"Garcia said it is estimated that nearly 70 percent of Latino Mormons are illegal immigrants. He said the church has responded by hiring members whose sole jobs are to transport some Latino missionaries from state to state because they can't fly due to their immigration status."
From the Articles of Faith:
We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.
We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul—We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.
Helping missionaries subvert immigration authorities is not obeying the law, it's actively breaking it.
here in Southern Utah this violation has gone rampant, there has been many self employed LDS contractors and landscaping company owners that have hired illegal immigrants without doing any investigation. The mentality here is its cheap labor for the big Corporation.
And then when there's a sweep, the church is in on it. Collect them, send them back...then sneak them back in...harvest time. Utah legislature wants them gone.
It's a no-win for Latino members who believed they'd be taken care of....and find out, the answer is no. Just read the waffling.
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/52141918-90/bishop-border-delegation-immigration.html.csp
Along the same lines, the church also owns many for profit businesses that operate on Sunday and require people to work on Sunday. The church makes big bucks from these enterprises all while preaching the sanctity of the sabbath.
Upon reading the topic title, "The Church Breaks Its Own Rules", my first thought was "Which one?" Now I see it is one which I didn't know about (the immigrants, not the articles of faith!)
It would be useful to perhaps compile these breaches into a compendium of sorts. Then every time someone throws the old "The church does everything within the law" argument at me, I'd have a ready list to throw back at them.
eta: People are called on missions to work for free for these businesses. I recently read in my newspaper where a couple had served a mission at the Berberian Nut Co.
Umm . . . am I the only one to catch the author's statement that the LDS church has 6M members, not the 14M being promoted?
I believe they meant in the USA. It's shocking when you think about it because only about 50% of the members on record consider themselves Mormon. The last actual census number I could find shows in 2008 only 3,158,000 people self identified as Mormon (US Census Bureau data). If the same percentage holds true world wide (there's reason to believe the percentages are less favorable for the Mormons based on anecdotal accounts) we're looking at really only about 7 million Mormons world wide, and not all of those would be actively practicing.
The mormon Latinos are protesting at Romney campaign events, as a result of feeling entitled to be here because the church is supportive of illegal immigration and a BYU professor is using the Book of Mormon as the case for why Latinos are entitled to be here. I love how this puts the historicity of the BOM front and center during this campaign cycle.
btw, why isn't the church helping the families who are here illegally to work within the system to become legal immigrants? Or perhaps even helping them to relocate to good communities in their home countries and investing in community building in those areas?
Encouraging illegal immigrants to build a life in a country in which they are at constant risk of deportation, cannot receive many social services, and cannot participate in the infrastructure of social security and medicare is socially irresponsible.
