35 years ago today - Fall 1979.

Neal and Rebecca Chandler of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, respond to a request from the National Organization of Women to host a discussion group of Mormons with Sonia Johnson, known nationally as a Mormon equal rights activist. A few weeks later at stake conference, Elder James E. Faust outlines the church's stand against the Equal Rights Amendment. After the meeting he and two members of the stake presidency overhear Neal expressing distress about the church's "dissembling about organized lobbying campaigns in Virginia and Florida and Missouri." For the next several years, Chandler later discovered, each time his bishop, Peter Gail, proposed him for executive positions, he "was told that this was not a possibility and was admonished to stop raising it as though it were."

[Source: Anderson, Lavina Fielding, "The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology," Dialogue, Vol.26, No.1]

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