One Person's Opinion

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Wednesday, December 11, 2002
 
THE MORMONS AND THE MODERN NATURAL SCIENCES:
An interesting controversy has sprung up involving a professor who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and who sought to show genetic links between pre-Columbian Native American tribes and White Americans. I am no expert on Mormon theology, but as I understand it, the Book of Mormon, which was revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith by a messenger of God, set forth a history of pre-Columbian America where Jesus visited and ministered to tribes after his crucifixion and resurrection in the Middle East, and those who followed him were fair-skinned and God's chosen people. (This explains the Church's resistance, until relatively recently, in according blacks the opportunity to attain the priesthood-- the theology was that darker-skinned people bore the "mark of Cain" in recognition of the darker-skinned tribes' rejection of Jesus' teaching when he visited the Americas.)

The professor, as I noted, looked for genetic links between native American fossils and Caucasians, attempting to prove that the Book of Mormon was truthful in recounting whites living in America before European settlement. Unfortunately, his research instead led him to conclude that Scripture was incorrect and that no whites lived in America before the Europeans came. When he made his conclusions public, the Church initiated proceedings to discipline, and perhaps excommunicate, the professor.

This is not the first clash between Joseph Smith's revealed word and scientific truth. One of the important Mormon Scriptures, the "Pearl of Great Price", contains the "Book of Abraham", which Smith claimed to have translated from Egyptian hyroglyphics using special lenses. However, what Smith claimed were the original Egyptian texts were examined by modern Egyptologists, and they turned out to be ordinary funerary offerings, not Mormon Scriptures.

Obviously, the Mormons should be heartily condemned for their assaults on academic freedom and the seeking of scientific truth. But beneath that, I feel a certain sympathy for the Mormons. Their Church is less than 200 years old and has grown very fast, now claiming millions of members. Salt Lake City, settled by Mormon Pioneers led by Prophet Brigham Young, is an extremely impressive, beautiful and vibrant city which just hosted a successful Winter Olympics. Brigham Young University not only has excellent academic programs but also boasts a top-rate athletic program; their football team has even won a national championship. And they have overcome their prior racial discrimination to become one of the most diverse of American religions; no longer are Mormons always white suburbanites from large families, as they once were. They have had an amazing run.

But the reason I feel sympathy is because the youth of their religion puts them at an extreme disadvantage with respect to the interaction of science and their religion. All religions, of course, clash with science to some extent; only the most fundamentalist Jews and Christians, for instance, still believe that the earth was populated in the sequence and in the timeframe set forth in Genesis. But younger religions have it worse, because not only does science call into question their beliefs regarding events at the beginning of history, but also the more recent events set forth in their texts.

To see this, imagine if Christ had been executed in the 19th Century, rather than 2000 years ago. That would likely mean that Christ would have identifiable living distant relatives. Bodies could be exumed, and DNA compared, to show that "the Messiah" was in fact still buried in the ground and no resurrection had occurred. The facts relating to miracles could be investigated, and secular explanations proffered. It would be possible to show (either through genetics or the fossil record) that animals who never made it onto Noah's Ark nonetheless survived the flood and reproduced. Contemporaneous reports of events set forth in Scripture would have appeared in newspapers and magazines, calling religious parables and legends into question.

This is what the Mormons face, not because their religion is any less true than Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, but simply because it came around later and is thus more amenable to scientific scrutiny. These days, of course, they react by shutting down inquiry by practicing church members; that, of course, is just going to shift the inquiry over to more skeptical non-members. In the long term, the Mormons will have to adopt a more flexible view with respect to the truth of their holy texts, just as many Christians and Jews no longer believe in the literal truth of their Scriptures at least as to matters such as evolution and the fossil record. But there is also a certain smugness out there, especially among some evangelical Christians who view the Mormons as heretics and who are seizing on these findings as a way to bring Mormons "back to Christ". On a theolgical level, the problem for Mormons is not that science has proven their sacred texts to be incorrect; it is that science has that capability to a greater extent than it does with older religions.

