honorentheos wrote:I'm amused at the parallels in this thread and the Dershowitz defense.
Calling an act immoral, universally without regard for person or position, is an essential trait of a pluralistic society. The US Supreme Court has established this precedent when it comes to arguments for religious exemption from the law for good reason, demanding all be equal under it. A belief in human sacrifice does not excuse murder. A belief in plural marriage as a sacrament does not excuse bigamy. If the act of hiding the facts to maintain power isn't immoral because the party doing so believes it's in the interests of those being deceive, well then. Enjoy the Dershowitz defense as it lays waste to liberal Western society. We will never agree that the issue is one of personal belief. It's not about religion being in a special category. Its about institutions of authority versus individual liberty and just application of a standard of moral behavior.
It is interesting to watch you attempt equate things that really don’t equate very well. Some of the things you accept as simply obviously immoral are still contested. For example, you say bigamy is obviously immoral. A whole lot of people would not agree. Many would argue that the Constitution should protect the right of consenting adults to enter into a contractual relationship of their mutual choosing. Where is your obvious immorality now?
Remember, the question is not what you and I find immoral, honor, or even what many Americans have long assumed was immoral, but what we can conclude is inherently, universally immoral. Some would in fact argue that laws against bigamy are an affront to Western liberal values of our day.
I do not find it to be obviously immoral that a church would not teach the totality of its history in proselyting or devotional services.
Moreover, the issue becomes more complicated when comparing the actions of an individual man with those of what is essentially a committee. Dershowitz is defending the misconduct of a single president in a particular system. The idea that an elected official would compromise national security in pursuit of the goal of re-election is, for me, an easy question to decide, as without a certain degree of national security, there is nothing left to protect.
Here we are talking about the myth that a culture has told itself over generations, one that is used to foster faith in certain values and rites. There is no doubt in my mind that certain people are culpable for hiding history along the way. But that is different from saying the Church’s actions have been clearly immoral. The Church’s actions, collectively speaking, have been all over the map. The cost of doing a bad job of dealing with the changing demands of a modern information society is obvious, but it is also something that many are dealing with.
At the same time it is important to acknowledge the positive steps that some Mormons and among them Church leaders have taken.
Complexity is not an excuse. That said, understanding complexity tempers what might otherwise be overly harsh judgment. I see an understandable but intemperate desire to condemn utterly the LDS Church, where I would like to see more understanding for the foibles of the Mormon people. The cost of the former might be forgetting the humanity of the latter.
So let’s by all means resolve not to hide history because we individually know it to be wrong in principle. At the same time, let us maintain sufficient imagination and compassion to understand the complex landscape of competing values that can result in a flawed historical narrative. Let’s give credit to those who see the flaws and endeavor to correct them, recognizing that rushing to change also has a cost. Many here might not consider that cost worth reckoning, but we can at least, I hope, sympathize with and not rush to condemn those who do.