VernPorter.com

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Dear Mitt;

I have a great deal of admiration for your family and for your dad. When Brigham Young’s racist doctrine was popular in the church your father dared take part in the civil rights struggle. While some Latter-Day Saints were telling their racist friends “You ought to join the Mormon Church because we know how to keep the blacks in their place.”, your father was marching for civil rights. When I faced the influence of polygamists and racists in the church, I ended up leaving for twenty five years. While racists and polygamists have been driven under ground, the influence of those who long for polygamy is alive and well. Now that I’m back, those who long for polygamy have done their best to make me feel unwelcome. Knowing that these are still the days when the wheat and tares are to grow together I am not attempting to drive them out of the church, merely to stick up for my right to believe the Book of Mormon’s case against polygamy.

Politics, however, is a different game. Radical atheists have set the agenda for the mainstream American news media, Hollywood, and the Democratic Party. Republicans have been retreating for far too long while the radical atheist agenda took control of our culture. Now that we finally have a Republican president who is not afraid of the mainstream American News Media, the Democrats, and Hollywood I am very disappointed to see Republicans joining forces with our opposition. I will not attempt to change your mind about Trump, but I will ask for your help in lessening the influence of false pride and self righteous snobbery in the church.

I left the Southern Baptist Church at the age of eighteen to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In less than two years I was serving a mission in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina where I often found myself near civil rights marches. Within a couple of months of returning from my mission I was dating the young lady to whom I have been married for 53 years. We were sealed in the Los Angeles Temple a few years before you and your wife were sealed in a temple of the Lord, but on the same date in March. She worked for a few years while I obtained an AA degree before going to work as a repairman for A.B. Dick Company servicing small printing presses and Mimeographs at Oakland high schools and U.C. Berkeley. It was during the anti war riots and my interest in politics was intensified by the experience. Our love for the Lord grew as we started raising a family and taking on various church callings.

New challenges came to my testimony after I was ordained a Seventy back when every stake had a quorum of Seventy. I learned that somewhere in or near San Joaquin Stake there was an infestation of polygamists. When we moved to Elk Grove I became a member of the Sacramento South Stake Seventy’s presidency. In Sacramento South Stake I found a high interest in polygamy and in racist doctrine. Reactions to the 1978 revelation making the priesthood available to men of all races was not entirely positive and the evidence of polygamist influences concerned me. I purchased more commentaries and the 26 volume  Journal of Discourses. We already had the seven volume History of the Church. It was obvious that the Pearl of Great Price was the source of the excessive interest in racism. It eventually became obvious to me that polygamists also had a special appreciation for the Pearl of Great Price. I began a study to discover which was more credible, the Pearl of Great Price for its support of racism and polygamy or sources in other scriptures which speak out against racism and polygamy. Among the other things which interested me I was also concerned about negative reports about our early history in Utah and  whether or not the Lord may have cast off the Mormons. I studied and took notes for several years for an hour or more every night.

My testimony now assures me that all the negative things  I have found about the early days of the church are explained in the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Bible. But, back then the negative reports from our history were hard for me to get past. The questionable things going on in the Sacramento South Stake and the opposition I faced there, much to my shame, motivated me to decided that the Lord had cast off the Mormons. I left the church for twenty five years.

I joined the Reorganized Church and when I became disappointed in them after a couple of years I spent the remainder of that 25 years angry at the Lord. I set my study of religion and my notes aside and  I accompanied Sylvia to Sacrament Meeting and church socials. Having placed religion on a back burner, I became more interested in politics and published my first book, Someone Has to Pluck the Chicken, in 2001. The impact of the 90s on cultural warfare was not lost  on me. Hypocrites among the news media and Democrat legislators nearly prevented Clarence Thomas from being confirmed a supreme court justice over accusations of dirty talk. They had Senator Packwood kicked out of the Senate for kissing bandit activities, but the senate could not convict President Clinton after his impeachment by the House of Representatives even though there was testimony of rape against him. But even charges of rape against Clinton were considered so unimportant that the impeachment was about his lies.

