salt lake tribune stake president robert kirby clipping

The other day a friend from Utah sent me a clipping of a Robert Kirby column from the Salt Lake Tribune about a stake president’s directive that all home and visiting teaching is to be done in Sunday uniform, regardless of the day of the week or hour of the day, that is, white shirts and ties for men (no Dockers, please) and proper skirts for women (no denim, please).

The white shirt and tie uniform is definitely spreading. Here in Sammamish, Washington, my grandson, made a deacon a couple of weeks ago, had to lie out from passing the sacrament on his first Sunday because the white shirts his mother had ordered online hadn’t arrived yet.

I don’t suppose anything is to be done about the Sunday white shirt and tie rule. It appears to be a practice as deeply entrenched in the Mormon sense of ritual as making sure the concluding speaker in sacrament meeting is always a priesthood holder. However, a simple way of protesting the white shirt and tie directive for home teaching does occur to me. The head of a household need only to inform his or her home teachers that if they show up in Sunday best on a day that isn’t Sunday they aren’t welcome in that home. If they want to home teach that household, they need to look like they have some individuality.