About a year ago I was in sacrament meeting and a member of the High Council gave a talk to us that I thought was the most anecdotal, personalized, and useless counsel I had ever received. It was basically a list of things that had worked for him in life and therefore were part of the Gospel and failing in them was an affront to God despite all scriptural evidence to the contrary. It did work for him but I firmly believe to this day it wouldn't work for me and most of the people in the ward. Discussing it later with other ward members we all agreed there was no Spirit there.
I've had my share of experiences such as this myself. The reason I've had them is because the entire membership of the Church, including the leaders, are composed of human beings. According to most of the critics here, however, some human beings are more, or less, human that others.
The goal is always moved, the bar always raised, the standards always double, for the Latter Day Saint.
Keep something in mind. Elder Stapeley was deeply influenced by the age and cultural norms with which he was raised. Note: although we have shed the mantle of racism and similar prejudices as a society, we have also saddled ourselves with an entire edifice of new ones, which normally fall under the rubric of "Leftism" and "political correctness".
Black people, in just my life time, have gone from objects of bigotry and scorn, to objects of sympathy, to the noble savages (a dubious distinction they share with Amerindians and now, Third World Muslims) of an entire cultural and political demographic group.
Frankly, the prejudices against Mormons that are a regular feature of this forum and others of similar ilk have little substantive differences from the old bigotries against Black people. Nor are the superstitions and prejudices of positivism, reductionism, atheism, metaphysical materialism, and the shabby political and social nostrums of much of our modern political and media culture any better than the old bigotries against Blacks, woman, Asians, Irish, Italians, Catholics, or anyone or anything else.
Can a culture that despises and kills tens of millions of its own unborn children for reasons of personal convenience, or allows tens of millions more children in Third World countries die of malaria when such is completely preventable, so that they can strut before their peers as socially conscious, morally superior sophisticates, "concerned" about "the environment"
really be all that far ahead of a mind like that of Stapley'?
Should a culture of divorce and family dissolution in which one of every two marriages will eventually end in divorce,, with a 30% unwed pregnancy rate among whites, and upwards of 70% among blacks, worry overmuch about the personal racially biased opinions of a single individual forty years ago who had no influence in and of himself on Church doctrine and who was, in his own way, as much a product of the best and worst of his age as we are of ours?
Perhaps we should concentrate more on the prejudices, bigotries, myths, and narrow shibboleths of our own age and less on the easy targets of the past.