My attitude began to change when at family gatherings my 4 year old granddaughter, Alana, would sit on my lap and sing “I am a child of God”. Soon I was singing with her and starting to think about what a bad example I was for my children and grandchildren. Finally it dawned on me that the Lord would not cast off the Mormons after a few decades when He had put up with the Israelites for hundreds of years and I was rebaptized and became active in the church once more. Having left off studying the scriptures for about twenty two years I decided to start over by attending adult institute classes on religion. I was nearly finished with my second book so I continued working on it. In my book, Someone Has to Pluck the Chicken, Someone Gets to Sound the Alarm, the chapter on Partisans contains an account of Clinton’s dirty dealings. Most of the investigations were eventually dropped because witnesses changed their testimony, left the country, or ended up dead.

In the meantime, after I had been active in the church for a year, President Williams invited me to apply for the restoration of my blessings which included my patriarchal blessing and priesthood ordinations, etc. making it as though I had never left the church. Since stake quorums of Seventy no longer existed, the restoration of my blessings did not include making me a Seventy again. The process included writing a letter to the First Presidency in order to tell them why I should have my blessing restored. Wanting to be completely up front with them I wrote “My testimony no longer requires me to believe that all of our leaders have been true to their callings, nor does it require me to believe that the Pearl of Great Price is completely credible”. Neither the First Presidency nor the Seventy they sent to restore my blessings rebuked me for the description of how my testimony had changed. When I reported this to the adult institute class Sylvia and I attended, a High Priest from another ward engaged me in an email exchange in which he made it perfectly clear that he considered my testimony completely unacceptable. In a ward Fast and Testimony Meeting I also mentioned the change in my testimony with no immediate repercussions.

By the time I finished Someone Has to Pluck the Chicken, Someone Gets to Sound the Alarm, I was being pushed around and falsely accused by a small handful of members of the church who should have been my friends. Because of my age I attended the High Priest’s group meetings instead of the Elder’s Quorum. A friend among the High Priests said that my letters to the editor of the Elk Grove Citizen were too confrontational. At another time he also said, “It’s been my experience that when someone leaves the church it is because their feelings have been hurt and they cannot forgive.” Everyone there present knew that I had recently returned to the church after leaving for twenty five years. Some months later, when the subject came up once more, he said “It’s been my experience that when someone leaves the church it’s because he has been guilty of serious sin. Oh, I don’t mean Vern of course.” Several years ago, President Ochtdorf, in an October conference said something like, “It is not always that simple, sometimes people or leaders have made mistakes.” Some time later when I confronted my friend with the several things he had accused me of in public, he denied it. I told him that I like to avoid arguing with people about what they have said or what they meant by what they said. He was happy to hear that and we have been getting along nearly as well as before.

Though I have forgiven him, I would really like a public apology, but I don’t know whether he is suffering from old age dementia or it’s just a matter of false pride. If it’s false pride then I blame some of our general authorities for the bad examples they have set for us with their refusal to acknowledge the spreading of false doctrine by some of our past leaders. We have fallen under the curse given in Jacob 4:14. We have looked beyond the mark, we have come to despise the words of plainness and sought for things which we cannot understand.

Back in 1980 Elder Mark E. Petersen, speaking in conference on the subject of Adam or Michael, disproved every item of Brigham Young’s Adam/God theory without naming the theory or its author. Near the end of his address he said something very much like “advocators of false doctrine have come among us”. Of the many false doctrines promoted by Brigham Young, this is the nearest I have seen a general authority come to admitting it.

My studies had led me to believe that the things in the P of GP could not begin to outweigh the things in our other scriptures which made the P of GP appear less than fully credible when it comes to justifying the withholding of the priesthood from blacks. I found in D&C 38 an excellent argument for siding with the 1978 revelation on making the priesthood available to men of all races. Section 38 contains a parable which shows that the Lord could not consider himself just if He had sons who all served him well and He said to one of them “go sit over there and be dressed in rags” and to the others “come sit over here and be dressed in robes”. As a general argument in favor of allowing blacks to hold the priesthood, the Book of Mormon and the New Testament both speak of the Gospel as being for all nations and even the Old Testament tells of a time to come when the temple would be enjoyed by peoples previously denied the privilege. In Isaiah 56 the Lord announces who shall be welcome in his house at some future time (Isaiah 56:6 &7), “Also the sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the Lord ... every one that keepeth the Sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of my covenant; ... for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.”

