Church of the Latter Day Saints explains cause of long ban on blacks in priesthood

[james_davis_nicoll]

They were being racist. Accordingly:

Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.

Which takes them a long way from the days when this letter was sent to George Romney.

Comments

[srogerscat.livejournal.com]

Sean O'Hara,

Nothing will change the past. What is your point, exactly? That they should stick to the old thinking because well, why not since it will change nothing they had already done by 1978?

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

You're right, no amount of apologizing can change the past. They're stuck with it. If they want to stop doing evil in the future, good on them, though continuing on with the same organization that perpetrated those evils doesn't give me great confidence in that. But don't apologize and expect the rest of the world to forgive them. The things they've done cannot be erased, and so they cannot be forgiven and their apologies are hollow and meaningless.

[srogerscat.livejournal.com]

A very broad statement. Is, then, any apology not hollow and meaningless?

[cofax7]

It sounds like what you're saying is that the point of an apology is forgiveness.

It is not.

The point of an apology is to acknowledge a wrong, to the person or persons injured, and commit to do better in the future. The value of an apology doesn't depend on the other party's forgiving them, but on the wrongdoer's acceptance that what they did was morally wrong.

So I don't care whether any black Mormons (as the party most wronged) ever forgives the LDS church: that's up to them to do or not, as it pleases. But I do appreciate that the church finally, long past time, understands that it was acting wrongly and has apologized for it. If in future they continue to discriminate against blacks, then we will know the apology was meaningless. But in the absence of such foresight, we can't know that.

Such an apology is appropriate. That's how we rebind the social fabric after it has been torn by wrongdoing.