Being Aware Of My Biases

From "Single Saints and the New Gay Family Policy: My Thought Experiment", Ardis E. Parshall - 11 Nov 2015)

I heard one woman describe her first temple baptismal trip as a teenager. She saw a painting of the hosts of heaven greeting the triumphant Savior – a painting that ought to inspire nothing but positive feelings – but it took her breath away for the wrong reason: Every face in that heavenly host was white. She realized, for the first time in her life, that her fellow Latter-day Saints didn’t even see her, didn’t think of her and people like her as having a place in heaven – oh, we would have denied it if she had challenged us about it, but the evidence would be that we did not see her.

I am becoming more and more aware of how the church and the rest my life might occur to people who are not white, male, Mormon, heterosexual, married to a woman, in the temple, with children, and in the middle class of the USA.