MoHoHawaii - Another Gay Mormon Blog

Losing one's religion

2012-01-11T09:24:00.000-08:00

I just spent some time watching an "exit interview" with a CES instructor and his wife who recently resigned from the LDS Church. I highly recommend it. It's a great window into the conflicts that many orthodox members of the Church experience, especially with respect to the Church's rejection of gay people. I found it interesting that the couple's disaffection began with cognitive dissonance about a friendship they formed with a gay man and his partner.

You can check it out here. If you are a believing, participating member of the Church you might find this interview useful in better understanding what people who leave go through. If you are an unorthodox or secular Mormon, it's required viewing. :- )

Pet parrot attacks Mormon missionaries

2011-12-20T18:00:00.000-08:00

OK, this is just a diversion from our normal fare. It's a short clip (2'38") of a pet parrot who goes after two Mormon missionaries.

I have to say that this brought back some memories. A missionary companion and I were once attacked by two geese with serious anger issues. Ah, the memories!

Via: Reuben's Cube

Toward a post-heterosexual Mormon theology

2011-12-12T11:52:00.000-08:00

One of the big Mormon blogs had a discussion on a recent Dialogue article that explored the potential for a gay-affirming version of LDS theology. It took me a couple of hours to read the article and the long thread of comments. It is an interesting presentation and discussion. If you have a couple of hours to burn, check it out.

The article questions whether gender exists and if it exists whether it is eternal. It then argues that if gender is not an essential, eternal attribute of a person, our expectations for straights-only exaltation might be open to revision. (This is a gross abbreviation of a much longer argument.)

Here’s my reaction, for what it’s worth. I’m not sure the point we should be considering is whether gender matters or is eternal. I think it’s pretty obvious that gender matters– if it didn’t then gay Mormons would just marry members of the opposite sex and those marriages would do as well as any others, or equivalently, it would easy for straight people to successfully marry members of the same sex. Clearly, this is not the case. When it comes to the formation of durable pair bonds, gender matters. A lot. We shouldn’t be arguing for the elimination or negation of gender.

It’s also easy to imagine that gender identity persists in the hereafter. LDS tradition tells us that there will be a continuity of personality and identity between our mortal and post-mortal selves. Given how deeply rooted gender identity and sexual orientation seem to be in people, this doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for Mormons to accept theologically. Eternal life where we are not “ourselves” is something other than eternal life.

I guess my question on the theological issue is how eternal the concept of patriarchy might be. Using Wikipedia’s definition, in patriarchy "the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization." In other words, it’s not so much that gender exists and is important to relationships, it’s whether gender disqualifies a person from participation in all aspects of society, including marriage and social leadership. This is a much, much bigger issue than just how we treat gay people.

It's interesting to note that there is a strict correlation across cultures in how women and homosexuals are treated. Compare, for example, Holland versus Saudi Arabia. In strongly patriarchal cultures like Saudi Arabia women are excluded from public life, and homosexuals are put to death. Cultures that have rejected patriarchy, such as Holland, open their society to participation by women in every way and see families headed by same-sex spouses as equal to all other families. Does the society of the Celestial Kingdom more resemble Holland or Saudi Arabia? Right now, the CK is trending toward the Saudi way of doing things-- our Heavenly Mother is mutely sequestered away, polygamy worthy of the FLDS is still the social order, and gay people are excommunicated from the Kingdom by male agents of a male deity. It couldn't be more of a sausage fest.

Thus, the question isn't whether gender is eternal, it's whether eternity is led by the male gender.

Of course, there is an ongoing conversation in Mormon culture on this topic. It is one of Mormonism’s central tensions right now. The earthly church is straining in the direction of Holland even as the folks with their hands on the tiller are pointing it toward Saudi Arabia.

I'm an optimist. The winds will prevail. Tulips and cheese are in our future.

Crazy Mormon love

2011-11-14T11:14:00.000-08:00

The radio program This American Life had an episode where a young gay Mormon describes his (inappropriate) crush on another Mormon guy. It's funny, poignant, utterly insane and oh so Mormon. You can listen to it here. It's called "Benny Takes a Jet" and runs 13 minutes.

You have to listen to this. It's a great story.

Update: Benny has a longer video interview here if you're curious about the person behind the story.

A professor talks about her gay Mormon students

2011-10-17T11:32:00.001-07:00

I read a very good essay by a non-Mormon Utah State professor about her experiences in rural Utah. What she has to say about her gay Mormon students is particularly interesting.

I won't quote her. Instead, I recommend just reading the whole article.

--
Via: Andrew Sullivan

Linens for the sacrament table

2011-08-24T12:01:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember as a child and adolescent my mother would care for the linens used at the sacrament table. I don't think anyone asked her to do this. She was never called and set apart, yet she carefully washed, starched and ironed the sacrament linens regularly. The sacrament table, when prepared, was always perfect in a way that only freshly starched linens can achieve. I also have a (vague) memory of her buying linens for the sacrament table with her own money. I don't know if this was standard at the time in the "mission field" where we lived, but my mother made sure that the tablecloths were of very high quality. I remember that they were of a luxurious weave and had white embroidery.

