God authorizes bigotry, sheep rebel . . .

On November 5, 2015 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) issued a new and extreme anti-gay edict banning same-sex married couples and their children from the Church. During the past 10 months, there have been scores of Mormon LGBT teenagers who have committed suicide because of it.

Mormon Apostle Dallin H. Oaks made matters worse when he said of the dozens of Mormon teen suicides, “I’m aware that those tragic things happen. Those things have to be judged by a higher authority than exists on this earth.”

It became a PR disaster for the Mormon Church. In the months to follow the policy change, so many Mormon families were hurting that Church leaders finally issued a rare acknowledgement on all of the suicides. The Church owned Deseret News covered it with this headline “LDS Church Leaders Mourn Reported Deaths in Mormon LGBT Community.”

On January 10, 2016 the Mormon Church did an about face. Apostle Russell M. Nelson said in a speech at Church owned BYU Hawaii that it was not actually a policy change, but the LGBT ban came directly from God. That hard to swallow bit of damage control two months after the original Church edict led to tens of thousands of more Mormon resignations.(bold not in original)

Church members started going online, talking to their Bishops and lining up by the thousands to fill out the necessary paperwork to officially leave their Church. One estimate is that up to 125,000 Mormons have resigned the Mormon Church in the last 10 months because of it. One attorney in Salt Lake City has personally handled 12,000 resignations alone. This figure is on top of the nearly one million Mormons who have resigned the Church after the it was outed as being the driving force and funder of California’s Proposition 8.