In my estimation polygamists found it easy to ignore the Book of Mormon condemnation of polygamy because in the Pearl of Great Price, neither the Book of Moses, nor the Book of Abraham mention Melchizedek. However, in the 13th chapter of Alma in the Book of Mormon, in section 107 of our Doctrine and Covenants, and  in the 14th chapter of Genesis in the inspired version of the Bible there is a great deal of information on Melchizedek and the Melchizedek Priesthood.

The Book of Abraham is an autobiography of Abraham which concludes before he meets Melchizedek. In the first chapter he writes about seeking the priesthood so that he could increase in knowledge and righteousness and become a father of nations. People obsessed with polygamy find this appealing because it makes Abraham’s indulging in having extra wives and concubines seem like something we should be allowed to do in order to be more righteous. It makes it easy to forget that Abraham paid tithing to Melchizedek and that Melchizedek took an evil people, called them to repentance and took them in search of the Zion of Enoch. Abraham was not commissioned to establish a Zion nor to be caught up to the Zion of Enoch, only to be a father of nations and establish a people who would remain a separate and distinct people as they kept the covenant of circumcision. His death and burial was foretold, whereas of high priests after the order of Enoch it was said that they would be translated and taken up into heaven (see Genesis 14 in the inspired version for a full account of the power of such high priests).

I’ve been back for about ten years now. A few years ago a high priest from another ward came to our priesthood meeting with a couple of handouts to accompany his pep talk on priesthood and the gospel. A major emphasis of the lesson he presented was that the patriarchal order is greater than the Melchizedek priesthood. This is of course false. In vol. 5, pp554-556 of the Joseph Smith History of the Church Joseph Smith clearly explained how and why the Melchizedek priesthood is greater than the Patriarchal Order. It is very easy to fall into this error of placing the Patriarchal Order above the Melchizedek Priesthood by those who give the Pearl of Great Price more credibility than our other scriptures. Perhaps this comes from an effort to imagine that the Lord gave them the Pearl of Great Price as a way of providing them with some of the greater things which would be withheld until they had shown the Lord that they believed the Book of Mormon. For the benefit of non-Mormons who might read this I should explain that Joseph Smith was only allowed to translate about 1/3rd of the plates he had been shown. The Book of Mormon explains that the Lord intended to test his people to see if they believed the first third before he allowed us to obtain the greater things on the rest of the plates.

So, for me the Pearl of Great Price became misleading when it came to matters of the availability of the priesthood to men of all races. When the biography of President David O. McKay came out in 2005 (David O. McKay and the rise if modern Mormonism) I finally discovered that there was some controversy over the withholding of the priesthood from blacks of African descent. President McKay said it was only a practice, not doctrine and that practice would change. During the 1950s and 1960s he tried many times to obtain revelation allowing him to make the priesthood available to men of all races. One of his councilors finally told him that he hadn’t been successful because the saints were not ready for that yet.

Apparently those general authorities who studied the Journal of Discourses agreed that the saints were not ready to discover that Brigham Young had taught a lot of false doctrine. President Joseph Fielding Smith was also the church historian so he, at least, is one general authority who should have been familiar with Brigham’s heresy, but he only denied it. How many other general authorities know that Brigham Young taught a lot of false doctrine and keep their mouths shut about it? How many members who know that Brigham Young taught a lot of false doctrine are motivated to behave deceitfully because they know about the coverup? How many of those who behave deceitfully believe that Abraham was more righteous than other leaders of dispensations because he had wives and concubines? We have a problem with false pride, false doctrine, and self righteous snobbery in the church or is ignorance a greater problem?  

The Lord is doing a great work throughout the world with the LDS Church. Some of that work is being done by members and general authorities who do so because they believe that their efforts are going to get them a large harem of wives with whom they can immediately go off to some far corner of the universe and procreate spirit children to whom they will become a God Almighty. This kind of Latter-Day Saint is guided by their love for things which make their hearts swell with pride as opposed to things which make their bosoms burn within them. These brethren guided by false pride are the kind of brethren who slander my name. The Lord is willing to use them, but they shall suffer loss. They will be saved, yet so as by fire.

My feelings of indignation over partisan hypocrisy in politics turned to indignation over hypocrisy and false doctrine in the church so I wrote my most recent book, Will the Real Mormons Stand Up and Sound the Alarm? It’s about my life in the church, and contains a brief history of the church and explains where racists and polygamists went wrong.