Affirmation: Gay & Lesbian Mormons

Simon Southerton

LDS Church Excommunicates DNA Author

August 2005
From a story posted at Yahoo News

An Australian author who wrote that DNA evidence fails to support the ancestral claims outlined in the Book of Mormon has been excommunicated by The Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter-day Saints.

After a three-hour disciplinary council meeting on Sunday in Canberra, Simon Southerton, author of Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA and the Book of Mormon, was informed his relationship with his religion of 30 years would be officially severed, Southerton said in an email to The Associated Press.

Southerton was charged by church authorities with adultery, but finally excommunicated for "having an inappropriate relationship with a woman," he said.

Southerton doesn't deny the relationship, which occurred two years ago, while he was separated from his wife. The Southertons have since reconciled, and Jane Southerton testified on behalf of her husband.

Southerton said he refused to discuss his personal life with church leaders on Sunday, instead asking them why he was not answering to charges of apostasy for having widely published on the internet and in his book his doubts about the church and his beliefs about DNA science.

Church leaders responded, Southerton wrote, by saying they were not avoiding the "issue of apostasy and that the charge they were investigating was more important."

"I am now convinced that they were intent on avoiding a council on the charge of apostasy," Southerton said in his email to the AP.

"I was clearly instructed before the meeting that if I attempted to talk about 'DNA' and my apostasy that the council would be immediately shut down and that it would be completed in my absence."

Mormon church officials do not comment on the decisions of local church leaders, church spokesman Scott Trotter said.

A former church bishop, Southerton voluntarily left the Mormon church seven years ago, after deciding he could no longer believe some of its teachings.

His book, published in 2004, outlines how existing DNA data for American Indians does not support the Mormon beliefs that the continent's earliest inhabitants were descendants of Israelite patriarch Lehi.