OK, I'm gonna take you all on. Hang on to your britches.
Racism has been perhaps the fundamental virtue in almost every human society that ever was. It is inherent in the very definition of tribal identity. "We", whatever we are, are always better than "Them". We are entitled to all kinds of privilege, not them. Before any tribe got out the war paint and went howling over any hill to assert control over the greener pastures, they alway got up a dance, a party of some kind, and gave great speeches about why that greener field should be theirs.
America is doing this today, of course we are entitled to go strutting across the world "building democracy". We are the BEST there ever was.
Progressives think they are better than conservatives. Conservatives think they are better than everybody. Corporate elites think they know best how to manage the resources of the world. Intellectual elites wanna tell dumbos what's what. Blacks in America were brought here because Whites wanted cheap labor. Indians were driven out of the forests and plains and mountains and their livelihood deliberately destroyed, and their people largely just wiped out because whites didn't think they would make good slaves. Otherwise, we would have rounded them up and made them learn to pick cotton. Manifest Destiny was genocidal as well as racist. When America took Cuba and the Philippines from Spain, we accepted the help of natives who we told "We're the Government. We're here to help you". Americans then fought the filipinos for four years to secure the sugar, lumber, and hemp for our industrial giants. To our credit, we taught them some constitutional precepts and even set up a constitution like ours, but we didn't leave until after they helped us fight the Japanese. Amazingly, a very large portion of filipinos actually wanted to become Americans.
Throughout human history, whenever "the powers that be" have prepared to extend their powers, they have found some rationale for denigrating the people who were in the way, for whatever reason was convenient.
So now we come along and call this inherent part of human nature, this self-love/other-abhorrence, a crime. Well, we aren't going to change human nature. We can set examples that are good, and otherwise advocate or instruct, but it takes people to make their own choice to struggle against this nature. The best we can do is make the decision to have a government that is limited and restricted from treating any person or group of people differently and preventing ordinary criminal actions against them that wouldn't be acceptable for anyone to do to the "best of us". Government should not have any privilege to abuse people in any way that people should not abuse others, depriving them of their property, their beliefs, their identity or self-respect, their rights to speech/belief/privacy/values/etc. . . . of equal treatment under all forms of color of law. Whether it's because of religious belief or skin color, or political ideology. We made a decision in the 1950s that communists dedicated to the overthrow of our Constitution deserved the right to believe and even vote for what they believed, despite the fact that their belief did not support our Constitution with respect to property and religious freedom.
We have Jews and even Moslems, as well as many other ethinic or cultural groups today who have fundamental doctrines that they are the chosen or elite ones or superior ones somehow, and many of them hate "others". We have La Raza teaching that native Americans of the Aztec ethnicity are "The Race" that is enttiled to America. We have politicians going to their gatherings and speaking nicely to them, all sympathetic-like. The Jews have a doctrine about Priesthood exclusion too. Nobody can be a Priest, or cohen, unless a male descendant of Levi.
Abraham in the Bible is reported as being chosen by God, and promised that his descendants would be a "blessing to all nations". The Bible goes on to explain the familial origins of all the tribes of man, at least that were known to the writers. There were three heads of mankind after Noah---Shem, Japheth, and Ham. Noah pronounced a non-equal belessing on the three. Ham is reported as having a wife descended from Cain, who the Bible says was given a "mark" after he murdered his brother Abel. Noah is reported, after a fairly trivial prank by todays standards, of being pretty upset with Ham for the act of disrespect, and giving him a "curse".
Even the Mormons didn't really have a great stomach for following all this ancient history, and most of them were pretty sympathetic to blacks even in Brigham Young's day. Brigham Young, whatever he said elsewhere, brought a large contingent of blacks with him in the first wagon train to Utah. They were freed slaves who had joined the Mormons because when their former masters had joined the Mormons, the Elders required the converts to free their slaves, because it was "not right that any man should be held in bondage." It was a voluntary choice on the part of the freed slaves, and they continued with their former masters into Mormonism.
The Mormons were really out of step with the "mainstream" back in 1847.
So back to the Bible. The Bible lists the various tribes of Ham known in the area at least, and then some chapters later gives the Israelites the same list and says the Israelites should not intermarry, and that this would be a law to the tribes of Israel "forever."
But Solomon forgot all that, and married some women from those tribes. After he was gone, and Israel scattered and taken into captivity, some books like Ezra, Chronicles, and Kings were written, which decried Solomon's transgression in marrying "strange wives". When the Israelites were preparing to return to their land, Ezra suddenly realized that the people had trangressed this law as well. The whole book of Ezra is about what was done to restore Israel to acceptance before God after this transgression.
I suppose we could look at all this as merely a relic of human tribalism. But Mormons were never just "haters" in general, neither Joseph Smith nor Brigham Young had that disposition. Perhaps they were products of their times, trying to set up or restore a "faith" that corresponded to some of the Biblical precepts somehow. Mormons struggled from day one with ideas about the character of God, of Justice, and of human rights. Sure there have been prejudiced Mormons who have said things inconsistent in one way or another, sometimes. But the Book of Mormon, and the modern LDS scriptures generally spoke of a unfied family of Man where anyone who would have faith in God would be accepted under the salvation of Jesus and brought back into His Presence.
Early Christians had a huge struggle over the issue of how to accept "Gentiles" who were converting to Christianity. There were a lot of Jews who wanted to keep the tribal exclusivity, but the ideal of a universal redemption of all mankind won out. Interestingly, we don't have much indication of any lineage or racial criterion for service in the early Christian church. No other "Christian" outfit has adopted, in all the history of Christianity, a "universal priesthood" concept like the Mormons have. And when it is all said and done, it was exactly that concept, which contradicted the whole Biblical tradition, that could not be reconciled with the "chosen lineage" notion that is also in the Bible.
And here's the kicker. both the concepts of "chosen lineage" and "universal priesthood" are framed in terms of a duty to serve others, no matter who they are, as Jesus did. The Christians, in fact, view Christ and His redemption of all mankind as the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant.
The fundamental unfairness of criticizing the Mormons over this religious belief, or it's abandonment, is that however much some of the critics want to stand up for human rights, they are not doing that for the Mormons. It's the government we need to manage, our civil laws, not other people's religions. If tribes or religions want to believe somehow they have something special, it should be their privilege. Well, we're all PC nowadays. We don't believe people have a right to speak unless it passes some litmus test of sensitivity.
I grew up with a mom who let drunks sleep in the hay in our barn, and sent me out with orange juice, bacon and cereal for them, whether they were black, white, or Indian. So far as I'm concerned, that's the kind of people Mormons are.