Sunday, December 01, 2002
 
SODOMY STATUTES AND THE HARM OF UNENFORCED LAWS:
Imagine if you lived in a town with the most restrictive sort of Sunday blue law, which essentially prohibited any public or commercial activity on Sunday other than going to church, with a penalty of six months in jail for the first offense and prison time for repeat offenders. The law was passed in 1780, and has not been enforced in 55 years. As a result, townsfolk engage in all sorts of activities that would be prohibited under the law, such as operating a movie theater, staging plays and sports events, opening the local stores and restaurants, playing games and picnicking in the park, publishing a newspaper, and anything else they might choose to do. There have been sporadic attempts to repeal the law, making the argument that a statute that is so routinely ignored and is never enforced should not be on the books. However, a vocal minority of religious conservatives who care deeply about the law have managed to block all attempts at repeal, arguing that even if the law isn't enforced, it reflects the fact that it is immoral not to honor the Sabbath, and the supporters of repeal are Godless hedonists who are opposed to one of this nation's great Judeo-Christian moral traditions.

This is the perfect analogy to the sodomy laws of many states, with the exception that some of the laws (though not all of them) apply only to homosexual sodomy and thus only criminalize the activities of a minority (other sodomy laws, however, apply to oral or anal sex between same-sex or opposite-sex couples, and thus criminalize the activities of almost every sexually active adult). Sodomy laws are almost never enforced against those having consensual sex, but they are difficult to repeal because the religious right is just about the only group that cares much about them, and they label anyone who attacks the laws as "anti-family" or anti-God, because their religious beliefs judge homosexual conduct to be a mortal sin. Of course, gay rights groups have attempted to repeal such laws, but in many states, gays have little or no political power, and they have bigger fish to fry anyway; the fact that the laws are generally not enforced means that they present a more theoretical threat as compared to the actual threat of things like employment discrimination and the denial of the benefits of marriage.

So the laws stay on the books. And they are not harmless. First of all, they do chill perfectly acceptable conduct. There are some people out there (I might call them "anal-retentive" but I don't want to make a bad pun here) who always try to follow the law, either because they are paranoid that the law will start being enforced or because they don't believe that it is right to knowingly break it. There is also always the threat that some day, a prosecutor, or a majority, might decide to start enforcing these laws again. Moreover, all unenforced laws (and there are a lot of them-- some having to do with silly or obsolete issues such as the duty to hitch your horse to the hitching post on the streetcorner) at the very least clutter our statute books, making it more difficult for an average citizen to learn what the law is and to conform his or her conduct to the law. Finally, the precise point of moral condemnation that makes the religious right support anti-sodomy laws is an important reason for their repeal-- the government should have no business engaging in the symbolic condemnation of private conduct solely on the ground of its supposed immorality.

As I said earlier, it is often difficult to overturn these laws in the legislature. What about in the courts? The problem with court challenges is originalism; the Constitution was written at a time when these statutes were enforced and were generally considered a legitimate exercise of state power. So no originalist worth his or her salt can say that a sodomy statute violates due process or equal protection. Nonetheless, those with more liberal judicial philosophies can find an abundance of theories for invalidating these laws, including that they violate due process by singling out a "discrete and insular minority" for harm or by invading the right to privacy, and that the violate equal protection by making irrational classifications between homosexuals and hetrosexuals, or between different sex acts. Indeed, a challenge to a Texas sodomy law has been brought to the US Supreme Court, and this may give the Court an opportunity to overturn its poorly-reasoned 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, where the Court upheld a Georgia statute with a 20 year prison term for sodomy on the ground that a state government has the power to criminalize anything the state feels is immoral. (Since that time, the Court's composition has changed and the Court has overturned a Colorado anti-gay rights statute with reasoning that certainly calls Bowers into question.)

But the political science questions are as troubling as the legal questions here. The fact that a democracy can produce laws that criminalize the harmless conduct of a majority of the voters certainly seems like a flaw in the system. One wonders whether, at least as to those laws that criminalize the sex practices of a majority of citizens, the answer might not be to start actually enforcing the laws. Then maybe the citizenry will learn that it is not wise to use the awesome power of imprisonment to make silly and anachronistic moral pronouncements.