A Change in the LDS Church?

There can be a good deal of cloak and dagger in the gay Mormon world, for obvious reasons, but much of the info that gets to me goes through the grapevine; it’s stuff that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. So when a LDS friend of Rob’s tell him that she has personally had a long talk with Monson just a while before he became President Monson and that she feels assured that he’s committed to slowly, but greatly improving the lot of gay men and women in the LDS church… well, it sounds fishy. It’s not that she’d lie but that she could have heard what she wanted; I don’t know her well enough to tell.

One thing has been on my mind, though. Danzig. Remember the LDS pressroom response to the Danzig controversy? It seemed kind of strange and out of character, but this was what really stuck out:

In his Tribune letter-to-the-editor, Mr. Danzig said he “was troubled that my church requested I violate my own conscience to write in support of an amendment I feel is contrary to the constitution and to the gospel of Christ.” In reality Church leaders had asked members to write to their senators with their personal views regarding the federal amendment opposing same gender marriage, and did not request support or opposition to the amendment.

The Church “did not request support or opposition to the amendment.” Now anyone paying attention would know that the LDS church in reality :-) has made it clear that they want members to support such marriage-banning amendments. Consequently, this statement, a response to a news story, caused some to experience a good deal of incredulity. It seemed to some like a disingenuous, or at least silly denial. But I don’t know.

The LDS church did most of that past encouraging of members to politically act against our families before this new presidency.

The problem for religions is that they benefit greatly by being the rock, the unflinching and assuring word of truth, but they also have to eventually change with new human moral discoveries. If you pay attention to, say, the Catholic Church, it takes a good deal of evidence to get anything near a mia culpa out of them, though. Most of the time a religion must use clever interpretations of their past actions and lawyerly arguments to both change and maintain that they never did, or to change but maintain that the change was already in the works; it was the unalterable plan of God all along for things to be one way back then, but another way now. That way they both evolve to survive and give that hard-to-find comfort in stability, in Truth.

So, what if there is a less PR-motivated explanation to this Danzig response? Is the church now trying to tell members they are not requesting that they support such legislation against our families? If so, does the change have something to do with the new President? Maybe it’d be putting too much weight into hearsay, but this could be seen as a change for the better, instead of a PR dodge.

Eh, I’m not putting much stock in it; it’s just been something on the mind.