What I would like to hear

So BYU religion professor Randy Bott made what I consider some of the most boneheaded comments I have ever heard regarding race, and of course, he made them in the Washington Post.

Because most of his comments are behind the paywall, I'll paste a section here:

Bott compares blacks with a young child prematurely asking for the keys to her father’s car, and explains that similarly until 1978, the Lord determined that blacks were not yet ready for the priesthood.
“What is discrimination?” Bott asks. “I think that is keeping something from somebody that would be a benefit for them, right? But what if it wouldn’t have been a benefit to them?” Bott says that the denial of the priesthood to blacks on Earth — although not in the afterlife — protected them from the lowest rungs of hell reserved for people who abuse their priesthood powers. “You couldn’t fall off the top of the ladder, because you weren’t on the top of the ladder. So, in reality the blacks not having the priesthood was the greatest blessing God could give them.”

No. Just no.

Deborah at Exponent II has already found Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's discussion and repudiation of this idea from the PBS piece on the Mormons.  Kristine at By Common Consent pointed audiences to scholarly work done on the topic. Dr. Armand Mauss also weighed in on the issue.

And as wonderful as all of that instant feedback and repudiation of the hateful comments made by Brother Bott, it left me wanting.

I want an official repudiation from the Brethren, something along these lines.

The ban on blacks holding the priesthood was never based on revelation but was instead based on the political and social understandings of race of the 19th century. Unfortunately, these attitudes were given the weight of doctrine and much misinterpretation of scripture was made in an attempt to justify this ban. It is the position of the church that the revelation in 1978 authorizing the ordination of blacks to the priesthood was necessary to correct the mistakes of men. There is absolutely no doctrinal or theological support for the idea that race has any correlation with worthiness, either in the premortal, mortal, or postmortal existence. To teach such an idea is to violate the commandment to love one another.

Now, I know it won't happen for lots of reasons, namely opening up the idea of prophetic fallibility and its potential application to the issue of gay marriage, but I have to say, I would so love to hear one of the 15 say that.

Maybe in General Conference.

UPDATE: Official church response. More gently worded than what I wrote, but then, I don't have the responsibility of speaking for the entire church so I can say whatever I want.

UPDATE TWO: One more link.

Introductions

This new project has been incubating in the back of my mind for months now. As I have contemplated my impending retirement from university teaching to embark on homeschooling my son, my students have repeatedly recommended that I take up pod-casting so that they can keep up with what has ticked me off in society that week.

I'm not really sure that there is a need for this blog. Anything I can do, Joanna Brooks has done better. And yet, there is a virtue to just being a voice in the choir, in adding a strength of numbers approach to calls for increased justice, mercy and love in our interactions.

Like Joanna, I am Mormon, but increasingly I find myself tugging and pulling at that title like an ill-fitting skirt that's just an inch too short to meet the Honor Code regulations. I am self-conscious at being slightly different than everyone around me at church. Sometimes that difference is obvious, and I am sure that sometimes that difference is exaggerated by my own sensitivity that filters my perceptions and interpretations.

But I feel alone many a Sunday in a community of woman who are following God the best that they know how. I wonder sometimes why I am not happy or even, some days, at least satisfied with a cultural practice that seems to enrich so many others. Am I falling victim to special snowflake status? Is this a manifestation of pride. Probably. But not all.

Another tug at the title of Mormon is necessary politically. Mormon has become a political category - eliciting a view of the respondent as socially and economically conservative, white, middle-class, situated comfortably along the I-15 corridor with a persecution complex as rich as a plate of funeral potatoes. Some of those descriptives fit me better than others, and some not at all, and so I find myself self-identifying more as Christian than Mormon, even while recognizing how politically loaded that term is as well.

So this is going to be my space, to discuss issues that I feel deeply about, and to try and coordinate all the conflicting parts of my life in something resembling an internally coherent whole.