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I was looking into the church’s opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. It’s interesting because it doesn’t seem the church opposed it because they wanted to discriminate against women. In fact, they simply believed it was bad legislation and objected moral consequences of certain passages of the amendment. It was bad legislation because all of the rights that protect women were already covered under the 14th amendment. The church favored then and favors now equal rights for women and other laws already in place, but they opposed this piece of legislation. It seems they opposed the amendment because:
1. It opened the door for on demand abortion
2. It potentially made it legal for women to be drafted into military
3. It would somehow increase the tax burden on single income families causing women to leave the home and work (the church was not opposed to women working when the family needs it, they just didn’t want to support an idea that could create the conditions where it would become required to survive like it is for many families today).
4. It opened the door for gay marriage and granting them rights to raise children.
5. It blurred the gender roles in marriage, freeing fathers from the obligation to support his wife and children financially (church value) by freeing him from having to pay alimony and child support were they to get divorced.
They wanted to preserve the conditions that allowed mormons to live their faith, fathers providing, women being mothers. They wanted to make a case for the nuclear family.
In some ways, the opposition to gay marriage today is really the same as the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment yesterday. One is that supporting the Equal Rights Amendment was not grounds for excommunication, just like supporting gay marriage is not grounds for excommunication today (though it does prevent a new baptism if your parents were gay). It was ok to support the amendment because you believed it was good legislation or not in conflict with gospel teachings, but ridiculing church leaders and trying to harm the church and frustrate its work was. I guess the confusion is that when the church takes a stance on an issue, it becomes its work. So whether it’s gay marriage or the civil rights amendment, if you oppose it and actively fight to get it passed, it would seem you are trying to frustrate the church’s work and should be excommunicated.
Kind of like it’s ok to think and talk about your belief that women should have the priesthood, but if you actually fight to make it a reality, you are apostate. Demanding that women have the priesthood is the same fight as well. It requires us to redefine gender roles, or to just toss them out. This is something the church will not do because of the belief that the gender roles come from God and are as old as Adam and Eve, or maybe even older.
I wonder, is there any truth to the ideas in the Proclamation to the Family. Is there value in traditional gender roles? Should we fight to preserve them as a prominent part of our culture? Or are they just chauvinistic and outdated? Perhaps we live in a world where you can just do whatever you want. If a couple agrees to have the wife stay home with the kids, fine. If not, that’s fine too.
It seems like they intended to create a culture that makes it hard for the family to split up. If they decide to get divorced, it would be hard for the women to get along alone, having stayed home and not gone to school or established a career, she is dependent on the man’s financial support, so staying with him is the easiest option. The man has incentive to stay married because if not, he will have to support the family anyway through alimony and child support. So staying married is the easiest option for both. Though staying together out of necessity doesn’t seem ideal because it could cause a lot of people to feel stuck in a miserable marriage, it does create a stable home for the kids.
Some of you guys probably know more about this than I do, can anyone share some insight?
I think are some parallels between the ERA fight and the recent gay marriage policy. But the situations are not completely equal. For one thing, the ERA did not pass and the Church didn’t have to deal with any of its consequences (unlike the gay marriage issue). Had ERA passed, would the Church have enacted policy changes? It’s unknown. In some ways, the gay marriage issues is more straightforward in that it deals with one very specific issue as opposed to the ERA that could have had many effects. Quote:I wonder, is there any truth to the ideas in the Proclamation to the Family. Is there value in traditional gender roles? Should we fight to preserve them as a prominent part of our culture? Or are they just chauvinistic and outdated? Perhaps we live in a world where you can just do whatever you want. If a couple agrees to have the wife stay home with the kids, fine. If not, that’s fine too.
Interestingly, I’ve seen some research that states that couples tend to get along better when they follow traditional roles. There tend to be fewer conflicts. Of course, I think the truth behind that is that the roles for the couples are well-defined and each does their own thing. So it’s not that women are in the kitchen and men are in the workplace, but rather than the man and woman have a defined placed and they are both OKAY with it, whatever it is.
I think the leadership sees the devastating impact of the breakdown of the traditional family in so many places around the world and tries to keep that from spreading. The central issue, however, for me, is how “equal rights” is defined – and that amendment had some serious issues in how it was worded, IF the only intent was to equalize rights for men and women. Opposition to it primarily was distrust in the wording and intent – at a time when the leadership was as conservative as it has been in our history.
Old-Timer wrote:I think the leadership sees the devastating impact of the breakdown of the traditional family in so many places……..
(not aimed at you Ray, just general observation) Whenever I’m in a class at church and somebody says “traditional Family”, I ask them what they mean by that. I tell them in my family tradition, a “traditional family” had one man and 7 wives (as my GGGrandfather had). When somebody at church uses the word “Traditional Family”, they think of 1950’s stereotype “Leave it to Beaver” family. But even 100 years before, in non polygamous families, it was not like that. You had a father that worked in the fields or Factory all day and never had much time to interact with his children. If he had boys he worked with them on the farm, but never saw much of his daughters. Since man has been on this earth for tens of thousands of years, why do we need to go back to the 1950’s for our families example. Why is that the best?
My guess is that it’s because the people that have been at the helm of the church for the last 30+ years were all raising young families in the 1950s. Many of the previous gen apostles were all apostles for a long, long time.
I agree, Sheldon. I used that term simply as the catch phrase it has become. Thanks for making that important point.
Unknown wrote:I guess the confusion is that when the church takes a stance on an issue, it becomes its work. So whether it’s gay marriage or the civil rights amendment, if you oppose it and actively fight to get it passed, it would seem you are trying to frustrate the church’s work and should be excommunicated.
The one qualifier here is the church’s work cannot be a strictly political work. The crossover is where the church takes a stand on a moral position – that directly corresponds with a political position. But with the example of drinking/WOW I can be against prohibition while at the same time promoting the WoW. This is why according to the rules of the church members should never be in trouble for their political activities. It gets messy because of natural crossover.
Orson wrote:Unknown wrote:I guess the confusion is that when the church takes a stance on an issue, it becomes its work. So whether it’s gay marriage or the civil rights amendment, if you oppose it and actively fight to get it passed, it would seem you are trying to frustrate the church’s work and should be excommunicated.
The one qualifier here is the church’s work cannot be a strictly political work. The crossover is where the church takes a stand on a moral position – that directly corresponds with a political position. But with the example of drinking/WOW I can be against prohibition while at the same time promoting the WoW. This is why according to the rules of the church members should never be in trouble for their political activities. It gets messy because of natural crossover.
The clarification that I have heard (not sure even the majority of Mormon’s agree) is that the line is that you can’t be pushing the church to change it’s stance. Elder Christopherson made that point with Gay marriage. You could push for the gov to allow, but just don’t push the church.And on the current hot topic of the policy change, I have been careful not to say “I want the church to change” when talking with my leaders. I just say that I am not getting a confirmation that this is of God and then shutting my mouth.
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