When I became a teenager it was my job as a male, of course, to help prepare the sacrament. I noticed at the time a difference between the attitude of devotion that my mother had in caring for the sacrament linens (I should also mention that she treated the cloth itself with respect, as if it were holy) and the casual, sometimes disrespectful manner of the boys who prepared the sacrament table. This difference in attitude registered with me, but as a teenager I didn't have the maturity to understand what it meant.

I doubt that my mother ever got a word of thanks for the many years of service she performed. I know that she was not looking for thanks. I think it was simply an act of worship.

Today I have mixed emotions about what my mother did. On the one hand, I admire her devotion, constancy and willingness to honor to symbols that were sacred to her. On the other hand, I have a hard time reconciling that with the public gratitude that was often expressed over the pulpit for the pimply, barely interested adolescent boys (myself included in this sorry lot) who performed the ritual. I have a hard time interpreting this as anything other than even more evidence that men and boys are valued and celebrated in ways that women and girls are not in LDS culture.

My mother (who was born in the first quarter of the 20th century) was of another era. She was extraordinarily bright and talented; she gave up graduate school in a scientific field to marry my father (women's options were not then what they are now); she raised five children. She was my father's equal in every way, yet it was my father who as stake president called bishops and organized the multimillion dollar building program of our stake. My father got an incredible amount of adulation for what he did while my mother starched the sacrament linens, unnoticed. I wonder in the end whose act of devotion meant more.

I think the LDS insistence on "eternal gender" is misplaced. There's absolutely no reason to segregate men's and women's ecclesiastical responsibilities. There's no reason whatsoever to value the contributions of one group of people over another and to exclude whole categories of people from leadership. I, for one, would love to see Carol Lynn Pearson called to the Quorum of the Twelve, and I think my mother should have been the bishop of my ward.

A Tale of Two Humanists

2011-08-16T18:45:00.000-07:00

I read in the paper the a few weeks ago of the death of General Authority emeritus Marion D. Hanks. Elder Hanks very nearly had the privilege of being the first person I ever came out to.

Here’s the story, which happened some 32 years ago.

My father was a stake president during my adolescent and young adult years. We lived “in the mission field,” and in those days the General Authorities made frequent visits to stake conferences. They would arrive on a Friday night and leave on Sunday afternoon. They lodged with president of the stake they were visiting, who was responsible for their food, transportation and housing.

My mother was always stressed by these visits. We went into overdrive cleaning the (already clean) house and making sure there were no failures of hospitality. Of course, occasional lapses did occur. I remember one unfortunate day when after frantic and thorough cleaning of the guest bathroom, someone forgot to replace the towels. The bathroom itself, however, could have been used as an operating theater for brain surgery. It was my job a few hours later to hand in a towel to the naked and dripping member of the Quorum of the Twelve who had stepped out of the shower into the towelless (but very clean!) bathroom. My poor mother almost died of shame. The houseguest in question is still one of the Twelve.

These visits by the Brethren were surprisingly intimate. I’m the youngest child in my family, and for the last several years of high school I was the only child living at home. Therefore, at meals, it would just be my parents, me and the visiting GA. Being a teenager I was, of course, not fully mature, but I was an avid reader and had developed fairly good powers of observation. I studied these men carefully as they sat at our dinner table, rode in the car, spoke in Church and chatted informally with my parents.

I learned something from these visits about General Authorities. I learned that they were usually brusque and impatient men who lacked personal warmth in one-on-one situations. One member of the Quorum of the Twelve (not the one I gave a towel to) struck me as particularly short tempered, even hostile. Only later in life did I learn that the “G.A. personality type” I had encountered was really just an example of the more general executive personality type. I started to run into men like those GAs all the time when I entered corporate life. They usually had titles of Vice President or Chief Whatever. The business executives I saw were efficient time managers who had deep affinity for quantifiable results and were allergic to excuses offered by their underlings. I learned later that everyone who manages an organization of more than 1,000 people has this kind of personality. Unlike virtually every other religious denomination, the LDS Church uses a corporate style of governance. It’s no wonder that the top LDS leaders act like executives when they conduct church business. I’m not offering this tidbit in the spirit of criticism. It’s really just background for what happened next.

When I was a freshman in college I came home for spring break, and the visit happened to coincide with stake conference. Our visiting General Authority was Elder Marion D. Hanks. Elder Hanks had a bit of a cult following in the Church due to his compassionate sermons. I was eager to meet him. At this time I was actively preparing to submit papers for my mission. When I met Elder Hanks, the first thing I noticed was the total absence of the “G.A. personality.” He looked into my eyes, and I immediately understood that he cared and that he was interested in who I was. We chatted about my college experiences (I went to a well-known East Coast school) and some other topics that I don’t remember well. I was completely enthralled by the holiness and compassion of this man. Normally I was reserved, even cautious, around the visiting G.A.s, but not this time.

