LDS church President Obama Piece – Insightful

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865671471/Complicated-but-not-hostile-LDS-Obama-relationship-draws-to-a-close.html” class=”bbcode_url”>http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865671471/Complicated-but-not-hostile-LDS-Obama-relationship-draws-to-a-close.html

tl;dr

Readers Digest Version

For five months of the Obama administration, the highest-ranking Mormon in the White House was an unpaid intern.

So when LDS historian Greg Prince looked back this week on his daughter’s internship in the Obama White House, he thought it was an apt metaphor for a good part of the relationship between the LDS Church and President Barack Obama.

While Obama developed respect and an affinity for President Dieter F. Uchtdorf of the faith’s First Presidency and found common ground on some immigration issues, the past eight years featured ideological collisions between the Obama administration and church leaders on issues related to religious liberty and same-sex marriage.

“If you look at each administration on its own merits, particularly over the past 35 years,” Prince said, “when the Republicans are in the White House, the Mormons prospered. When the Democrats were in the White House, the Mormons essentially were frozen out.”

Still, from 2009 to today, both sides made efforts.

President Uchtdorf, second counselor in the First Presidency, attended Obama’s historic first inauguration in January 2009 with Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

Just Love the Silver Fox.

In fact, Hatch said that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act he sponsored in 1993 was a bulwark against liberal attacks over the past decade.

Don’t know what to think on this one?

Meanwhile, President Obama and President Uchtdorf engaged in dialogue.

It began indirectly in April 2011. A White House official met President Uchtdorf and heard him speak at a BYU Management Society meeting in Washington. The official was so favorably impressed that he began to work within the White House to arrange a meeting between the two men.

More Love.

President Uchtdorf’s first meeting with Obama was in March 2013, when 14 religious leaders met in the Roosevelt Room, where the president asked them to support his effort to streamline the legal immigration process. President Uchtdorf emerged to say the president’s outline for immigration reform matched Mormon values.

A year later, Obama invited President Uchtdorf to a White House prayer breakfast and a meeting of religious leaders in the Oval Office. Prince, the LDS historian, was at the breakfast. As Obama interacted with President Uchtdorf, “I saw deep affection between the two men that was reciprocal,” Prince said.

When Obama visited Salt Lake City in April 2015, he spent a portion of his brief time here with Mormon leaders, President Uchtdorf among them.

“I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say President Uchtdorf dazzled (Obama and his staff),” Prince said. “He became the best embodiment of Mormonism as far as the Obama administration.”

Prince said he is convinced two things have hurt the LDS Church’s relationship with the Obama administration. The first is a longer-term issue, caused when the Religious Right became a political force in the 1980s and began to demonize the Democratic Party at a time when Utah is among the reddest of states. Two, after Obama beat Romney in 2012, a study showed that Utah ranked fourth in the nation for producing the most racist tweets.

Those who make too much of the divide between the president and the church over gay marriage should do so cautiously, Mason said.

“I think we still don’t appreciate how quickly the culture changed around this issue,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any other rights issue in American history, and I’m not exaggerating here, where the culture changed so drastically so quickly.”

Mason said the whole country changed its mind about gay rights and gay marriage in the course of a generation.

I won’t quote the final section, but it is worth the read. I found the whole piece insightful and heartening since it is from the Deseret News.