At a press conference Tuesday in Salt Lake City, elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints made a startling offer to gay and lesbian America: If you will support reasonable religious-liberty exemptions for us, we will support expanded civil-rights protections for you.
From the point of view of gay-rights advocates and gay people — and I happen to be in both categories — there were two ways to look at the church’s announcement. It could be an olive branch. Or it could be a trap.
Religious conscience exemptions allow faith-based organizations like churches or the Salvation Army — and often businesses like bakeries or wedding photographers — an out from laws forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation. The carveouts can be drawn up narrowly, broadly, or somewhere in between.
Time and again, in lawsuits and state legislatures, religious conservatives have demonstrated a “take all the marbles” mentality. In Kansas and Arizona (unsuccessfully) and in Mississippi (successfully), they pushed legislation significantly exempting religious objectors from having to obey anti-discrimination laws — even though those states give gays no anti-discrimination protection anyway.
Faced with this kind of “get off our planet” opposition, gay-rights advocates have had reason to view religious-conscience exemptions as exceptions designed to swallow the rule. I’m not entirely surprised, then, that a number of gay-rights advocates, including the influential Human Rights Campaign, poured cool water on the Mormon pronouncement.
So why do I think that the declaration is an olive branch, one that gay-rights leaders should seize?
First, the style was authoritative. The big public announcement — very rare for the church — was no trial balloon. From a religious body that as recently as 2008 was throwing its heart and soul, plus a lot of money, into revoking same-sex marriage in California, this appears to be a genuine change of tone.
Second, the deal itself appears to be real, not symbolic. At a time when a majority of states still offer no workplace protections for gay people — meaning, in some places, we could be fired from our jobs merely for wearing our wedding rings to work — Mormon support for expanded civil rights can be a game-changer. (Indeed, it probably will ensure passage of an anti-discrimination bill in Utah.)
Third, the right way to read the Mormon statement is as an invitation to talk, not as a final offer. The statement calls for “understanding and goodwill, including some give and take.”
Striking a successful balance is possible. In fact, it has been done again and again with civil-rights laws, going back to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Congress did it with religious exemptions for abortion rights. State legislatures have done it repeatedly with gay marriage. And Salt Lake City did it in 2009, with a gay-rights ordinance that included robust religious-liberty exemptions — and that both the Church and gay-rights activists supported.
Finally, there are the politics. By coming forward to support new gay-rights protections, the church has publicly and pointedly broken with the confrontational approach of evangelicals, the Catholic Bishops and culture-warrior litigation groups like Alliance Defending Freedom. By doing so, it weakens those groups’ polarizing strategies and their claims to speak for religious conservatives.
If the Mormons’ outreach falls on deaf ears with gay-rights activists, religious hard-liners will gleefully say, “We told you so; gay-rights advocates are interested in fighting, not talking.”
Of course, some negotiations fail. But it would be self-defeating for gay civil-rights advocates not to probe the possibilities for compromise. The place to begin is at the state and local level. Let’s see what kind of anti-discrimination laws the church will agree to, then let’s see if it goes to bat for them.
A longtime gay-rights activist I know calls the Mormon statement a “cultural moment.” Yes: And gay-rights leaders would be remiss not to seize it.
Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
