Just_A_Guy

Sure. But in this case it's hard and confusing and muddles the issue. The very ideas that we have both continuing revelation...but doctrine never changes.... Those ideas don't really work together.
Edit: I understand that this has been defined this way at the top levels of the church in cases. I just don't understand how it's helpful to do so. But...sure... not my purview. Just my thoughts.

The older and wiser I get, the more I realize that we don't understand much of anything, and in reality, it all ultimately needs to go in that basket.

I certainly hope so. But that hope is coupled with concern.

I doubt this will be a concern. My hope is that Brother Sherinian will grow from this job and perhaps reconsider some (many) of his endorsements. In any case, I have faith that Christ heads his Church and Kingdom, and that the leaders he has put in place will keep their hand on the tiller and will not lead us to ruin.

I've always found this such a strange claim to make. It's applying meaning to a word that the word doesn't mean.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/doctrine
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doctrine
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/doctrine
"Doctrine" means what is taught and accepted by an organization. Obviously, by definition of the word, doctrine changes in the Church. And it's strange to me to try and define "doctrine" as something it is not. There are many things that have been taught and accepted by the church that are now no longer taught or accepted.
It would make more sense to add an adjective to the word. Eternal doctrine doesn't change. Core doctrine doesn't change. God's doctrine doesn't change. Or the like. But just "doctrine" obviously changes.

A distinction needs to be made between doctrine and policy. Doctrine does not change and we generally look to the scriptures, with assistance from the Holy Ghost, for this to be established (though living prophets certainly have a role in establishing accepted interpretation of the scriptures). But policy does change and has always been viewed as the prerogative of living prophets. So the question becomes where does doctrine end and policy begin? It's not always so clear. And the Church is always having to go out of it's way to remind members when changes are made that they are changes to policy not doctrine.
Policy as a rule should be the vehicle that helps implement doctrine. Whether it's three hour church or two hour church, the doctrinal purpose of attending church hasn't changed. But the policy did change to help emphasize the doctrinal role of the home in gospel learning. Likewise the policy about baptizing children of same-sex couples was in flux for a time but the Church was always clear that it's beliefs, doctrinally speaking, never changed.

I don't think we have to go so far as to say "golly gee willikers, no one knows what the will of God really is; so I guess we're all just the moral kings of our own individual universes!"  (Not saying that's your position; just waxing hyperbolic for argument's sake.)
On the other hand, I think Spackman would likely point out that we, too, approach scripture and history and morality and God Himself with our own set of cultural expectations.  Our own perceptions on gay marriage and race-and-priesthood are heavily influenced by--if not exclusively 21st-century--certainly post-Enlightenment Western notions such as liberty, democracy, equality, power (and who should wield it), culture, race, ethnicity, the modern nation-state, cross-cultural sensitivity, the tension between universal ethical standards versus allegiance to one's own identity group, the relationship between individualism and collectivism and between duty and personal fulfillment/happiness (both in society as a whole, and within the constraints of one's own "clan"), covenant, child-rearing, and relatively unique constructs of "love" generally and "romance" in particular.  In the absence of modern prophets speaking authoritatively for God, we're on extremely tenuous ground if we assert that these particular values and notions are morally/ethically superior to those that rooted earlier civilizations; or if we purport to know God's will about any particular topic any better than any other person at any other point in history.  
It's especially perilous for us as Latter-day Saints to make projections about what kind of behaviors (or, for that matter, doctrines) will become en règle in the future; because the whole notion of living prophets presupposes that God has information to give to future generations that He didn't give to past generations--that He will expect actions of future generations that He did not expect of past generations.  We can't say for sure that divine ratification of same-sex marriage is impossible; any more than we can rule out the banning of the color cyan, the mandating of eating fish on Fridays, a proscription on home solar arrays, the restoration of plural marriage (including concubinage), or a re-institution of a race/lineage-based priesthood ban.  For all we know, tomorrow night President Nelson will get a revelation that the Savior of the World was actually an overweight pipefitter with a heart condition named Earl who died in Chicago in 1954. 
We conservatives have to concede that in theory, as far as the future goes, nothing is completely off-the-table.  (Obviously, there are eternal truths and divine absolutes and there are indeed things that will never be permissible, worlds without end; but our ability to "know" precisely which parts of the Gospel as we understand it are truly immutable, is somewhat malleable.)  All we can do is take a proposed doctrinal innovation and weigh it against the body of revelation and practice the Church has already received, and make sometimes-tentative and sometimes-pretty-darned-confident declarations about how "this could actually fit and solve a lot of problems" versus "this would be a radical departure from everything we have known and done in the past".  (And then, of course, comparing that necessarily-subjective conclusion to the whisperings of the Spirit and the pronouncements of the current Church authorities.)
When dealing with these kinds of questions, I think it's also easy to fall into an overly simplistic discourse about "what God wanted."  The fact is, human motives aren't that clear-cut, and I don't know that God's are either.  I don't want to eat my vegetables, or get up and go walking at 5 AM, or discipline my kids for misbehaving in a particular way.  But I do it, because I'm playing a longer game, and I know that distasteful actions in the here-and-now are necessary to attain a particular goal over the longer-term.  
In that sense, I have no problem agreeing with @MrShorty that God probably didn't want to impose the priesthood ban.  It's not how He got his kicks and giggles.  But for some reason, He found it necessary.  That reason could be any one of a myriad of things.  Maybe it was due to the prejudices of Church members.  Maybe it was necessary for the sake of PR for a church operating in a hopelessly prejudiced region.  Maybe it was, as Elder McConkie stated after the fact, an extension of God's practice of dispensing the Gospel to different peoples at different times.  Maybe it was strategically necessary as a guide for the Church to focus first on growing in the areas where Church growth would prove most sustainable while avoiding areas where Church efforts would be undone in coming decades due to political or cultural upheaval.  Maybe a blanket ban nipped in the bud the pretensions of designing, predatory men (William McCary, perhaps, or others) who, if they could claim authority via priesthood ordination, may have led thousands astray or even precipitated a race-based schism in the Church.  Maybe President Young (as interpreted by Reeve) was actually right that there really is something to the idea of Africans having common descendancy from Cain or some similar ancestor, and it being improper to allow that ancestor to have priesthood-bearing seed under the Patriarchal Order for a period of time.  Maybe there were factors going on in the pre-existence that we know nothing about.  We've been asked not to hitch our wagon to any particular speculative explanation, and so I try not to.  But that doesn't mean that no such explanation in fact exists.  
On the other hand, stripped of 21st-century cultural baggage, the theological argument against divine origin of the ban seems to me to boil down to the protestation that "the God I worship just wouldn't do such a mean thing!"  The trouble with this argument is that, as @Vort points out, Prince's biography of McKay cites multiple witnesses to illustrate persuasively that God did do such a mean thing, as recently as the 1950s.  Which pretty much eviscerates the argument that He could not also have done such a thing in the 1850s.  (And of course, Jews in the spirit world awaiting their redemption who happen to have died during the Holocaust, continue to suffer under a current race-based temple ban vis a vis proxy temple work; and that happened within the last twenty years.)  
Probably inevitably, arguments over the priesthood ban don't really revolve around the question of whether it was a divinely-instituted necessary-evil.  Instead they tend to jump to the assumption that President Young, President McKay, and the other pre-McKay prophets instituted or maintained a spurious discriminatory practice against God's instructions and due to nothing more than their own unquestioning adoption of broader cultural discriminatory mores and oppressive power dynamics.  Because the modern political ramifications of such a position are fairly obvious:  If the GAs were hateful fun-sucking old doodie-heads once upon a time, then they probably are again; so we'll just wait for their moral judgment to catch up with ours, and in the meantime bring on the sexy time!!!  
But, with regard to gay sex and gay marriage vis a vis the priesthood ban:  Reeve himself, in a podcast interview with Gospel Tangents around 2018-2019, pointed out that there is a distinction between that and the priesthood ban; as gays do have the option to govern their behavior in such ways as to make them eligible to receive priesthood and temple blessings.  It's also worth noting that there was a very early LDS tradition of ordaining at least a few black men to the priesthood, and that even when the ban was imposed Young foresaw that it would someday be lifted.  By contrast, there is no precedent in LDS history for permitting or solemnizing gay sexual relationships at any point in its history and no authoritative suggestion by a GA that such unions will ever be permissible.  
Like I mention above, when talking about future Church policy we can probably never say "never" with one-hundred percent confidence; because we simply don't know everything and we do believe that the Restoration is ongoing.  But as many have shown in a variety of contexts, it's always tempting to trip all over ourselves trying to pre-emptively follow what we fancy the prophets will be saying in 50 years, to the point that we forget to follow what they're saying right now.  The current Church position is the one that keeps us safe, leads us to Zion, and ultimately introduces us into the Divine presence.
And if a person's going to prattle on about how someday the Church will allow gay sealings in its temples, I feel like I have a right to prattle on about how someday both society and the Church will allow the children of apostates and outsiders to be sold into slavery.  My prediction, having the value of scriptural precedent behind it, would be just as well-founded as theirs is.  And if @mikbone or @old or @The Folk Prophet tells us all that we should start praying to Pipefitter Earl the Corpulent on the basis that that's what all the Mormon cool kids will be doing as of 2124--I suppose we don't have have much of a basis to prove them wrong, either.   

