Mormon Chief Urges Moms To Stay Home Hinckley Also Defends Church Policy Denying Women Priesthood Status

Mormon Church President Gordon Hinckley said Sunday that, if possible, mothers should forgo full-time jobs in favor of raising their children at home.

“It is well-nigh impossible to be a full-time homemaker and a full-time employee,” Hinckley said in a sermon directed to the women of the 9.6 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Hinckley recognized that many women cannot stay at home to raise their children because of economic reasons.

“To you I say, do the very best you can,” he said. “I hope that if you are employed full time you are doing it to ensure that basic needs are met and not simply to indulge a taste for an elaborate home, fancy cars and other luxuries.”

Speaking on the concluding day of the faith’s 166th Semiannual General Conference, Hinckley said he often is asked by reporters about the role of women in a church where only males can hold offices in the lay priesthood.

“They do so in an almost accusatory tone, as if we denigrate and demean women,” said Hinckley, 86.”I invariably reply that I know of no other organization in all the world which affords women so many opportunities for development, for sociality, for the accomplishment of great good, for holding positions of leadership and responsibility.”

Mormon women have their own auxiliary, the Relief Society, and also can serve in leadership roles in programs for children and young women. But only men can serve as bishops of local congregations, for example, or in the all-male hierarchy of the church.

“It was the Lord who designated that men in his church should hold the priesthood,” said Hinckley, who cited no scriptural or other reference in the printed text of his remarks.

In a CBS “60 Minutes” interview broadcast in April, Hinckley said only males hold the Mormon priesthood “because God stated that it should be so. That was the revelation to the church. That was the way it was set forth.”

Lavina Fielding Anderson, a member of the staff of the independent Mormon Women’s Forum Quarterly, pointed out that no revelation specifically excluding women from the priesthood has ever been published or announced.

“I think what we have here is a case of interpretive drift. Doctrine is being invented to bolster a tradition,” said Anderson, who was excommunicated in 1993 for publication of a paper detailing church leaders’ conflicts with Mormon intellectuals and feminists.