Mormons have never had racially segregated congregations. Blacks joined the church even before 1978. My congregation in Salt Lake in the 1950s, where I grew up, had black families. I baptized a black sergeant in Colorado Springs in 1974. As you noted, the black Mormons already IN the church (such as the thousands in Brazil) were the major reason the Church leadership asked God to approve a change in the long standing policy. There were also thousands in Africa who had been pleading for missionaries to come baptize them, who had been converted just by reading the Book of Mormon and sharing it with friends and family.

Even when blacks were not ordained, the church ordained Native Americans, Polynesians, Latinos, and Asiansand had been sending missionaries to them for over a century before 1978.

If O'Donnell had bothered reading the Washington Post the week before his tirade, he would have seen an article about black Mormons in Nigeria!

O'Donnell's remarks are deeply offensive to Mormons generally, and doubly so to racial minority members like me (I am a Japanese American, born in Japan). It is even more ironic that Lou Dobbs hates the Mormon Church because it EMBRACES immigrants from Mexico and Latin America! He thinks we are contributing thto the illegal immigrant problem by being nice to people.

With respect to Joseph Smith's character generally: No trial ever found him guilty of any felony. He was often arrested (under the vague standards of the time) for "disorderly conduct" because other people got disorderly when he preached to them. The most significant legal actions against him were plainly illegal, like the trial of Jesus: He was arrested in Missouri bi the militia and initially ordered to be summarily executed without trial. The subordinate officer refused the order. He and other leaders were then held without bail for months, without being indicted or tried. By Spring 1839, the state of Missouri was so embarrassed that they lethe prisoners "escape" during transport to a new venue, without a shot fired by the guards, who lent them horses. In Illinois, Smith peacefully surrendered to arrest, was taken to the county seat (away from the protection of other Mormons), released on bail but then rearrested after the circuit judge left town, so he would be held in the jail for a day. Before he could have a bail hearing, a unit of Illinois militia stormed the jail and shot him, his brother Hyrum, and his unindicted friend John Taylor. The resemblance to the execution of Christ was not lost on Governor Thomas Ford, who acknowledged feeling like Pilate in promising Smith safety.

So many preachers and political demagogues of Smith's day became rich and powerful without challenging the established religions of the day, that if Smith's goal had been riches and power, he could have gotten them with the approval of millions. HIs journals and letters, and those of hundreds of contemporaries who lived and worked with him every day, are now available for scrutiny. The picture they paint of him is of a man who was guided by principle, who put others before himself, who put telling what he believed to be true before the expediency of telling people what they wanted to hear. There is no evidence that Smith was in any way insincere in his professed beliefs. His sermons express love for God and his fellow man. He does not meet the criteria for a con man, who takes from his followers. Smith suffered as much or more than his followers. He had no home of his own until the last years of his life. He and his wife suffered several times the agony of losing children in infancy. He worked hard at physical labor his entire life.

Slandering Smith's chartacter is like the tales that Jesus somehow faked his death and resurrection, without any explanation for how a person of so much corruption could attract and establish an institution that engenders so much virtue among its members.

As for Smith's religious production, it is something that has withstood almost two hundred years of calumny and scrutiny. While the primary allegiance of Mormons to the truth of the Book of Mormon, as a companion witness of Christ's reality, is based on reading, pondering and prayer, there has been growing realization in the last 50 years that applying the standard tools of scholarship to the book demonstrates again and again that it has the marks of an authentic text with origins in 600 BC Jerusalem. It makes casual references to facts about the Arabian Peninsula that were unknown to any American in 1830, including the name of a particular location in Arabia, and the fact that, contrary to the beliefs of geographers, there was a small area in the Oman coast that was (and still is) lush with vegetation, including trees that could be used for ship timbers, as well as the only known depostis fo iron ore in Arabia, the latter only discovered 5 years ago.

The fact that Smith asserted the original record was written on gold-like metal was only a point for ridicule in 1830. Yet since then, hundreds of metal records from the millenium before Christ have been unearthed in the Middle East, such as the Copper Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which, like the Book of Mormon, was hidden up in a container and placed under the ground (in a cave) for later recovery.

The book uses proper names that have since been identified as non-Biblical but authentic Hebrew and even Egyptian names of 600 BC. Since the Rosetta Stone had not been translated yet, how could Smith have guessed at those names, and ones that were well known at that period? Two of the leading men in the book are named Alma, yet the fact that this was a male name was not known until 50 years ago, when Yigael Yadin found and inscription attesting to it.

