{"id":1232,"date":"2004-08-25T17:20:37","date_gmt":"2004-08-25T21:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1232"},"modified":"2009-01-16T18:01:26","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T22:01:26","slug":"recent-change-to-the-political-neutrality-statement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2004\/08\/recent-change-to-the-political-neutrality-statement\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Change to the Political Neutrality Statement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/rameumptom.blogspot.com\/2004\/08\/first-presidency-adds-new-statement-to.html\">Over at BCC, John Hatch points out an important new change<\/a> to the church&#8217;s political neutrality statement.  The statement has an additional new sentence, and it reads:<\/p>\n<p><i>In addition, members who hold public office should not give the impression they represent the Church as they work for solutions to social problems.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>John gives a detailed breakdown of some of the recent incidents of church legislators invoking church doctrine to justify legislation, and of the numerous statements issued by the church over the last year repudiating those legislators.  <\/p>\n<p>This change drives home the point the the political neutrality statement is serious.  The church doesn&#8217;t support Bush.  It doesn&#8217;t support Kerry.  It is neither Democrat nor Republican.  And except in certain specific areas where the church has taken an explicit position (such as the ERA, or possibly the gay marriage amendment), it is probably wrong to suggest that church doctrine requires one to follow a particular political ideology.  One need not be a good Republican, or Democrat, or Libertarian, or whatever, to be a good church member.  Is that so hard to understand?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at BCC, John Hatch points out an important new change to the church&#8217;s political neutrality statement. The statement has an additional new sentence, and it reads: In addition, members who hold public office should not give the impression they represent the Church as they work for solutions to social problems. John gives a detailed breakdown of some of the recent incidents of church legislators invoking church doctrine to justify legislation, and of the numerous statements issued by the church over the last year repudiating those legislators. This change drives home the point the the political neutrality statement is serious. The church doesn&#8217;t support Bush. It doesn&#8217;t support Kerry. It is neither Democrat nor Republican. And except in certain specific areas where the church has taken an explicit position (such as the ERA, or possibly the gay marriage amendment), it is probably wrong to suggest that church doctrine requires one to follow a particular political ideology. One need not be a good Republican, or Democrat, or Libertarian, or whatever, to be a good church member. Is that so hard to understand?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-1232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics","tag-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6017,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions\/6017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}