The Bible says that the mother of Ephraim and Manasseh (i.e. the wife of Joseph of Egypt) was an Egyptian woman, daughter of an Egyptian priest. (Gen 41:45). According to the Book of Abraham, no one with Egyptian blood could hold the priesthood. (Abr 1:21-22, 27).

If you received a Patriarchal Blessing, you were probably told that you were of the Tribe of Ephraim.

But any Mormon who is of the tribes of Ephraim or Manasseh should never have been ordained to the priesthood.

BUT...the Church has an out...

Joseph Smith taught that the moment someone is baptized into the church, his blood is literally transformed into the pure blood of Abraham. (History of the Church 3:380, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith p. 150). I was taught this "out" in seminary in the 80's.

However, upon baptism, everybody's blood should likewise be changed. Including Africans prior to 1978.

So according to LDS doctrine Africans never should have been denied the priesthood, having been changed to pure Abrahamic blood.

I am aghast! You leave one to conclude that pre-1978, the church was being led by racists!

I had reached the conclusion, at the time I left the church, which was before 1978, that baptism only worked to wipe out (White-out) the sins of this life, but not the failings of the pre-existence, nor the pre-pre-existence.

If God were merciful, baptism would wipe out not only sins but also ear hair.

Ear hair is caused by gravity pulling the hairs from the top of your head down into your head and they have to come out somewhere.

How about orifices a little lower?

Here's a good hair story....read at your own risk....

Years ago I got a little pimple on the inside of one nostril. I fussed with it for a few days and got it to pop, then it started healing. A few days later, I got another pimple in the same place, but it was on the outside of my nostril.

When it finally became ripe for the taking, I gave it a squeeze and out came the usual. I could tell it wasn't done so I squeezed again. Out came a nose hair from the inside!

That hair defied the laws of gravity and took a worm hole through space.

I have a very tiny, unnoticeable scar on my nostril. Looks like pore, but slightly bigger. I should have saved that hair.

Thank you for "shairing".

"A Pimple in Time" is always a great story.

I christen thee "The Red Pimple Shill"!

And the persecution of gays is not doctrine. It is merely "policy".

Stop thinking so much! It's not faith promoting! :-D

It’s a bit of a curse. Pretty hard to turn it off.

I should look it up again. But I'm pretty sure that recently they've been making statements that have demoted it to nothing more than a "policy" of mysterious origins. And they also claim that the only reason that a "revelation" was needed to cancel the policy was because the policy had been followed for so long.

So no need anymore to get into any doctrinal fever swamps and debates about it because it was always just a "policy" that somehow was accidentally followed for 150 years or so. But it's all better now. Everything is okay now. Time to move on. Flecks of history, couplets, mysterious policies...who has time to obsess about such things when we have so much good work to do?

(Side note: Because it was just a policy, they don't want you to think about it anymore. And they especially don't want you to ask this question: "How could a church led by living prophets and apostles have let a policy concerning something as important as denying saving and exalting ordinances to a huge group of people based on where there ancestors came from stand for so long without ever noticing that it was wrong? Do not ask that. Just don't do it. Just remember...everything is okay now...everything is okay now...everything is okay now...your eyelids are getting heavy...heavy...heavy....)

Yes. Well, no. Well...yes...they tried. But no...it was not convincing.


It has been demoted to policy, or even folklore.


It was McKay who interpreted the practice as being justified by Abraham 1:26. (Mormonism and the Negro, part 2, p.19). And McKay strongly implied it was policy.

“There is not now, and there never has been a doctrine in this church that the negroes are under a divine curse. There is no doctrine in the church of any kind pertaining to the negro. We believe that we have a scriptural precedent for withholding the priesthood from the negro. It is a practice, not a doctrine, and the practice someday will be changed. And that's all there is to it.’”
(Sterling M. McMurrin affidavit, March 6, 1979. See David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism by Greg Prince and William Robert Wright.)

…but note that even if President McKay made this statement, God’s mouthpiece on Earth still says that it is justified, and rooted in scripture (Abraham 1:26)


However, in saying that, he was contradicting a recent prophet (George Albert Smith) who explicitly said it was not merely policy:

“It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the Priesthood at the present time. The prophets of the Lord have made several statements as to the operation of the principle.” (Official statement of the First Presidency to BYU President Ernest L. Wilkinson, dated August 17, 1951, quoted in John Lewis Lund, The Church and the Negro, p.89).

For the Church the theological underpinnings for the Priesthood ban nothing more than folklore is disingenuous. Prophets and Apostles taught the Curse of Cain/Ham, it was accepted, acted upon, and believed by prophets to be justified by commandment and scripture.

For anybody who has not read it, I recommend Steve Benson's review of the subject: https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1453398

David O. McKay wanted to get rid of the policy but the other GAs prevented it. He did succeed in getting it lifted for certain ethnic groups.

Thanks to population genetics, we now understand that we are all Africans.