What it costs people
The November 2015 Policy
Children of same-sex parents barred from baptism. Called revelation. Reversed in three years.
What it said
On November 5, 2015, a change to Handbook 1 leaked. It did two things:
- Classified members in same-sex marriages as apostates, subject to formal Church discipline.
- Barred children living with a same-sex couple from baby blessings, baptism, confirmation, priesthood ordination, and missions until age 18, at which point they had to move out of the home and disavow the practice of same-gender cohabitation and marriage.
NPR coverage and Elder Christofferson’s on-record explanation in Deseret News, which is Church-owned, so it cannot be dismissed as hostile press.
Sit with the disavowal requirement. To be baptized, an eighteen year old had to formally renounce their own parents’ marriage.
Three and a half years. Two opposite policies. The same men, the same method, the same claimed source.
If the 2019 reversal was revelation, the 2015 policy was not. If 2015 was revelation, God changed his mind about whether the children of gay parents can be baptized.
The Church’s stated reason
Michael Otterson, Managing Director of Public Affairs, in the official clarification: "Church leaders want to avoid putting little children in a potential tug-of-war between same-sex couples at home and teachings and activities at church." Read the official statement
Christofferson: "We don’t want the child to have to deal with issues that might arise where the parents feel one way and the expectations of the church are very different."
It is a coherent protective rationale, and it is what they actually said.
Then, three and a half years later
April 4, 2019: the First Presidency reversed it. Children of same-sex couples can be blessed and baptized. Same-sex marriage no longer automatically triggers a disciplinary council.
The stated basis for the reversal: "These policy changes come after an extended period of counseling with our brethren in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles after fervent, united prayer to understand the will of the Lord." Church News
The question that has no good answer
How does revelation produce two opposite policies in three and a half years?
Both were presented as the will of the Lord, arrived at through prayer by the same men. If the 2019 reversal was revelation, the 2015 policy was not. If 2015 was revelation, God changed His mind about whether the children of gay parents can be baptized.
This is the same structural problem as the priesthood ban, compressed from 126 years into 42 months, and recent enough that the people it affected are still alive.
You will hear that Utah youth suicides rose a specific percentage because of this policy. That causal claim is not established.
The widely circulated "141 percent" figure traces to an unsourced on-air statement, not a study. The one paper finding a statistical association, Knoll in Dialogue, explicitly says it "does not and cannot show a definitive link" and stresses that correlation is not causation.
A separate analysis of 86,346 Utah youth found LGBQ Latter-day Saint youth were not at higher suicide risk than LGBQ youth of other faiths.
What is defensible: Utah youth suicide rose from 17 to 42 per 100,000 between 2011 and 2017, a multi-year trend with multiple contributing factors that both predates and postdates this policy. Religious rejection specifically, as distinct from religious affiliation generally, does show up in the research as a risk factor. What is not defensible is saying this policy caused a spike.
This is the priesthood ban’s structure compressed from 126 years into 42 months.
And recent enough that the people it happened to are still alive to describe it.
Why this should make you question
You do not need the suicide statistic. The policy itself is the argument. For three and a half years, the Church of Jesus Christ required an eighteen year old to disavow their own parents’ marriage before it would baptize them, and then decided, through prayer, that it did not.