Fundamentally it depends on whether the modern prophets and apostles are what they say they are.  If so, then we can trust them to act as the “firebreak” when necessary.
Insofar as the Church ever really taught that “scripture always trumps prophets”, I’m not sure that’s really an ideal paradigm.  For one thing, it ignores the role of the reader in interpreting scripture.  For another, scripture can often be cited for both sides of a particular controversy.  For yet another, sometimes the scriptures are incomplete or silent or (most often in the case of the KJV) just plain wrong.  And for yet another:  sometimes God gives different instructions tailored to people in different times and places.  
“Scripture always trumps prophets” might be a useful generality to teach primary children; but at a certain point the exceptions become glaring enough that we start looking for more useful paradigms.

I'll DM you if/when it becomes public; for now, it's probably a little too sensitive to go into detail about.   

Fundamentally it depends on whether the modern prophets and apostles are what they say they are.  If so, then we can trust them to act as the “firebreak” when necessary.
Insofar as the Church ever really taught that “scripture always trumps prophets”, I’m not sure that’s really an ideal paradigm.  For one thing, it ignores the role of the reader in interpreting scripture.  For another, scripture can often be cited for both sides of a particular controversy.  For yet another, sometimes the scriptures are incomplete or silent or (most often in the case of the KJV) just plain wrong.  And for yet another:  sometimes God gives different instructions tailored to people in different times and places.  
“Scripture always trumps prophets” might be a useful generality to teach primary children; but at a certain point the exceptions become glaring enough that we start looking for more useful paradigms.

Fundamentally it depends on whether the modern prophets and apostles are what they say they are.  If so, then we can trust them to act as the “firebreak” when necessary.
Insofar as the Church ever really taught that “scripture always trumps prophets”, I’m not sure that’s really an ideal paradigm.  For one thing, it ignores the role of the reader in interpreting scripture.  For another, scripture can often be cited for both sides of a particular controversy.  For yet another, sometimes the scriptures are incomplete or silent or (most often in the case of the KJV) just plain wrong.  And for yet another:  sometimes God gives different instructions tailored to people in different times and places.  
“Scripture always trumps prophets” might be a useful generality to teach primary children; but at a certain point the exceptions become glaring enough that we start looking for more useful paradigms.

