Today, LDS Church Public Affairs wrote a letter to Ordain Women and released a statement about their planned April 5 event at General Conference. You can read it here.

Both the letter and the statement are an effort to discourage women like me (who care about women’s issues but have mixed feelings about ordination) from joining OW’s respectful, poignant, determined effort to advance equality within the LDS Church.

But I am not discouraged. And I hope you will not be either.

If anything, today’s statements from the Church strengthen my commitment to be there April 5. I hope you will too.

The Church PR statement takes the defensive tactic of disparaging those it feels threatened by. It accuses Ordain Women of “detracting” from a productive “conversation” within the Church about women’s issues. But it is plainly incorrect and inconsistent with recorded history for LDS Church Public Affairs spokespeople to state that there has been a good “conversation” in the Church about women’s issues.



If there has been a “conversation” about gender equality in Mormonism, it is not because the Church has led or even supported it. It is because generations of Mormon feminists have continued to ask faithful but agitating questions of the faith we love, even when it has discouraged, rejected, and disrespected us. We’ve asked questions in our prayers, in our families, among friends, on our own blogs. The national media–including the New York Times–has done more to proactively acknowledge and advance serious conversation about gender issues in Mormonism than the LDS Church, which has been on the defensive on women’s issues for decades.

If our faithful Mormon feminist questioning has penetrated the behind-closed-doors decision-making meetings at Church Headquarters, we are thrilled. But Mormon women are not involved in those meetings. Regretfully, we still have no authoritative role in making decisions of theological, policy, and financial consequence in the Church we love and serve. Our Church continues to function as an outdated, closed-door, gender-segregated bureaucracy–a model rooted in the secular conservative management models of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, not in Mormon scripture and certainly not in the vision Joseph Smith had when he “turned the key” to the women leaders of the Relief Society.

Ordination is not my bosom-burning cause. But I am tired of seeing women I love leave the faith because there is no serious, open respectful conversation within the Church about issues that matter to them and because they are stigmatized and rejected when they dare to ask the questions. Today, again, the Church sought to push out women who are asking the questions.

I respect what OW has done to advance serious conversation about women’s equality in Mormonism. I will stand with them this April 5. I hope you will join me.