Mormon Church Endorses Passage of Salt Lake City LGBT Non-Discrimination Ordinance

In a somewhat of a surprise move, the Mormon Church supported the passage of a non-discrimination by the Salt Lake City city council that extends housing and employment protections to gays and lesbians in Salt Lake City. In delivering the Mormon Church's comments to city council, the Church representative credited the city council with balancing the rights of citizens to housing and employment with freedom of religion issues. Personally, I suspect what really motivated the Mormon Church was all the bad press that it has received in the wake of the largely Mormon financed passage of Proposition 8. Of course, it's also possible that some city fathers had a sit down with the Church and explained how non-competitive the city was becoming because of all of the anti-Mormon fall out. Whatever the motivation, I am thankful that the Mormon Church did the right thing for a change, although it's a bit depressing that Salt Lake City is now more progressive than the Commonwealth of Virginia. Here are some highlights from Google News:

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The Mormon church for the first time has announced its support of gay rights legislation, an endorsement that helped gain unanimous approval for Salt Lake city laws banning discrimination against gays in housing and employment.
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The Utah-based church's support ahead of Tuesday night's vote came despite its steadfast opposition to gay marriage, reflected in the high-profile role it played last year in California's Proposition 8 ballot measure that barred such unions.
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"The church supports these ordinances because they are fair and reasonable and do not do violence to the institution of marriage," Michael Otterson, the director of public affairs for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said.
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Passage made Salt Lake City the first Utah community to prohibit bias based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Under the two new ordinances, it is illegal to fire someone from their job or evict someone from their residence because they are lesbian, bisexual, gay or transgender.
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Utah lawmakers tend to quickly fall in line when the influential church makes a rare foray into legislative politics. So Tuesday's action could have broad reaching effects in this highly conservative state where more than 80 percent of lawmakers and the governor are church members.
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But addressing the council on Tuesday, Otterson said the endorsement is not a shift in the church's position on gay rights and stressed it "remains unequivocally committed to defending the bedrock foundation of marriage between a man and a woman."
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Church support for the ordinances is due in part to the way the legislation was drafted to protect those rights. Exceptions in the legislation allow churches to maintain, without penalty, religious principles and religion-based codes of conduct or rules. "In drafting these ordinances, the city has granted common-sense rights that should be available to everyone, while safeguarding the crucial rights of religious organizations," Otterson said Tuesday.

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The full statement issued by the Mormon Church can be found here.