I don't think we have to go so far as to say "golly gee willikers, no one knows what the will of God really is; so I guess we're all just the moral kings of our own individual universes!"  (Not saying that's your position; just waxing hyperbolic for argument's sake.)
On the other hand, I think Spackman would likely point out that we, too, approach scripture and history and morality and God Himself with our own set of cultural expectations.  Our own perceptions on gay marriage and race-and-priesthood are heavily influenced by--if not exclusively 21st-century--certainly post-Enlightenment Western notions such as liberty, democracy, equality, power (and who should wield it), culture, race, ethnicity, the modern nation-state, cross-cultural sensitivity, the tension between universal ethical standards versus allegiance to one's own identity group, the relationship between individualism and collectivism and between duty and personal fulfillment/happiness (both in society as a whole, and within the constraints of one's own "clan"), covenant, child-rearing, and relatively unique constructs of "love" generally and "romance" in particular.  In the absence of modern prophets speaking authoritatively for God, we're on extremely tenuous ground if we assert that these particular values and notions are morally/ethically superior to those that rooted earlier civilizations; or if we purport to know God's will about any particular topic any better than any other person at any other point in history.  
It's especially perilous for us as Latter-day Saints to make projections about what kind of behaviors (or, for that matter, doctrines) will become en règle in the future; because the whole notion of living prophets presupposes that God has information to give to future generations that He didn't give to past generations--that He will expect actions of future generations that He did not expect of past generations.  We can't say for sure that divine ratification of same-sex marriage is impossible; any more than we can rule out the banning of the color cyan, the mandating of eating fish on Fridays, a proscription on home solar arrays, the restoration of plural marriage (including concubinage), or a re-institution of a race/lineage-based priesthood ban.  For all we know, tomorrow night President Nelson will get a revelation that the Savior of the World was actually an overweight pipefitter with a heart condition named Earl who died in Chicago in 1954. 
We conservatives have to concede that in theory, as far as the future goes, nothing is completely off-the-table.  (Obviously, there are eternal truths and divine absolutes and there are indeed things that will never be permissible, worlds without end; but our ability to "know" precisely which parts of the Gospel as we understand it are truly immutable, is somewhat malleable.)  All we can do is take a proposed doctrinal innovation and weigh it against the body of revelation and practice the Church has already received, and make sometimes-tentative and sometimes-pretty-darned-confident declarations about how "this could actually fit and solve a lot of problems" versus "this would be a radical departure from everything we have known and done in the past".  (And then, of course, comparing that necessarily-subjective conclusion to the whisperings of the Spirit and the pronouncements of the current Church authorities.)
When dealing with these kinds of questions, I think it's also easy to fall into an overly simplistic discourse about "what God wanted."  The fact is, human motives aren't that clear-cut, and I don't know that God's are either.  I don't want to eat my vegetables, or get up and go walking at 5 AM, or discipline my kids for misbehaving in a particular way.  But I do it, because I'm playing a longer game, and I know that distasteful actions in the here-and-now are necessary to attain a particular goal over the longer-term.  
In that sense, I have no problem agreeing with @MrShorty that God probably didn't want to impose the priesthood ban.  It's not how He got his kicks and giggles.  But for some reason, He found it necessary.  That reason could be any one of a myriad of things.  Maybe it was due to the prejudices of Church members.  Maybe it was necessary for the sake of PR for a church operating in a hopelessly prejudiced region.  Maybe it was, as Elder McConkie stated after the fact, an extension of God's practice of dispensing the Gospel to different peoples at different times.  Maybe it was strategically necessary as a guide for the Church to focus first on growing in the areas where Church growth would prove most sustainable while avoiding areas where Church efforts would be undone in coming decades due to political or cultural upheaval.  Maybe a blanket ban nipped in the bud the pretensions of designing, predatory men (William McCary, perhaps, or others) who, if they could claim authority via priesthood ordination, may have led thousands astray or even precipitated a race-based schism in the Church.  Maybe President Young (as interpreted by Reeve) was actually right that there really is something to the idea of Africans having common descendancy from Cain or some similar ancestor, and it being improper to allow that ancestor to have priesthood-bearing seed under the Patriarchal Order for a period of time.  Maybe there were factors going on in the pre-existence that we know nothing about.  We've been asked not to hitch our wagon to any particular speculative explanation, and so I try not to.  But that doesn't mean that no such explanation in fact exists.  
On the other hand, stripped of 21st-century cultural baggage, the theological argument against divine origin of the ban seems to me to boil down to the protestation that "the God I worship just wouldn't do such a mean thing!"  The trouble with this argument is that, as @Vort points out, Prince's biography of McKay cites multiple witnesses to illustrate persuasively that God did do such a mean thing, as recently as the 1950s.  Which pretty much eviscerates the argument that He could not also have done such a thing in the 1850s.  (And of course, Jews in the spirit world awaiting their redemption who happen to have died during the Holocaust, continue to suffer under a current race-based temple ban vis a vis proxy temple work; and that happened within the last twenty years.)  
Probably inevitably, arguments over the priesthood ban don't really revolve around the question of whether it was a divinely-instituted necessary-evil.  Instead they tend to jump to the assumption that President Young, President McKay, and the other pre-McKay prophets instituted or maintained a spurious discriminatory practice against God's instructions and due to nothing more than their own unquestioning adoption of broader cultural discriminatory mores and oppressive power dynamics.  Because the modern political ramifications of such a position are fairly obvious:  If the GAs were hateful fun-sucking old doodie-heads once upon a time, then they probably are again; so we'll just wait for their moral judgment to catch up with ours, and in the meantime bring on the sexy time!!!  
But, with regard to gay sex and gay marriage vis a vis the priesthood ban:  Reeve himself, in a podcast interview with Gospel Tangents around 2018-2019, pointed out that there is a distinction between that and the priesthood ban; as gays do have the option to govern their behavior in such ways as to make them eligible to receive priesthood and temple blessings.  It's also worth noting that there was a very early LDS tradition of ordaining at least a few black men to the priesthood, and that even when the ban was imposed Young foresaw that it would someday be lifted.  By contrast, there is no precedent in LDS history for permitting or solemnizing gay sexual relationships at any point in its history and no authoritative suggestion by a GA that such unions will ever be permissible.  
Like I mention above, when talking about future Church policy we can probably never say "never" with one-hundred percent confidence; because we simply don't know everything and we do believe that the Restoration is ongoing.  But as many have shown in a variety of contexts, it's always tempting to trip all over ourselves trying to pre-emptively follow what we fancy the prophets will be saying in 50 years, to the point that we forget to follow what they're saying right now.  The current Church position is the one that keeps us safe, leads us to Zion, and ultimately introduces us into the Divine presence.
And if a person's going to prattle on about how someday the Church will allow gay sealings in its temples, I feel like I have a right to prattle on about how someday both society and the Church will allow the children of apostates and outsiders to be sold into slavery.  My prediction, having the value of scriptural precedent behind it, would be just as well-founded as theirs is.  And if @mikbone or @old or @The Folk Prophet tells us all that we should start praying to Pipefitter Earl the Corpulent on the basis that that's what all the Mormon cool kids will be doing as of 2124--I suppose we don't have have much of a basis to prove them wrong, either.   

