“I hate war!” was a clear denunciation voiced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 14, 1936. He was talking about
real war five years before he had to lead the United States in the most destructive war in history.
There are lesser wars in respect to which citizens are called to take sides. In recent decades some of the most popular chosen examples are the “culture wars,” which are so attractive among some religious factions. They have proven to be productive of not much more than unproductive polarization and civil chaos.
Now and then, over against them, an informed and articulate citizen is found to utter a meaningful “I hate war!” in respect to culture wars.
Among them in the recent past and, specifically, this October, is a speaker who has the credentials to participate in the noisiest domestic contretemps this season. He is Dallin H. Oaks, who could have been expected to wage war on one side as factions agitate about the loss of religious liberty, thanks to Supreme Court and other court actions. The warriors have been urging us all to take up rhetorical arms against such courts.
Oaks is well credentialed to represent Mormons, who generally occupy main fronts in the culture wars. A “member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” he is the third most senior apostle among the twelve apostles in his church.
Oaks has been president of the LDS academic flagship, Brigham Young University. We knew him in his University of Chicago Law School faculty days as a superior legal scholar and a staunch, articulate loyalist in the LDS ranks. No one we knew then or since would have thought of him as a compromiser, a wishy-washy sort.
So we paid attention when Oaks showed how he hated culture wars and spoke up for an alternative in the particular instance of a “church and state” issue. The conflict was a prime time, front-page subject, thanks to Kim Davis, a conservative Christian. Davis refused to obey laws and courts mandating the issuance of marriage licenses for gay marriages, which she, in her version of Christianity, in conscience opposes.
Oaks disagreed with Davis and her sympathizers, and used the occasion of a talk on “The Boundary of Church and State” at the recent Sacramento Court-Clergy Conference to address the larger issues behind and beyond that case.
Reader Alert! Now we are going to do something rare in
Sightings. Instead of quoting and condensing his talk, we will pass it on intact via the internet. Attempts to excerpt cogent bits and to reproduce appropriate snippets failed. The whole speech deserves attention.
We have to explain why excerpting would be unfair to Oaks, his original audience, and serious people on all sides who have a stake in the controversy. Instead of being wishy-washy, he demonstrated, some say, weariness over Mormons being constantly and predictably cast as militant cultural warriors.
Oaks also made clear that Davis’ action was harmful to the republic and, yes, to religious freedom and the rule of law.
True to the ethos of Oaks’s alma mater and his talk, we reproduce his succinct statement of a thesis:
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