I’m excited to introduce Dr. Taylor Petry, an associate professor at Kalamazoo College, and editor for the Dialogue Journal.  In this first segment, we’ll talk about how LDS leaders have changed how they talk about race issues, especially with regards to interracial marriage over the 20th century.  Is this similar to possible changes regarding LGBT issues?

Taylor: The typical way that we have told the history of the priesthood ban has been primarily around focusing on race as the exclusive category.  But when I started looking at the conversations that were happening and what church leaders were saying about race in the 1950s and 60s, I saw immediately that marriage was one of the big concerns. Why were they in favor of segregation? Why did they oppose civil rights? Why did they even have church policies that would prevent marriage in the temple?
Because they were really concerned about interracial sex. They thought that this was a big, big problem. We have this whole ideology about race and racialized groups, that this group was destined to do this, and this group was destined to do that. They worried that interracial mixing would dilute the sort of divine designs for those particular races. So I immediately saw that the question of race was really entwined with the with questions of sexuality. Again, as a sort of modern parallel to issues around same sex relationships today, I also wanted to show that the question of ‘who could marry who’ wasn’t just an issue that we dealt with in polygamy. It was an issue that we dealt with in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and even up until the last decade, we still were publishing manuals that had quotes from Spencer W. Kimball discouraging interracial marriage.
So the question of who can marry who, what kinds of couples are allowed in the church, in some cases, socially, and then in some cases ecclesiastically, was not just an old question, it was a pretty new question that we’ve dealt with. So I wanted to tell the history of how we worked through that particular issue as a way, not explicitly, but a parallel to the kinds of questions that we’re dealing with [regarding] same sex relationships, too.
Of course, things have changed pretty radically with regards to interracial marriage since the 1960s.
GT:  I think what was interesting to me is, especially in the ‘50s, and 60s, that interracial marriage would bring about the downfall of civilization. Now we have a black general authority, which was unheard of in the 50s and 60s. Peter Johnson is who I’m talking about, but he’s married to a white woman. And we have an apostle, [Gerrit] Gong.  He’s Asian, and he has a white wife as well. So, apparently, we’ve completely changed on this issue about whether interracial marriage is a good thing. I think you also mentioned Mia Love.  She’s a black Congresswoman, and she has a white husband.  So, talk about how we flip from, “This is the downfall of civilization,” to totally embracing it now.
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Taylor:  Spencer W. Kimball, who had been a big advocate of the Indian Placement Program, was out there as the biggest opponent of interracial marriage. The same thing happens when we’re setting up BYU-Hawaii or whatever it was called back then, the Polynesian College.[1]  I forget exactly what its name was back then. But, [you get the] same thing. You get social integration.  That leads to marriages and relationships and the church is like, “Oh, this isn’t what we meant. We wanted integration, but not intermarriage.” So, there’s a lot of anxiety about that. It’s surprising that then,