Keynote 101: Richard P. Howard Lecture (7:00 p.m., Thursday, September 18)
Title: Hawaii: Ground Zero for the LDS Church’s Foray into Marriage Equality by Dr. Gregory A. Prince
Abstract: Until the early 1990s, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dealt with LGBTQ issues as internal matters, even as the 1969 Stonewall Inn Riots had thrust gay rights permanently into the public square. The church’s insularity dissipated when a lawsuit filed in Hawaii first made marriage equality not only possible but, by virtue of Hawaii’s unusual constitutional protection of sexual orientation, likely. Most states, as well as the federal government, took notice and responded by erecting legal barriers to the export of same-sex marriage from Hawaii. Two organizations, however, joined the fight directly, raising large amounts of money and mobilizing a small, covert, and highly effective lobbying organization to derail the lawsuit. They succeeded in the short term, although Hawaii ultimately embraced marriage equality prior to the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Oergefell v. Hodges. Those two organizations were the Roman Catholic Church and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -strange bedfellows given their earlier history of mutual animosity. Their efforts in Hawaii became the playbook later used to pass California’s Proposition 22 in 2000, and Prop 8 in 2008-the latter being a domino pushed by the LDS Church in one direction that unexpectedly pivoted 180 degrees dropped the other dominoes in the opposition direction, hastening the national adoption of marriage equality.
Biographical Sketch: Dr. Gregory Prince has spent a half-century in healthcare as a clinician and a medical researcher. He received two doctorate degrees from UCLA, DDS in 1973 and PhD in pathology in 1975. He spent four decades in virus research, co-founding Virion Systems, Inc. and pioneering the prevention of RSV disease in premature infants using Synagis®, the first monoclonal antibody approved by the FDA for preventing any infectious disease. Synagis® has been administered to millions of high-risk infants and has saved countless lives. In 2008, he and his wife JaLynn founded Madison House Autism Foundation (www.madisonhouseautism.org), named after their adult autistic son, to address the lifespan issues facing autistic adults, their families, and other caregivers.
He chairs the dean’s council of the University of Utah School of Dentistry and is a governor of Wesley Theological Seminary in DC. He has published over 150 scientific papers, as well as four books and over two dozen articles within the genre of Mormon Studies. In June 2023, the Mormon History Association awarded him the Leonard J. Arrington Award for lifetime achievement.