I generally agree, but will point out in partial response that the enemies of the Church are *already* emboldened by the mere appointment of a man whom they see as one of their own.  In their paradigm, all they need to do is usurp a few high-profile positions, and then the Church membership like sheep will quietly do the bidding of the libertines.
I don’t want to unduly embarrass the Q15, but part of me also wonders if maybe it isn’t a bad thing for the libertines to know that they’ll never be able to wholly do our thinking for us no matter what positions—or even quorums—some of their allies manage to infiltrate.  

"Nothing"  "Completely". 
These two words are where the liberals have a point.  But the prick of that tiny point is somehow magnified into a ballistic missile of LGBTQ justification/rationalization that MUST be accepted and imposed upon the backwards conservative dinosaur who is too steeped in ancient superstition and tradition to understand God's "true" motives.  So say the woke prophets who deign to speak to us from their protected positions of authority.
No.
Religion by its very nature is conservative.  Without that trait, it would not be a religion.  It would be a fad political movement.  If religion is to change so wildly with every generation, the purpose of any religion in society would be completely untenable.
Religion codifies "acceptable behavior" in a manner that it would be tyrannical for government to do.  But is required to be stable if it is to have any benefit.  Only slow, gradual changes across several generations even have a chance at being a credible movement.
Any major changes in religion requires prophecy (not a social movement) to justify a sudden change.
The trans movement?  It was so far off the radar that neither Obama nor Hillary were willing to allow trans to use the bathroom of the opposite sex.  And pundits were touting the fact that it would never be pre-operative transexuals.  Only post-op.  And it would be ridiculous to believe the movement would go that far.
Well, here we are about 8 years later, not even a full generation, and it is being shoved down our throats without a consideration for all the harm it is doing to our children.  It isn't even allowed to be debated in public forums open to the lay person.  Parents are arrested for addressing a school board or a PTA meeting about how their daughters are being raped by a male pretending to be a girl.
And virtually all liberal Latter-day Saints are trying to claim this is the road that the Lord wants us to go down as a Church?
Back to the original point, Yes, almost nothing is off the table.  But we obviously need to keep things that are absolutely core beliefs as sacred and undeniable.  The Atonement of Christ is central.  There is no substitute.
But when we consider some things so close to the core that most of the rest of our belief system simply wouldn't make any sense without it, we need to pause for just a moment to consider.  How close to the core does it need to be for us to require and truly demand of the Lord that we receive a divine manifestation on the order of the First Vision?
Sealing, eternal families, the roles of father and mother, husband and wife.  With the past 150 years of understanding how important these are, and to change to beliefs that have been condemned throughout all of human history, without any explanation other than, "Hey society is saying so, and we need to get with the program" do we not have a right to demand such a manifestation if we are expected to go along with it?
Where is the doctrinal and theological basis for such change?
All I've ever heard is "Society says so.  Therefore, the Church will have to change to catch up."
Is this where we are?  Society (not God) tells the Church which direction to go?  I thought the whole purpose of the Church was for us to influence society -- not the other way around.  God's law is to stand as immutable as possible.  And we don't change our values, only our priorities based on the needs of that generation.
If we choose to go along with gay marriage and trans ideologies, it is to the destruction of the family and the death of the human race.  We do this to the detriment of our eternal destinies and our utter destruction.

Your prediction would be better founded.  All scripture makes it clear that same-gender sex and marriage will never be approved by God - indeed, logic itself dictates the same.

