give it the construction which was intended when adopted. No man of
common honesty and common sense dares to assert on this floor that it
was the intent when the Constitution was amended to admit women as lay
delegates. It follows inevitably that they are not constitutionally
eligible, and to admit them is to violate the Constitution of the
Church, which, as a Court, we are in honor bound not to do.

It has been asserted with gravity that the right to vote for a person
for office carries with it the right to be voted for unless prohibited
by positive enactment. This proposition is not true, and never has been.
We have seen, when the Constitution and Restrictive Rules were amended,
the intent was to admit men only as lay delegates. No General Conference
can, by resolution or decision, change the Constitution and Restrictive
Rules. Grant, if you please, that the General Conference, by its action
in 1880, had power to make women eligible in the Quarterly Conference as
stewards and class-leaders, this could not qualify her to become a lay
delegate in the law-making body of the Church. The qualifications of lay
delegates to this body must inhere in the Constitution and Restrictive
Rules, according to their intent and meaning when adopted. It is
fundamental law that where general disabilities exist, not simply by
statute, but by common law, the removal of lesser disabilities does not
carry with it the removal of the greater ones.

Legislation qualifying women to vote in Wyoming and elsewhere had to be
coupled also with positive enactments qualifying her to be voted for,
otherwise she would have been ineligible to office. This is so, and I
defy any lawyer to show the contrary.

§3, Article I, Constitution of the United States, reads: