Hell, we should all just breathe a sigh of relief that this particular judge was willing to back off instead of doubling down on the stupid. There is yet hope for the republic.
If anything, I find it surprising that there is a presumption that the church could broadcast private information about her even before she withdrew.
TokyoBayer, thank you for that detailed response. That’s a much worse history than I realized.
Public shaming for religious reasons have been around forever. Mormons didn’t invent it.
I was just listening to a podcast with an interview of a chiropractor in Oregon. He’s gay and was excommunicated for that, which directly affected his practice. He had actually asked if he could simply quit but they refused his request. Had he known that he could have forced the issue and insisted on it, he would not likely have lost as many patients.
The Mormon church has for years counseled gays to marry women anyway in order to help “cure” them. This has been a huge problem and there are frequent divorces after the couple have children. Most of the children affected by this new policy were the result of these unions.
The original policy, which was leaked a couple of weeks ago, stated that any children of parents who are married to a same sex partner would be affected. Period. This apparently would have affected children of divorced parents as well, regardless of the living araignment.
After the outcry, they modified it so that if the parent who has primary custody is not in a same sex marriage the child can be baptized, etc. even if the child spends the weekends with their gay parent.
However, while this seems to be an improvement, it fails to address the question of joint custody, and there are predictions that a lot of Mormon judges are going to be giving custody to the straight parent. Even with an unbiased judge, the problem is the joint custody would result in the child being excluded from their church and community, translating to more gay parents not being granted joint custody.
It’s not pretty.
One selling point for Mormons has been how close knit they are, and how much of a community it becomes. The downside is that when they decide to not be inclusive, the excluded people can get really hurt. It’s tragic when they decide to hurt the children of those they’ve elected to shun.
The judge has recused himself from the case. I guess he figured it was a good way to get out of the shit storm he created.
Does anyone know if this will affect the complaints?