considerable departure from some statements by previous presidents. David O. McKay, president from 1951 to 1970, father of seven, suggested that birth control puts a marriage on a level with “the panderer and the courtesan” when a couple seeks to “befoul the pure fountains of life with the slime of indulgence and sensuality.” As recently as 1987 President Ezra Taft Benson directed the Saints, “Do not curtail the number of children for personal or selfish reasons.”
The Associated Press writer Vern Anderson, discussing the current Handbook wording, credited President Hinckley with the change. In 1983, when then-President Spencer W. Kimball, an outspoken foe of birth control, was largely incapacitated and Hinckley was effectively already running the church, Hinckley told a BYU audience that he was “willing to leave the question of numbers to the man and the woman and the Lord.” The 1989 edition of the Handbook was ambiguous, and by 1992 the quasi-official Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry made the number and spacing of children a private, prayerful decision. Mormons today have fewer children than their parents had, but their families are larger than the non-Mormon American average.
The Handbook currently in force covers numerous family-related topics. Church leaders are told to discourage adopted children from seeking to identify their natural parents. “Dating and get-acquainted businesses” are specifically barred from operating on church premises or using church mailing lists—a problem that would not arise in most other denominations. As for agonizing end-of-life decisions, the Saints are not obligated “to extend mortal life by means that are unreasonable” when “dying becomes inevitable.” But the religion condemns assisted suicide or deliberately putting to death someone with an incurable condition. Decisions on organ transplants and donations are left up to the individual. Surrogate motherhood, artificial insemination with donor sperm, and in vitro fertilization using donor sperm or eggs are “strongly discouraged” but not flatly prohibited.
Like other religious traditions, Mormonism teaches that God desires abstinence from sexual relations outside marriage and strict fidelity within the married state. Mormon parents are directed to make sure that the public school sex education of their children is “consistent with sound moral and ethical values.” In cases of unwed pregnancy, the First Presidency states that every effort should be made “to establish an eternal family relationship,” but if a successful marriage seems unlikely for the parents, the church encourages adoption. “Generally, unwed parents are not able to provide the stable, nurturing environment so essential for the baby’s well-being.”
Family relationships receive regular attention in inspirational homilies from the ward level on up to conference speeches. They absorb much Relief Society attention, cover a lot of space in issues of Ensign, and account for the new “School of Family Life” announced in 1998 for BYU, a curriculum without parallel elsewhere in American higher education. Previously the school operated a division of “family sciences” that included an old-fashioned home economics major. The new school was also intended to focus research on marriage, parenting, and related public policy issues.
Politically the LDS Church is willing to join hands with conservative Protestants and Catholics on such family values issues as abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. The most important and successful such campaign to date in which it has participated was the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, which was seen as a threat to the traditional American family.
The ERA was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in October 1971, and by the U.S. Senate in March 1972. By December 1972 it had already been ratified by twenty-two states. In these early stages the LDS church did not openly oppose the amendment, which was passed in a number of states with significant Mormon populations, including Idaho, Colorado, California, and Hawaii. A survey published by the church-owned Deseret News in November 1974 showed that 63 percent of Utahns favored the ERA.
At this point the church big guns swung into action and developed a behind-the-scenes strategy guided largely by future President Gordon B. Hinckley, then a special policy adviser to the First Presidency. But Hinckley’s involvement in the headquarters-directed anti-ERA activities received only a single sentence in Sheri L. Dew’s thick 1996 biography of Hinckley, published by the church-owned Deseret Book Company. “Elder Hinckley,” she wrote, “acted several times as a Church spokesman on the matter.”
After Relief Society President Barbara B. Smith delivered a significant anti-ERA speech, the Utah legislature defeated the ERA in February 1975. By 1976, thirty-four states had ratified the ERA, and only four more were needed to make it part of the Constitution. Strategy included some important public addresses by church leaders in states with large Mormon populations. Though Idaho’s legislature had passed the amendment with a two-thirds majority, it was rescinded by a simple majority of voters in a referendum that followed a major address by Apostle Boyd K. Packer. Throughout 1977 LDS leaders worked behind the scenes to control state-level International Women’s Year conferences. According to D. Michael Quinn, at some of these “there was the now-familiar sight of a Mormon man coordinating women delegates with a walkie-talkie.”
