Lesbians Selling Birthplace of Mormon Prophet

The birthplace of one of the greatest Mormon prophets, former LDS Church president Gordon B. Hinckley, is up for sale. The owners, according to the Salt Lake Tribune: a lesbian couple, Cristy Gleeve and Keri Jones (who together have a daughter named Glory).

Hinckley was the LDS Church’s longest-serving leader until his death in 2008 at 97. During his tenure, the church went through it’s largest expansion in history, reported the Associated Press that year: “The number of temples worldwide more than doubled, from 49 to more than 120 and church membership grew from about 9 million to about 13 million.”

The Tribune’s Peggy Fletcher Stack says that the the Mormons softened their official stance on gays while Hinckley was president in what many call the traditional “love the sinner, hate the sin” model perfected by other Christian churches.

But the strange new mix that is Salt Lake City — recently named The Advocate’s Gayest City in America — makes a lesbian couple, their lesbian realtor (that’d be Babs DeLay, founder of Urban Utah), and a famed Mormon prophet intersect at 840 East 700 South, where the house sits now, waiting for someone with $350,000 swoop it up.

And if the current owners sound more familiar to LGBT readers than Hinckley? That’s because Keri Jones made history herself when NCLR took on a custody case between her and her former partner, Cheryl Barlow. Jones fought all the way to the Utah Supreme Court to have visitation with the child they had together via alternative insemination. Then she lost. In a shocking 2007 decision, according to NCLR, the Utah Supreme Court “reversed the trial court decision and abolished protections for all children with non-biological parents rather than provide these protections equally to children with lesbian parents,

” rolling back 30 years of legal rulings in Utah.