A Church spokesman confirmed changes in the Church handbook regarding apostasy and same-sex marriage and the children the grow up on same-sex households.

I am going to quote from a KSL story that is respectful and appears accurate.

SALT LAKE CITY — The LDS Church confirmed Thursday that children living with same-sex parents or guardians will not be allowed membership in the church until reaching “legal age” and the individual “disavows the practice of same-gender cohabitation and marriage.”

The new instructions are included in a revision to the Church Handbook of Instructions for leaders.

The criteria for membership also requires an individual to no longer be living with a parent “who has lived or currently lives in a same-gender cohabitation relationship or marriage.” A mission president or a stake president must now request approval from the Office of the First Presidency to baptize and confirm, ordain, or recommend missionary service for an individual in these circumstances.

Church spokesman Erik Hawkins released the following statement:
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A lot of the focus from the latest Pew poll on religion will be on how the U.S. is becoming less religious, but that is not even close to the whole story. In fact, Pew notes that:

Among the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who do claim a religion, there has been no discernible drop in most measures of religious commitment. Indeed, by some conventional measures, religiously affiliated Americans are, on average, even more devout than they were a few years ago.

The religious are becoming more religious, and young people are less religious but are more “spiritual.”

The Pew poll of 35,000 people in 2014 was an update on a similar poll taken in 2007. Some of the most interesting details were released today, Nov. 3.

Here are some highlights I found interesting:

*Mormons are more likely to say they pray daily, read scriptures, attend Gospel study groups, share the Gospel and attend church than they were seven years earlier.
*Mormons, along with the rest of the world, are much more likely to say that “homosexuality should be accepted by society.”
*People who are generally not religious are much more likely to be associated with the Democratic party, and this tendency is growing significantly.
*There has been very little movement in the last seven years in peoples’ views on abortion. Mormons are least likely to say that abortion should be legal in all/most cases.

There is a lot more there. Please check it out and read it yourself.

There are at least two men who became public husbands of women who were sealed to Joseph Smith in the 1840s.

The first and most well-known of these was Joseph C. Kingsbury, who documented that “on the 29th of April 1843 I according to President Joseph Smith council & others agread to Stand by Sarah Ann Whitney as supposed to be her husband and had a pretended marriage…”[ref]Joseph C. Kingsbury journal, page 13, apparently recorded after August 1848, available online via http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/JCKingsbury.html.[/ref]

The second and almost entirely unknown of these was Jonathan Harriman Holmes, who in the 1860s told his children and friends that his wife, Elvira Annie Cowles, had first been the wife of Joseph Smith, that he, Jonathan, had agreed to be her husband after Joseph’s death if she wished it. When taken together with the fact that Joseph Smith performed the December 1842 ceremony wedding Jonathan Holmes to Elvira Annie Cowles, the December 1842 marriage can be seen as a pretended marriage, like that of Joseph C. Kingsbury to Sarah Ann Whitney.[ref]See the statement William Wright provided to Church headquarters in the early 1900s (contained in Brian Hales’ Joseph Smith’s Polygamy) and Jonathan’s reported statement to his own children as documented in the Job Welling family history, available online at familysearch.org under books.[/ref]

Both Kingsbury and Holmes were widowers. In each case, the man was subsequently sealed to the bride of his youth in the Nauvoo temple. It is clear in the case of Kingsbury that the promise of being sealed to his wife and someday reunited with his dead children was convolved in his willingness to be a pretended husband to Sarah Ann Whitney. Continue reading →