The LDS Church was politically ready to join hands with allies such as the conservative Catholic Phyllis Schlafly to achieve its concept of pro-family goals. By 1979, Quinn said, Hinckley had devised a clear set of guidelines for LDS involvement. People should not be “set apart” for political activities; the LDS name should not be used in the title of political organizations; church buildings and church meetings could be used to discuss ERA issues; church funds should not be used; political candidates should not be endorsed, but incumbent voting records should be published. Much of this strategy, of course, is also used by non-Mormon Religious Right groups, including the Christian Coalition.
The Ensign frequently published articles on the ERA, including statements by President Spencer W. Kimball. Leaflets were widely distributed discussing the issue and sometimes suggesting how to vote in referendum elections or for state legislators. Anti-ERA speakers were invited to speak in ward chapels; massive letter-writing campaigns were mounted. A Boston Globe headline read, “It’s Do or Die for the ERA: Mormon Power Is the Key.” Nationally the tide was turning. By 1982 the ERA was dead.
The major “family values” public policy issue currently facing religious conservatives in the United States is same-sex marriage. The 1995 family proclamation was emphatic that marriage can exist only between a man and a woman, ordained as such by God and “essential to His eternal plan.” About gays and lesbians Hinckley told a 1998 General Conference: “We cannot stand idle if they indulge in immoral activity, if they try to uphold and defend and live in a so-called same-sex marriage situation. To permit such would be to make light of the very serious and sacred foundation of God-sanctioned marriage and its very purpose, the rearing of families.”
This became a pressing matter in 1993 when the Hawaii Supreme Court said the state had no constitutional right to bar same-sex marriage licenses. The “full faith and credit” clause of the U.S. Constitution requires all states to honor each other’s statutes and legal bonds, and moral traditionalists feared that homosexual marriages would have to be recognized nationwide. The Mormon Church was active with other religious groups in the legal maneuvering, as well as in the 1998 referendum in which Hawaiian voters, by 69 percent, gave the legislature the power to ban same-sex marriages.
The church also played a dramatic role in Alaska, where a superior court judge had ruled in favor of a gay couple’s marriage application. The Mormon Church contributed $500,000 to the successful 1998 referendum drive to ban same-sex marriages, quintupling the war chest of the Alaska Family Coalition. It was the largest contribution to a ballot measure campaign in state history.
In a 2000 brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, the church said it would cease its cherished sponsorship of 30,000 Boy Scouts troops with 400,000 participants if the organization were legally forced to have openly gay leaders. Activism escalated after the Supreme Judicial Court allowed same-sex marriage in Massachusetts in 2004. The Mormon governor Mitt Romney failed in efforts to have the legislature call a referendum on the issue.
The LDS First Presidency stated that the church “favors measures that define marriage as the union of a man and a woman and that do not confer legal status on any other sexual relationship,” thus opposing civil unions as well as gay marriages. In 2006, church leaders called upon believers to back a federal marriage amendment to the Constitution. In that cause, Apostle Russell M. Nelson was among those forming the Religious Coalition on Marriage, alongside the nation’s Catholic cardinals; white, black and Hispanic Evangelicals and Pentecostalists; conservatives within “mainline” Protestant denominations; and leaders from the Southern Baptist Convention, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Orthodox Judaism.
It remains to be seen how the church’s involvement in such U.S. political controversies might affect its image, status, and activities overseas. But however public issues evolve in the United States and elsewhere, the church’s twenty-first-century stand on the family is clear. The family, defined in notably old-fashioned and prefeminist terms, is the basic unit of secular society and of the church. The LDS authorities consider it among their most sacred trusts to do everything in their power to protect it.