Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners.

To help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community, please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under Support.

All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you.

Thanks for your support.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host John DeLin.

It is November 12th, 2015 and today we are interviewing Eric Reeves.

To give you a little background, many of you will know that last week, so about seven days ago, November 5th about, the LDS Church changed their Handbook One of Handbook of Instructions for their leadership where, among other things, they added same gender,

their cohabitation or marriage as a mandatory criteria for apostasy and they also implemented a policy that said the children of gay or lesbian people who are in same gender relationships either cohabitating or in a marriage cannot receive a baby blessing, cannot be baptized, cannot receive a baby blessing.

They are not baptized, cannot receive the priesthood and cannot serve missions unless they reach the age of 18 and then it requires first presidency approval.

A week has gone by since that was released and the entire sort of Mormon internet has exploded and also it's become an international news story.

I've personally spoken with New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, LA Times, like it's a big, big story.

There's a lot of things that we've done to try and be a part of this. We did a review of these policy changes on Mormon stories last Friday and we released that.

Over the weekend we've started putting together a website called Suffer the Little Children.org where we're assembling stories of people affected by these policies and that website is now live and we're proud of that.

What I now want to do just today and tomorrow really is release just a few interviews with people who have been affected by this policy and the first person that I'm interviewing is Eric.

Eric is what makes Eric's story maybe particularly intriguing and maybe why some of you have tuned in is that Eric is the son of Linda and Melvin Reeves but his mother Linda is in the Relief Society general presidency I think is what it's called.

So for those who aren't LDS the LDS has three women who sort of stand at the head of their entire Relief Society organization of women all throughout the church and Linda Reeves is in that presidency.

She is first counselor. No, no, sorry. She's second counselor in the Relief Society general presidency.

And so Eric you know we're going to get into this but Eric felt strongly about wanting to talk about these issues you know fully aware that you know that his mom is in a high profile position with the church and that neither you know nor I have any particular interest in being expletative of this situation.

But but something about Eric situation made him want to reach out to me and see what we could do so with that big old lengthy introduction Eric Reeves welcome to more stories podcast thank you thank you for having me.

Now let's just begin our tell us just a bit about just at a really high level you like you know are you single are you married or you know where do you live and just sort of tell us just a bit about you in a high level right now.

Yeah, I am single I currently live meaning I'm not married I currently live in New York City was born in the Los Angeles area and live there until just before my teenage years when our family moved to the Salt Lake area.

I've been back in the California region again since then I served a mission in Nicaragua 2004 to 2006 and ended up out here in the city after school.

...