I don't think we have to go so far as to say "golly gee willikers, no one knows what the will of God really is; so I guess we're all just the moral kings of our own individual universes!"  (Not saying that's your position; just waxing hyperbolic for argument's sake.)
On the other hand, I think Spackman would likely point out that we, too, approach scripture and history and morality and God Himself with our own set of cultural expectations.  Our own perceptions on gay marriage and race-and-priesthood are heavily influenced by--if not exclusively 21st-century--certainly post-Enlightenment Western notions such as liberty, democracy, equality, power (and who should wield it), culture, race, ethnicity, the modern nation-state, cross-cultural sensitivity, the tension between universal ethical standards versus allegiance to one's own identity group, the relationship between individualism and collectivism and between duty and personal fulfillment/happiness (both in society as a whole, and within the constraints of one's own "clan"), covenant, child-rearing, and relatively unique constructs of "love" generally and "romance" in particular.  In the absence of modern prophets speaking authoritatively for God, we're on extremely tenuous ground if we assert that these particular values and notions are morally/ethically superior to those that rooted earlier civilizations; or if we purport to know God's will about any particular topic any better than any other person at any other point in history.  
It's especially perilous for us as Latter-day Saints to make projections about what kind of behaviors (or, for that matter, doctrines) will become en règle in the future; because the whole notion of living prophets presupposes that God has information to give to future generations that He didn't give to past generations--that He will expect actions of future generations that He did not expect of past generations.  We can't say for sure that divine ratification of same-sex marriage is impossible; any more than we can rule out the banning of the color cyan, the mandating of eating fish on Fridays, a proscription on home solar arrays, the restoration of plural marriage (including concubinage), or a re-institution of a race/lineage-based priesthood ban.  For all we know, tomorrow night President Nelson will get a revelation that the Savior of the World was actually an overweight pipefitter with a heart condition named Earl who died in Chicago in 1954. 
We conservatives have to concede that in theory, as far as the future goes, nothing is completely off-the-table.  (Obviously, there are eternal truths and divine absolutes and there are indeed things that will never be permissible, worlds without end; but our ability to "know" precisely which parts of the Gospel as we understand it are truly immutable, is somewhat malleable.)  All we can do is take a proposed doctrinal innovation and weigh it against the body of revelation and practice the Church has already received, and make sometimes-tentative and sometimes-pretty-darned-confident declarations about how "this could actually fit and solve a lot of problems" versus "this would be a radical departure from everything we have known and done in the past".  (And then, of course, comparing that necessarily-subjective conclusion to the whisperings of the Spirit and the pronouncements of the current Church authorities.)
When dealing with these kinds of questions, I think it's also easy to fall into an overly simplistic discourse about "what God wanted."  The fact is, human motives aren't that clear-cut, and I don't know that God's are either.  I don't want to eat my vegetables, or get up and go walking at 5 AM, or discipline my kids for misbehaving in a particular way.  But I do it, because I'm playing a longer game, and I know that distasteful actions in the here-and-now are necessary to attain a particular goal over the longer-term.  
In that sense, I have no problem agreeing with @MrShorty that God probably didn't want to impose the priesthood ban.  It's not how He got his kicks and giggles.  But for some reason, He found it necessary.  That reason could be any one of a myriad of things.  Maybe it was due to the prejudices of Church members.  Maybe it was necessary for the sake of PR for a church operating in a hopelessly prejudiced region.  Maybe it was, as Elder McConkie stated after the fact, an extension of God's practice of dispensing the Gospel to different peoples at different times.  Maybe it was strategically necessary as a guide for the Church to focus first on growing in the areas where Church growth would prove most sustainable while avoiding areas where Church efforts would be undone in coming decades due to political or cultural upheaval.  Maybe a blanket ban nipped in the bud the pretensions of designing, predatory men (William McCary, perhaps, or others) who, if they could claim authority via priesthood ordination, may have led thousands astray or even precipitated a race-based schism in the Church.  Maybe President Young (as interpreted by Reeve) was actually right that there really is something to the idea of Africans having common descendancy from Cain or some similar ancestor, and it being improper to allow that ancestor to have priesthood-bearing seed under the Patriarchal Order for a period of time.  Maybe there were factors going on in the pre-existence that we know nothing about.  We've been asked not to hitch our wagon to any particular speculative explanation, and so I try not to.  But that doesn't mean that no such explanation in fact exists.  
On the other hand, stripped of 21st-century cultural baggage, the theological argument against divine origin of the ban seems to me to boil down to the protestation that "the God I worship just wouldn't do such a mean thing!"  The trouble with this argument is that, as @Vort points out, Prince's biography of McKay cites multiple witnesses to illustrate persuasively that God did do such a mean thing, as recently as the 1950s.  Which pretty much eviscerates the argument that He could not also have done such a thing in the 1850s.  (And of course, Jews in the spirit world awaiting their redemption who happen to have died during the Holocaust, continue to suffer under a current race-based temple ban vis a vis proxy temple work; and that happened within the last twenty years.)  
Probably inevitably, arguments over the priesthood ban don't really revolve around the question of whether it was a divinely-instituted necessary-evil.  Instead they tend to jump to the assumption that President Young, President McKay, and the other pre-McKay prophets instituted or maintained a spurious discriminatory practice against God's instructions and due to nothing more than their own unquestioning adoption of broader cultural discriminatory mores and oppressive power dynamics.  Because the modern political ramifications of such a position are fairly obvious:  If the GAs were hateful fun-sucking old doodie-heads once upon a time, then they probably are again; so we'll just wait for their moral judgment to catch up with ours, and in the meantime bring on the sexy time!!!  
But, with regard to gay sex and gay marriage vis a vis the priesthood ban:  Reeve himself, in a podcast interview with Gospel Tangents around 2018-2019, pointed out that there is a distinction between that and the priesthood ban; as gays do have the option to govern their behavior in such ways as to make them eligible to receive priesthood and temple blessings.  It's also worth noting that there was a very early LDS tradition of ordaining at least a few black men to the priesthood, and that even when the ban was imposed Young foresaw that it would someday be lifted.  By contrast, there is no precedent in LDS history for permitting or solemnizing gay sexual relationships at any point in its history and no authoritative suggestion by a GA that such unions will ever be permissible.  
Like I mention above, when talking about future Church policy we can probably never say "never" with one-hundred percent confidence; because we simply don't know everything and we do believe that the Restoration is ongoing.  But as many have shown in a variety of contexts, it's always tempting to trip all over ourselves trying to pre-emptively follow what we fancy the prophets will be saying in 50 years, to the point that we forget to follow what they're saying right now.  The current Church position is the one that keeps us safe, leads us to Zion, and ultimately introduces us into the Divine presence.
And if a person's going to prattle on about how someday the Church will allow gay sealings in its temples, I feel like I have a right to prattle on about how someday both society and the Church will allow the children of apostates and outsiders to be sold into slavery.  My prediction, having the value of scriptural precedent behind it, would be just as well-founded as theirs is.  And if @mikbone or @old or @The Folk Prophet tells us all that we should start praying to Pipefitter Earl the Corpulent on the basis that that's what all the Mormon cool kids will be doing as of 2124--I suppose we don't have have much of a basis to prove them wrong, either.   

