Just a bit more!

"I guess one of the greatest mysteries of mortality is why mankind fails to learn from History"
--L. Tom Perry CR Oct 1992

 "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." --George Santanaya 1905

(Below is a partial print from a NY Times article June 2012 -when Mormons Building Bridges organized parades for inclusiveness of homosexuals in marriage etc.  This article revisited the past between 1978-80.  These several paragraphs are part of a large article.  I have taken the liberty of Bold on parts that speak about loss of membership. I remember this time period.  Today's happenings will end up the same way if we don't know what we really base our testimony on and conduct ourselves accordingly.) 

****************************************

(paragraphs from NY Times Article)

The church began to pay attention to the group’s increasing political activism, and members of Mormons for E.R.A. began to pay a price for their political apostasy. Some women received letters from church officials warning them about their spiritual fates. “If you are really serious about being a Mormon,” a high-ranking church official wrote to Teddie Wood, one of the original four founders of the group, “you will sustain the Prophet,” before concluding, “So far as I am concerned – you are not a ‘Mormon.’ ” Other women were removed from cherished church positions. Worse, church leaders revoked several women’s “temple recommends,” the status that allows faithful Mormons to enter church temples and conduct sacred ceremonies and rituals essential for salvation.

Johnson suffered the harshest judgment when she was called to a church trial to consider, as her summons stated, “the relationship between your church membership and your conduct during the past months.” A church leader informed Johnson that the charges stemmed from her having “knowingly preached false doctrine” and harmed the church’s missionary efforts.

Sonia Johnson was led away by a police officer after she had chained herself to the gate of a Mormon temple during a demonstration supporting the Equal Rights Amendment in Bellevue, Wash., in 1980.

Before her trial, Johnson told a crowd gathered outside her church ward building that she was “confident that the Prophet will – if necessary – step forward at the proper time to vindicate me, and to vindicate the constitutional rights of all citizens to exercise their political rights as conscience dictates, without fear of religious repression.”

But no such intervention came. Instead, church leaders pronounced her excommunicated. Her bishop, however, took pains to make clear that Johnson had lost her standing with her lifelong faith not because of her support for the E.R.A. but, as her letter of excommunication stated, because she was “not in harmony with church doctrine concerning the nature of God in the manner in which He directs His church on earth.”
( end of NY Times paragraphs)

*******************************************

The 1980 Ensign, if you want to see what was up in 1978 with the ERA (35 years ago!) go here .  there were lots of other Ensign articles about this time in our history.  

The time period that Sonia Johnson got excommunicated is when I was involved in a Women's Conference in Anchorage, got to spend the night at the same home as our guest speaker (Gen. RS Pres. Barbara Smith) and had rooms on same floor.  It was wonderful to talk with her about this sort of thing.  There are several Ensign articles you can look up, if you have a mind to.   I remember Elder Packer's talk also. 

All of this current discussion/demand has such a familiar ring to it!

My feelings, that came out of the whole event in '78-'80 time period, and remain today is ...the Church is either true or it's not.  IF it's true then we are led by modern day Prophets that will receive revelation for the Church at large.  It will be in the Lords timetable and not man's.  It may be slow but it will be sure.  I don't need to bother myself about joining causes that counsel/plead/nag/suggest/support anything that the governing body has not yet addressed.  My personal input, in any form, is not necessary for the Church to ever make any changes! My mantra about Church revelation is--it clearly filters ...from the top down.  not the bottom up.

I know.  I know.  enough already! but I just keep thinking of things I want to say and then I say them and that's the way this cookie is crumbling!!!