For those with their ears pricked for echoes of the adventurous LDS past – the days of discovery, persecution, migration, a fraught peace – the convening of the General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offers strange, not always heartening, fare.
Some ironies are easy to spot. Ever since the 1995 appearance of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” LDS speakers have elaborated its claims about gender, domestic life and, above all, the conviction that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God.”
Just two years ago, Dallin H.