I don't think we have to go so far as to say "golly gee willikers, no one knows what the will of God really is; so I guess we're all just the moral kings of our own individual universes!"  (Not saying that's your position; just waxing hyperbolic for argument's sake.)
On the other hand, I think Spackman would likely point out that we, too, approach scripture and history and morality and God Himself with our own set of cultural expectations.  Our own perceptions on gay marriage and race-and-priesthood are heavily influenced by--if not exclusively 21st-century--certainly post-Enlightenment Western notions such as liberty, democracy, equality, power (and who should wield it), culture, race, ethnicity, the modern nation-state, cross-cultural sensitivity, the tension between universal ethical standards versus allegiance to one's own identity group, the relationship between individualism and collectivism and between duty and personal fulfillment/happiness (both in society as a whole, and within the constraints of one's own "clan"), covenant, child-rearing, and relatively unique constructs of "love" generally and "romance" in particular.  In the absence of modern prophets speaking authoritatively for God, we're on extremely tenuous ground if we assert that these particular values and notions are morally/ethically superior to those that rooted earlier civilizations; or if we purport to know God's will about any particular topic any better than any other person at any other point in history.  
It's especially perilous for us as Latter-day Saints to make projections about what kind of behaviors (or, for that matter, doctrines) will become en règle in the future; because the whole notion of living prophets presupposes that God has information to give to future generations that He didn't give to past generations--that He will expect actions of future generations that He did not expect of past generations.  We can't say for sure that divine ratification of same-sex marriage is impossible; any more than we can rule out the banning of the color cyan, the mandating of eating fish on Fridays, a proscription on home solar arrays, the restoration of plural marriage (including concubinage), or a re-institution of a race/lineage-based priesthood ban.  For all we know, tomorrow night President Nelson will get a revelation that the Savior of the World was actually an overweight pipefitter with a heart condition named Earl who died in Chicago in 1954. 
We conservatives have to concede that in theory, as far as the future goes, nothing is completely off-the-table.  (Obviously, there are eternal truths and divine absolutes and there are indeed things that will never be permissible, worlds without end; but our ability to "know" precisely which parts of the Gospel as we understand it are truly immutable, is somewhat malleable.)  All we can do is take a proposed doctrinal innovation and weigh it against the body of revelation and practice the Church has already received, and make sometimes-tentative and sometimes-pretty-darned-confident declarations about how "this could actually fit and solve a lot of problems" versus "this would be a radical departure from everything we have known and done in the past".  (And then, of course, comparing that necessarily-subjective conclusion to the whisperings of the Spirit and the pronouncements of the current Church authorities.)
When dealing with these kinds of questions, I think it's also easy to fall into an overly simplistic discourse about "what God wanted."  The fact is, human motives aren't that clear-cut, and I don't know that God's are either.  I don't want to eat my vegetables, or get up and go walking at 5 AM, or discipline my kids for misbehaving in a particular way.  But I do it, because I'm playing a longer game, and I know that distasteful actions in the here-and-now are necessary to attain a particular goal over the longer-term.  
In that sense, I have no problem agreeing with @MrShorty that God probably didn't want to impose the priesthood ban.  It's not how He got his kicks and giggles.  But for some reason, He found it necessary.  That reason could be any one of a myriad of things.  Maybe it was due to the prejudices of Church members.  Maybe it was necessary for the sake of PR for a church operating in a hopelessly prejudiced region.  Maybe it was, as Elder McConkie stated after the fact, an extension of God's practice of dispensing the Gospel to different peoples at different times.  Maybe it was strategically necessary as a guide for the Church to focus first on growing in the areas where Church growth would prove most sustainable while avoiding areas where Church efforts would be undone in coming decades due to political or cultural upheaval.  Maybe a blanket ban nipped in the bud the pretensions of designing, predatory men (William McCary, perhaps, or others) who, if they could claim authority via priesthood ordination, may have led thousands astray or even precipitated a race-based schism in the Church.  Maybe President Young (as interpreted by Reeve) was actually right that there really is something to the idea of Africans having common descendancy from Cain or some similar ancestor, and it being improper to allow that ancestor to have priesthood-bearing seed under the Patriarchal Order for a period of time.  Maybe there were factors going on in the pre-existence that we know nothing about.  We've been asked not to hitch our wagon to any particular speculative explanation, and so I try not to.  But that doesn't mean that no such explanation in fact exists.  
On the other hand, stripped of 21st-century cultural baggage, the theological argument against divine origin of the ban seems to me to boil down to the protestation that "the God I worship just wouldn't do such a mean thing!"  The trouble with this argument is that, as @Vort points out, Prince's biography of McKay cites multiple witnesses to illustrate persuasively that God did do such a mean thing, as recently as the 1950s.  Which pretty much eviscerates the argument that He could not also have done such a thing in the 1850s.  (And of course, Jews in the spirit world awaiting their redemption who happen to have died during the Holocaust, continue to suffer under a current race-based temple ban vis a vis proxy temple work; and that happened within the last twenty years.)  
Probably inevitably, arguments over the priesthood ban don't really revolve around the question of whether it was a divinely-instituted necessary-evil.  Instead they tend to jump to the assumption that President Young, President McKay, and the other pre-McKay prophets instituted or maintained a spurious discriminatory practice against God's instructions and due to nothing more than their own unquestioning adoption of broader cultural discriminatory mores and oppressive power dynamics.  Because the modern political ramifications of such a position are fairly obvious:  If the GAs were hateful fun-sucking old doodie-heads once upon a time, then they probably are again; so we'll just wait for their moral judgment to catch up with ours, and in the meantime bring on the sexy time!!!  
But, with regard to gay sex and gay marriage vis a vis the priesthood ban:  Reeve himself, in a podcast interview with Gospel Tangents around 2018-2019, pointed out that there is a distinction between that and the priesthood ban; as gays do have the option to govern their behavior in such ways as to make them eligible to receive priesthood and temple blessings.  It's also worth noting that there was a very early LDS tradition of ordaining at least a few black men to the priesthood, and that even when the ban was imposed Young foresaw that it would someday be lifted.  By contrast, there is no precedent in LDS history for permitting or solemnizing gay sexual relationships at any point in its history and no authoritative suggestion by a GA that such unions will ever be permissible.  
Like I mention above, when talking about future Church policy we can probably never say "never" with one-hundred percent confidence; because we simply don't know everything and we do believe that the Restoration is ongoing.  But as many have shown in a variety of contexts, it's always tempting to trip all over ourselves trying to pre-emptively follow what we fancy the prophets will be saying in 50 years, to the point that we forget to follow what they're saying right now.  The current Church position is the one that keeps us safe, leads us to Zion, and ultimately introduces us into the Divine presence.
And if a person's going to prattle on about how someday the Church will allow gay sealings in its temples, I feel like I have a right to prattle on about how someday both society and the Church will allow the children of apostates and outsiders to be sold into slavery.  My prediction, having the value of scriptural precedent behind it, would be just as well-founded as theirs is.  And if @mikbone or @old or @The Folk Prophet tells us all that we should start praying to Pipefitter Earl the Corpulent on the basis that that's what all the Mormon cool kids will be doing as of 2124--I suppose we don't have have much of a basis to prove them wrong, either.   

