After decades of slow progress toward embracing the LGBTQ+ community, elders in the Mormon Church on Tuesday appointed apostle Dallin H. Oaks, a former justice on the Utah Supreme Court and staunch opponent of marriage equality, to be its next president.

Oaks, 93, succeeds Russell M. Nelson, whom he served as first counselor. Nelson died in September at age 101. Succession criteria among church leadership all but guaranteed the nonagenarian’s ascension to the top post.

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“I accept with humility the responsibility that God has placed upon me,” Oaks said in brief remarks in Salt Lake City.

In 1984, Oaks, a lawyer by training, authored a confidential memo on “the interests at stake in the proposed legalization of so-called homosexual marriages,” a document that guided the Church of Latter-day Saints’ opposition to marriage equality for decades to come.

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“Homosexual ‘marriages’ would be a devilish perversion of the procreative purposes of God and the earth life He has granted His children,” Oaks wrote.

“One generation of homosexual ‘marriages’ would depopulate a nation, and, if sufficiently widespread, would extinguish its people,” he added. “Our marriage laws should not abet national suicide.”

Oaks penned the memo the same year he joined the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the church’s second-highest leadership body.

The church spent millions in opposition to the marriage equality movement, including a successful effort to pass a ban on same-sex marriage in California in 2008.

Oaks has described homosexuality as an ephemeral “affliction.”

“The good news for somebody who is struggling with same-gender attraction is this,” he said: “It is that ‘I’m not stuck with it forever.’ It’s just now.” 

“Same-gender attraction did not exist in the pre-earth life” and “neither will it exist in the next life,” Oaks claimed in a 2006 church interview.

In 2022, however, religious freedom trumped opposition to marriage equality when both Oaks and the Mormon Church came out in support of the Respect for Marriage Act, the law codifying the recognition of same-sex marriages performed in any state by other states and the federal government. 

Religious freedom protections in the bill drew the church’s backing.

“We believe this approach is the way forward,” the church said. “As we work together to preserve the principles and practices of religious freedom together with the rights of LGBTQ individuals, much can be accomplished to heal relationships and foster greater understanding.”

At the same time, anti-LGBTQ+ opponents of the bill cited the threat of “pedophilic marriage” and “polygamous marriages” if it became law.

Polygamy, or “plural marriage”, was officially banned in the Mormon Church in 1890, but the practice still persists.

Jeff Bennion, co-founder of the Gender Harmony Institute, a “holistic” conversion therapy practice in Utah that addresses gender-related distress, said Oaks’s appointment inspired both “joy and excitement” and “anxiety” and “frustration” in the church.

He described Oaks’s tenure as “a ministry of law and love.”

“Throughout his academic, professional, and religious pursuits, President Oaks has wrestled with the same paradox he invites us to confront: how to combine uncompromising truth with unconstrained love. In his many addresses on Love and Law, he insists that divine commandments and divine compassion are not enemies.

“‘We must be soft on people,’ he said once, ‘but firm on principles.’”

In 1970, Oaks was tapped by the church to lead Brigham Young University.

In a speech in 2021, he denied that electroshock treatments and vomit aversion were used at the school as a form of conversion therapy during his tenure.

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