The Book has many iknstances of Hebraic text forms, such as the inverted parallelism Chiasmus (ABC, CBA), sith some examples of 10 and 15 levels. This form was not known in America in 1830, and only a few scholars in Europe had studied it. There is no evidence that Smith ever tried to use this form to authenticate the book, which he surely would have done if he had known what it was, and had gone to the trouble of purposely introiducing it into the text. No one noticed it was there until 1967. Repeatedly, application of various scholarly methods to the book have borne fruit in demonstrating it is full of authentic Hebrew language, grammar, and pre-exilic religious beliefs (as attested by Methodist British scholar Margaret Barker). Proefssor John Sorenson has proposed a strong correlation between the text and the geography of southern Meexico and Guatemala, for which he gives detailed support.

Mormons do not expect enyone will accept the Book of Mormon on those gorunds alone. But they do maintain that what they have discovered shows that it is intellectually possible to be an educated person and a Mormon. The book just keeps getting more and more to look like an ancient document.

On the dismissal of the idea of a pre-Columbian voyage to the Americas: Archeology now supports an understanding that the earliest Americans arrived as much as 20,000 years ago, before the "land bridge" through the ice cap opened up 13,000 years ago. The only rational way for them to do that was by boats, probably small coastal vessels or rafts. Thus, travel by ocean appears to have been the PRIMARY method that mankind colonized the Americas. The fact that humans were found all over the Pacific Ocean by the Eruopeans means that they had the means to travel those distances before European technology arrived. The refusal to accept the cultural cross-connection betwen the pyramids of Egypt and Mesopotamia and oiAmerica is more the proprietary attitude of American archeologists than any actual evidence of separate origin or lklogic.

The Book of Mormon itself is full of teachings concerning the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, and attest to the centrality of salvation through Him. Critics complain it is etiehr too much like the bible, or too different from it., They cannot make up their minds. It is clearly supportive of the Bible narrative, and does not contradict it in any way. Its main message is that God is the God of the whole earth, not just one small region in the Middle East. The alleged "racism" of its text is a modern superposition on some of its phrasing. Remember that its references to another "race" is really only about two branches of the same original colonizing family. All through 1,000 years they communicate and intermarry. There are mass movements where one faction dissents from one group and joins the other. And at the two most important junctures of the history, it is the "whiter" group that is the most wicked and suffers the greater destruction! The message is clearly NOT that "whiter" people are approved by God, but rather that those who obey God are approved by God. Some of the greatest heroes of the Book of Mormon are the "Lamanites", such as Samuel the prophet who foiretells the birth of Christ, and the 2060 young men who fight to defend the "white" Nephite nation against their unbelieving cousins. These "stripling warriors" are icons of fortitude and faithfulness to Mormon children. While some Mormons absorbed typical American attitudes toward Indians, in general the Mormons had better relations with the Indians than other settlers, and treated them better, teaching each other that they were children of Isrtael to whom God had made promises of special blessings. Spencer W. Kimball, who received the 1978 revelation, was especially concerned with advancing the education of American Indian youth. for decades, "white" Mormon families would take in Indian children as foster children to live with and go to school with their own childrten. Integration could not be more advanced than that. Almost every Mormon in the West attended church and school with Indian children and youth during the 1950s and 1960s. One of my circle of friend s in high school included Bill, a Navajo who had been abandoned by his family because he was a para[plegic, and confined most of the time to a wheelchair. We had several classes together, and he drew posters when I ran for a student body office.

EVen out in the periphery of Mormondom, we have Mormon missionaries from Kenya and Mongolia who come to help convert the people of eastern Idaho. One of Japanese misisonary companions had three daughters, one of whom was a missionary in Florida and on Temple Square in Salt Lake. A second daughter attends BYU Idaho and married an Idahoan. HIs third daughter attended BYU-Hawaii and married another Japanese student, and they are employed in Chicago!

O'Donnell, if he simply visited Mormon wards in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC, would be confronted with Mormons of all races, often married to each other, and speaking each other's languages.
He needs to be told to go out and meet some real Mormons before he passes judgment on people who have been persecuted for so many years for such little reason. O'Donnell has born false witness against his neighbors, 13 million fold. The fact that he has a role in the production of the TV series "Big Love" just compounds the culpability of the media for engendering hatred. After playing the role of a sincere liberal Democrat on The West Wing, he has demonstrated the hypocrisy of the Left, which lauds itself for its support for diversity, but demonstrates through tirades like his that whenever it gets power, it wil be totalitarian in its intolerance of real diversity and its obstinate ignorance.