New Podcast on Family Proclamation and Elder Oaks

[consiglieri]

Bill Reel teams up with Radio Free Mormon in a new podcast to talk about the backdrop of the Family Proclamation in order to more fully contextualize Elder Oaks' recent General Conference talk.

http://www.mormondiscussionpodcast.org/ ... ent-220356

An interesting nugget that pops up is Elder Packer's 2008 description of how the Family Proclamation came into existence.

According to Elder Packer, the United Nations world conference on the "family" held in Beijing was a major precipitating factor to the creation of the Family Proclamation.

A Proclamation to the World

Not too many years ago there came a movement in the world having to do with the family. The United Nations called a council on the family in Beijing, China. We sent delegations to that council on the family and to other councils that were held. And then it was announced that one of them would be held near our headquarters, and we thought, “Well, if they are coming here, we had better proclaim ourselves.”

http://scottwoodward.org/Talks/html/Pac ... amily.html

I did a little research and was unable to find any United Nations conference on the "family" in Beijing.

There was, however, a United Nations world conference on "women" held in Beijing, China.

Strangely, this conference, which Elder Packer cites as a precipitating factor to the creation of the Family Proclamation, was held September 4-15 of 1995.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Con ... omen,_1995

If this is the United Nations world conference to which Elder Packer alludes, it is hard to see how the precipitating factor for the creation of the Proclamation could have occurred only a couple of weeks before the Family Proclamation was read in the Relief Society Women's meeting at the end of September of the same year.

It is also hard to see how President Hinckley (or his surrogates) could have approached the General Relief Society Presidency two weeks prior to their meeting about having the Family Proclamation read publicly.

Essentially, Elder Packer would have the Relief Society approached about reading the Proclamation in mid-September of 1995, even though the impetus for the creation of the Family Proclamation (the UN World Conference) concluding on September 15th.

In addition to these problems, Elder Packer's scenario would seem to conflict with the story told by Elder Oaks that the impetus for the Family Proclamation came almost a year before it was introduced in September of 1995.

All the Best!

--Consiglieri

[Jeffret]

There was a different conference on the family. Not the Beijing one. It was pretty significant in Mormon circles. Some Mormons went to it and felt like they were instrumental in keeping it more conservative and expressing their repressive views on the family. That experience got a number of the activists and leaders fired up. There was one BYU professor in particular who was involved and kind of the leading intellectual anti-gay force in the Church outside its ordained leaders. His name used to crop up all the time in anything Mormon against gays. All the time. I got so used to seeing his garbage. Oddly, by the time Prop 8 rolled around he had pretty much disappeared. I still saw references to some of his older writings from time to time but he was no longer personally a force or showed any involvement. Maybe he had passed.

That conference was around the time the PotF (Croc-Proc) came out. I highly doubt the conference was actually causative to the PotF. The legal challenges in Hawaii and elsewhere were much stronger drivers. The Church needed an official statement to point to demonstrate their strongly held religious belief. Also, they needed a way to get their members involved. They didn't want everything traced back to Church leaders. They wanted to give the impression of widespread, grass-roots, sincerely held belief, even though we all know Mormons don't do anything unless organized by their leadership. Can't do. And they wanted to head off any potential sympathy for LGBT folks. They didn't have anything specific in their official teachings against LGBT, though the biases run very deep, so they needed to make it clear to their members.

Another significant force was Packer's great fear of feminism. The PotF isn't just an anti-gay epistle. It's also intended to maintain what it perceives as traditional gender roles. Church leaders wanted to make clear their opposition to feminism and changes in gender roles in marriage and elsewhere. These changes were pretty significant at the time. When we were married students at BYU around 1990, one of our bishops was Dr. Brent Barlow from the Marriage and Family Sciences department at BYU. He used to write a family column on family in the Deseret News and had written several books. He was a good bishop for young married couples. When we had a chance to catch up with him a few years later, he related how much American families had changed during that time, that the shifts in expectations and dynamics were substantial.

[oliver_denom]

I'm not sure where Packer was pulling that from, but my understanding is that the primary impetus for the Family Proclamation was the lawsuit over gay marriage and subsequent legislative actions and referendums happening in Hawaii.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_ ... _in_Hawaii

The proclamation was just one part in the church's political offensive against gay marriage in Hawaii in order to emphasize that such marriages were doctrinally incompatible with Mormonism. While other churches have placed their opposition on a couple of passages from the bible, the LDS church wanted to put a stake in the ground by saying that an anti-gay marriage position was essential to core beliefs.

[consiglieri]

There was a different conference on the family. Not the Beijing one. It was pretty significant in Mormon circles. Some Mormons went to it and felt like they were instrumental in keeping it more conservative and expressing their repressive views on the family. That experience got a number of the activists and leaders fired up. There was one BYU professor in particular who was involved and kind of the leading intellectual anti-gay force in the Church outside its ordained leaders. His name used to crop up all the time in anything Mormon against gays. All the time. I got so used to seeing his garbage. Oddly, by the time Prop 8 rolled around he had pretty much disappeared. I still saw references to some of his older writings from time to time but he was no longer personally a force or showed any involvement. Maybe he had passed.

That conference was around the time the PotF (Croc-Proc) came out. I highly doubt the conference was actually causative to the PotF. The legal challenges in Hawaii and elsewhere were much stronger drivers. The Church needed an official statement to point to demonstrate their strongly held religious belief. Also, they needed a way to get their members involved. They didn't want everything traced back to Church leaders. They wanted to give the impression of widespread, grass-roots, sincerely held belief, even though we all know Mormons don't do anything unless organized by their leadership. Can't do. And they wanted to head off any potential sympathy for LGBT folks. They didn't have anything specific in their official teachings against LGBT, though the biases run very deep, so they needed to make it clear to their members.

Another significant force was Packer's great fear of feminism. The PotF isn't just an anti-gay epistle. It's also intended to maintain what it perceives as traditional gender roles. Church leaders wanted to make clear their opposition to feminism and changes in gender roles in marriage and elsewhere. These changes were pretty significant at the time. When we were married students at BYU around 1990, one of our bishops was Dr. Brent Barlow from the Marriage and Family Sciences department at BYU. He used to write a family column on family in the Deseret News and had written several books. He was a good bishop for young married couples. When we had a chance to catch up with him a few years later, he related how much American families had changed during that time, that the shifts in expectations and dynamics were substantial.

Thanks for the information, Jeffret!

It is amazing how deep this all runs. The podcast goes into the effort by the church to gain standing in the Hawaii case as the primary impetus behind the "Croc-Proc." (LOL!) Elder Oaks does not mention that in his GC talk, because he wants it to be seen as separate and apart from any maneuvering.

I raised this point because I thought it interesting that Elder Packer gave a different explanation back in 2008 that seems in some respects to run counter to even the extremely vague "inspirational" procedure mentioned by Elder Oaks.

As well as the timing of the United Nations Beijing World Conference on Women.

[Jeffret]

There are others who I'm sure remember this stuff much more than I do and who were much more involved than I was. One person who particularly comes to mind is Nadine Hansen. I'm sure she also knows a bunch of other people who were involved and would remember.