I don't think we have to go so far as to say "golly gee willikers, no one knows what the will of God really is; so I guess we're all just the moral kings of our own individual universes!"  (Not saying that's your position; just waxing hyperbolic for argument's sake.)
On the other hand, I think Spackman would likely point out that we, too, approach scripture and history and morality and God Himself with our own set of cultural expectations.  Our own perceptions on gay marriage and race-and-priesthood are heavily influenced by--if not exclusively 21st-century--certainly post-Enlightenment Western notions such as liberty, democracy, equality, power (and who should wield it), culture, race, ethnicity, the modern nation-state, cross-cultural sensitivity, the tension between universal ethical standards versus allegiance to one's own identity group, the relationship between individualism and collectivism and between duty and personal fulfillment/happiness (both in society as a whole, and within the constraints of one's own "clan"), covenant, child-rearing, and relatively unique constructs of "love" generally and "romance" in particular.  In the absence of modern prophets speaking authoritatively for God, we're on extremely tenuous ground if we assert that these particular values and notions are morally/ethically superior to those that rooted earlier civilizations; or if we purport to know God's will about any particular topic any better than any other person at any other point in history.  
It's especially perilous for us as Latter-day Saints to make projections about what kind of behaviors (or, for that matter, doctrines) will become en règle in the future; because the whole notion of living prophets presupposes that God has information to give to future generations that He didn't give to past generations--that He will expect actions of future generations that He did not expect of past generations.  We can't say for sure that divine ratification of same-sex marriage is impossible; any more than we can rule out the banning of the color cyan, the mandating of eating fish on Fridays, a proscription on home solar arrays, the restoration of plural marriage (including concubinage), or a re-institution of a race/lineage-based priesthood ban.  For all we know, tomorrow night President Nelson will get a revelation that the Savior of the World was actually an overweight pipefitter with a heart condition named Earl who died in Chicago in 1954. 
We conservatives have to concede that in theory, as far as the future goes, nothing is completely off-the-table.  (Obviously, there are eternal truths and divine absolutes and there are indeed things that will never be permissible, worlds without end; but our ability to "know" precisely which parts of the Gospel as we understand it are truly immutable, is somewhat malleable.)  All we can do is take a proposed doctrinal innovation and weigh it against the body of revelation and practice the Church has already received, and make sometimes-tentative and sometimes-pretty-darned-confident declarations about how "this could actually fit and solve a lot of problems" versus "this would be a radical departure from everything we have known and done in the past".  (And then, of course, comparing that necessarily-subjective conclusion to the whisperings of the Spirit and the pronouncements of the current Church authorities.)
When dealing with these kinds of questions, I think it's also easy to fall into an overly simplistic discourse about "what God wanted."  The fact is, human motives aren't that clear-cut, and I don't know that God's are either.  I don't want to eat my vegetables, or get up and go walking at 5 AM, or discipline my kids for misbehaving in a particular way.  But I do it, because I'm playing a longer game, and I know that distasteful actions in the here-and-now are necessary to attain a particular goal over the longer-term.  
In that sense, I have no problem agreeing with @MrShorty that God probably didn't want to impose the priesthood ban.  It's not how He got his kicks and giggles.  But for some reason, He found it necessary.  That reason could be any one of a myriad of things.  Maybe it was due to the prejudices of Church members.  Maybe it was necessary for the sake of PR for a church operating in a hopelessly prejudiced region.  Maybe it was, as Elder McConkie stated after the fact, an extension of God's practice of dispensing the Gospel to different peoples at different times.  Maybe it was strategically necessary as a guide for the Church to focus first on growing in the areas where Church growth would prove most sustainable while avoiding areas where Church efforts would be undone in coming decades due to political or cultural upheaval.  Maybe a blanket ban nipped in the bud the pretensions of designing, predatory men (William McCary, perhaps, or others) who, if they could claim authority via priesthood ordination, may have led thousands astray or even precipitated a race-based schism in the Church.  Maybe President Young (as interpreted by Reeve) was actually right that there really is something to the idea of Africans having common descendancy from Cain or some similar ancestor, and it being improper to allow that ancestor to have priesthood-bearing seed under the Patriarchal Order for a period of time.  Maybe there were factors going on in the pre-existence that we know nothing about.  We've been asked not to hitch our wagon to any particular speculative explanation, and so I try not to.  But that doesn't mean that no such explanation in fact exists.  
On the other hand, stripped of 21st-century cultural baggage, the theological argument against divine origin of the ban seems to me to boil down to the protestation that "the God I worship just wouldn't do such a mean thing!"  The trouble with this argument is that, as @Vort points out, Prince's biography of McKay cites multiple witnesses to illustrate persuasively that God did do such a mean thing, as recently as the 1950s.  Which pretty much eviscerates the argument that He could not also have done such a thing in the 1850s.  (And of course, Jews in the spirit world awaiting their redemption who happen to have died during the Holocaust, continue to suffer under a current race-based temple ban vis a vis proxy temple work; and that happened within the last twenty years.)  
Probably inevitably, arguments over the priesthood ban don't really revolve around the question of whether it was a divinely-instituted necessary-evil.  Instead they tend to jump to the assumption that President Young, President McKay, and the other pre-McKay prophets instituted or maintained a spurious discriminatory practice against God's instructions and due to nothing more than their own unquestioning adoption of broader cultural discriminatory mores and oppressive power dynamics.  Because the modern political ramifications of such a position are fairly obvious:  If the GAs were hateful fun-sucking old doodie-heads once upon a time, then they probably are again; so we'll just wait for their moral judgment to catch up with ours, and in the meantime bring on the sexy time!!!  
But, with regard to gay sex and gay marriage vis a vis the priesthood ban:  Reeve himself, in a podcast interview with Gospel Tangents around 2018-2019, pointed out that there is a distinction between that and the priesthood ban; as gays do have the option to govern their behavior in such ways as to make them eligible to receive priesthood and temple blessings.  It's also worth noting that there was a very early LDS tradition of ordaining at least a few black men to the priesthood, and that even when the ban was imposed Young foresaw that it would someday be lifted.  By contrast, there is no precedent in LDS history for permitting or solemnizing gay sexual relationships at any point in its history and no authoritative suggestion by a GA that such unions will ever be permissible.  
Like I mention above, when talking about future Church policy we can probably never say "never" with one-hundred percent confidence; because we simply don't know everything and we do believe that the Restoration is ongoing.  But as many have shown in a variety of contexts, it's always tempting to trip all over ourselves trying to pre-emptively follow what we fancy the prophets will be saying in 50 years, to the point that we forget to follow what they're saying right now.  The current Church position is the one that keeps us safe, leads us to Zion, and ultimately introduces us into the Divine presence.
And if a person's going to prattle on about how someday the Church will allow gay sealings in its temples, I feel like I have a right to prattle on about how someday both society and the Church will allow the children of apostates and outsiders to be sold into slavery.  My prediction, having the value of scriptural precedent behind it, would be just as well-founded as theirs is.  And if @mikbone or @old or @The Folk Prophet tells us all that we should start praying to Pipefitter Earl the Corpulent on the basis that that's what all the Mormon cool kids will be doing as of 2124--I suppose we don't have have much of a basis to prove them wrong, either.   

