UTAH: LDS Donates To LGBT Center

The Mormon Church has made its first-ever donation to an LGBT organization. Ben Winslow reports for Salt Lake City's Fox affiliate:

The LDS Church quietly made a $2,500 donation to the non-profit Utah Pride Center to help its efforts with LGBT homeless and youth. The money, coming in the form of access to the Bishop’s Storehouse, will provide food for those in need, the Utah Pride Center told FOX 13. In a grant letter, the LDS Church wrote: “We are grateful to be able to serve your efforts in this worthy project and appreciate the work that you and others are doing related to this initiative.” The LDS Church declined to comment beyond what it wrote in that letter, a spokesman told FOX 13. Members of the Utah Pride Center were thrilled with the donation. “The Utah Pride Center is grateful for the church’s help in our efforts to provide food for those in our community who are in need,” said the center’s board president, Kent Frogley, in a statement.

The donation did not comes as a surprise as the group had applied for the grant.

UTAH: Watch Gov. Gary Herbert Sign Bill Outlawing Anti-LGBT Discrimination

As you can see in the tweet above, there were two pieces of good news out of Utah last night as the "license to discriminate" bill is dead for this legislative session. The clip below was posted to Gov. Herbert's official YouTube channel.

VATICAN: American Anti-Gay Religious Leaders To Attend Meeting On Marriage

Miranda Blue writes at Right Wing Watch:

Next week, American Religious Right leaders including the Southern Baptist Convention’s Russell Moore, pastor Rick Warren, Archbishop of Philadelphia Charles Chaput, and Latter-Day Saints official Henry Eyring will be joining opponents of LGBT equality from around the world at an interfaith conference on the “complementarity of man and woman in marriage” hosted by the Vatican. The conference follows a synod at which Catholic bishops considered, but ultimately rejected, proposals to soften the church’s stances on homosexuality, as well as those who have been divorced. Although he is not listed as a speaker, another prominent American opponent of LGBT equality will also be attending the conference. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said in an interview on Newsmax TV today that he plans to attend the conference in Rome and expects the Catholic Church to “make a very clear statement that pertains to marriage and what the Church views marriage to be” to provide “clarity” to the confusion coming out of the recent synod.

They must be very worried about something.

Mormon Church Confesses: Yes, Joseph Smith Married As Many As 40 Women

The Mormon Church has finally formally acknowledged that its founder Joseph Smith married as many as 40 women, one of whom was only 14 years old at the time.

Elder Steven E. Snow, the church historian and a member of its senior leadership, said in an interview, “There is so much out there on the Internet that we felt we owed our members a safe place where they could go to get reliable, faith-promoting information that was true about some of these more difficult aspects of our history. “We need to be truthful, and we need to understand our history,” Elder Snow said. “I believe our history is full of stories of faith and devotion and sacrifice, but these people weren’t perfect.” The essay on “plural marriage” in the early days of the Mormon movement in Ohio and Illinois says polygamy was commanded by God, revealed to Smith and accepted by him and his followers only very reluctantly. Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs had multiple wives, and Smith preached that his church was the “restoration” of the early, true Christian church. Most of Smith’s wives were between the ages of 20 and 40, the essay says, but he married Helen Mar Kimball, a daughter of two close friends, “several months before her 15th birthday.” A footnote says that according to “careful estimates,” Smith had 30 to 40 wives. The biggest bombshell for some in the essays is that Smith married women who were already married, some to men who were Smith’s friends and followers.

The revelation notes that Smith probably didn't have sex with all his wives as some of them were merely "sealed" into being his eternal wife in the next life. And on the next planet.