Mormon Church Revises Policy Making Same-Sex Married Couples Apostates

The Church of Latter-Day Saints announced this week that it has revised a policy that now describes same-sex married couples as apostates and bars children of same-sex married couples from becoming baptized until they are 18-years-old.

"Church handbooks are policy and procedural guides for lay leaders who must administer the church in many varied circumstances throughout the world," Mormon church spokesman Eric Hawkins said in a statement.

"The church has long been on record as opposing same-sex marriages. While it respects the law of the land, and acknowledges the right of others to think and act differently, it does not perform or accept same-sex marriage within its membership," Hawkins added.

The policy adds that a child raised in a same-sex household must, when they turn 18-years-old, ask the First Presidency for permission to be baptized and be assigned to a missionary trip.

The teenager, at age 18, must "specifically disavows the practice of same-gender cohabitation and marriage," the document says, "and does not live with a parent who has lived or currently lives in a same-gender cohabitation relationship or marriage."

The church's change in policy comes shortly after Mormon Church Elder Dallin H. Oaks announced that government workers, such as Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, should obey the rules of their job before their religious beliefs.

Davis was jailed earlier this year for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

"Office holders remain free to draw upon their personal beliefs and motivations and advocate their positions in the public square. But when acting as public officials they are not free to apply personal convictions — religious or other — in place of the defined responsibilities of their public offices," Oaks said earlier this year. "A county clerk's recent invoking of religious reasons to justify refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-gender couples violates this principle."