Kinda playing it fast and loose with that underlined word there I think.

Excellent question.  Thanks, I learned something new.
S. Kent Brown, “What Were Those Sacrifices Offered by Lehi?” in From Jerusalem to Zarahemla: Literary and Historical Studies of the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1998), 1–8.
https://rsc.byu.edu/jerusalem-zarahemla/what-were-those-sacrifices-offered-lehi#:~:text=When Lehi “made an offering,safely completed a long journey.
 
Also, there are huge similarities between Lehi and Moses.  
Moses and the burning bush - Lehi and the pilar of fire
Exodus from Egypt - Exodus from Jerusalem
Travel thru the wilderness
Destination of the promised land.
 
Perhaps the Lord was trying to impress upon Lehi and his family that Lehi was a similitude of Moses.
Laman and Lemuel both believed in Moses.  But they couldn't believe that their own father (or brother) could be a prophet.  

As I understand it... (this means that I am not an expert in this area, but I've read a few things).
Samuel was also an Ephraimite.  He was chosen as God's prophet of that era.  He even wore priestly robes (as evidenced by Saul tearing them).  And the sacrifices were to be offered by Samuel, not Saul. David was of the tribe of Judah and he offered sacrifices in the temple.  He was considered a prophet-king. So, it appears that prophets (at least) were allowed to offer sacrifices just like the Levites. Likewise, Lehi was clearly called as a prophet.  So, that means that he held the priesthood authority to do so. The common understanding is (and I don't know what the scriptural basis is, but it makes sense):
While the Melchizedek priesthood was not common, it was still present.  And those holding it could also offer sacrifice.  And it was that authority that Lehi brought to his sons and the Nephite nation.

I like to think I'm open minded (but who doesn't like to think they are open minded?). For me, I think this particular issue falls in line with similar issues like slavery in the Bible or genocide in the Bible where the scripture/prophet(s) claim that God commanded/approved of something and we only have the scripture's/prophet's word that God said or did something. As noted, I would like to think that I am open to the possibility that God said or did things that seem so immoral to me. However, in cases like these, something about the immorality of the practice -- something about how the practice seems so anti-thetical to my understanding of the gospel and goodness and the nature of God and man -- demands a higher burden of proof than the explanation that God did not do what fallible prophets and errant scripture claim of Him.

I think I have mentioned here before that, IMO, Ben Spackman captures the real problem of the priesthood and temple ban in his blog post about slavery in the Bible: https://benspackman.com/2019/11/gospel-doctrine-lesson-40-colossians-and-philippians-but-mostly-philemon/
Spackman writes,
Spackman writes in the context of slavery, but I find the same thing can be said of allegations that God commanded genocide or that God commanded/approved of a race based ban on priesthood ordination and temple ordinances (I think it is important to remember that this wasn't just about who could officiate priesthood ordinances, but also who could receive ordinances that we claim are necessary for exaltation).
Even if I ever find myself convinced that God caused or approved of these "evils," I expect these issues to still end up under the problem of evil umbrella, as we then have to wrestle with the whys and wherefores and such of God who can and does inflict (or allow to be inflicted) practices on His people that seem so contrary to what we believe is right and good and true.
Adding as a hedge against "presentism" or some other "maybe we in the 21st century don't or can't understand God's moral calculus on these things. I think it is pretty solidly accepted in LDS circles that a major purpose of our mortal experience is learning to judge good and evil, right and wrong. IMO, if we are too quick to simply write this sort of thing off as "God's morality is inscrutable to mere mortals," then I think we are failing in some way to pursue our purpose in this life and learning how to judge right and wrong. Perhaps at the end of the day, I can begrudgingly accept that I just don't understand right and wrong the same way God understands right and wrong, but I am going to be uncomfortable with an inscrutable morality until the moment I can stand before God and ask Him to help me understand it.

I generally agree, but will point out in partial response that the enemies of the Church are *already* emboldened by the mere appointment of a man whom they see as one of their own.  In their paradigm, all they need to do is usurp a few high-profile positions, and then the Church membership like sheep will quietly do the bidding of the libertines.
I don’t want to unduly embarrass the Q15, but part of me also wonders if maybe it isn’t a bad thing for the libertines to know that they’ll never be able to wholly do our thinking for us no matter what positions—or even quorums—some of their allies manage to infiltrate.  

Didn’t it turn out that 4 or 5 of those guys did indeed have convictions for doing bad things to kids?

We do what we can righteously do, and then we stand still and see the salvation of God as he fights our battles, shows to all that he is God, provides means for our continued action, comforts us, and reveals his arm.  God is able to do his own work.