The stake we lived in was geographically large. At one point during the weekend Elder Hanks needed to be conveyed from one location to another, which would have entailed a car trip of approximately one hour. My father asked me to drive Elder Hanks where he needed to go.

My mind raced: I would have an hour alone with someone who I thought had the answers to the Big Questions. As you can imagine, I was completely preoccupied, prior to my mission, with trying to deal with my homosexual orientation. Like many young people, I thought G.A.s had a direct pipeline to God. A thought came into my head: I could ask Elder Hanks about my big secret.

Fate intervened, however, and I never got the opportunity to have that talk. My father’s schedule cleared, and he was able to drive Elder Hanks himself. I remember my father telling me that he needed to discuss some church business during the drive. The two of them traveled alone.

Thinking back on this I wonder what could have been, and I’m supremely grateful that I did not have the opportunity to bare my soul to that kind-hearted visiting church leader. I have absolute faith that Elder Hanks would have treated me with dignity and compassion. He was that kind of man. Nonetheless, this was during the era of the Church’s most hardline stance against homosexuality. The official thinking was that homosexual orientation could be changed by a process of repentance. Young people were routinely counseled to enter mixed-orientation marriages. No matter how compassionate Elder Hanks might have been, he wouldn’t have had any way to help me, and it is likely that he would have told me to confide in my parents, which at that time would have been a disaster. I might even have ended up in hands of LDS Social Services and who knows where that would have led. This was in the era of aversion therapy and Freudian nonsense. (Which is worse, being thrown into a pit full of behaviorists or Freudians?) It’s hard to remember today how bad the Church used to be on this issue. As bad as it now, there's been a big step forward from when I was a young person.

When I read the Elder Hank’s obituary, I was pleased to find out that he was active in humanitarian causes and had been an early champion of LDS service missions. Even after all these years, I am filled with respect and admiration for this man.

After my mission I went back to college and encountered someone who reminded me of Elder Hanks. It was the famous anthropologist Ashley Montagu. Professor Montagu had pioneered research into the maternal-infant bond. As I got to know him in a small seminar, I was amazed at how profound were his understanding of and affection for the human animal. He had a great influence on my thinking. It was the first time that I realized the power of the humanist point of view and how much it had in common with the highest ideals (as I understood them) of my religious tradition. It was the first time I got a glimpse of the idea that you could be good without God. Of course, I was a closeted, active Mormon at this time on the brink of entering an extremely ill-advised mixed-orientation marriage. He probably thought I was a mess (which I was).

Both Elder Hanks and Professor Montagu have passed on. In the end, I don’t see these men as very different in outlook, even though one of them was probably a nonbeliever (we never discussed it) and the other was an LDS general authority.

[Related note: Interestingly, Elder Hanks was later sidelined in a manner to similar to Marlin Jensen more recently. It seems that sidelining the most compassionate General Authorities is something that repeats itself in every generation.]

Film - Lead with Love

2011-08-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

There's a good video for parents of gay children that's recently been produced by some folks at the University of Utah. You can see it here. It runs for 35 minutes (well worth the time).

I like the fact that the psychologists in the film gave four concrete suggestions for parents. They used the mnemonic LEAD for these:

Let your affection show.

Express your pain away from your child.

Avoid rejecting behaviors.

Do good before you feel good.

This is useful advice. If you want to skip into the section of the film where these are explained, jump to approximately the 20 minute mark.

I think these points are helpful as background for gay people who come out to parents. When you come out, you should realize that even the most accepting parents are going to have powerful emotions and will probably go through a period of adjustment that feels like grieving. Your parents may seem to withhold affection from you and push you away with rejecting behaviors at first. It helps to understand that this is just their way of reacting and that given time their attitude toward you will improve. You just have to be patient and not react strongly to their rejecting behaviors. Maintain faith that they still love you, even if you can't feel their love at first. In my experience, families do come around. It just takes time in some cases.

Here's a preview clip (2 min 39 sec) of the film:

Drinking 101: A word of wisdom

2011-06-30T18:23:00.000-07:00

This post is directed at Mormons, gay and straight, who drink or are open to giving it a try. The problem with being raised LDS is that we have parents who don't drink and who therefore have taught us nothing about how it's done. We don't know how to do it! It turns out that, like almost everything, there are sensible, even stylish ways to go about this as well as ways which range from the merely boorish to the downright self-destructive.

This brief guide is intended, dear reader, to spare you much heartache. Trust me, you don't want to learn how to drink in a gay bar. :- )

So, without further introduction, here are MoHoHawaii's guidelines for successful drinking. Prost!

Know what a drink is. A drink is a fairly standard measure of alcohol. It's equal to 12 oz. of beer, 6 oz. of wine and 1.5 fl. oz. of 80 proof spirits such as gin, tequila, whiskey or vodka. When we talk about how many drinks a person has had, we're talking about these measures, regardless of the number of glasses that have been used.

Drink socially. Drinking is an extraordinarily useful social lubricant. It's been around for millenia. When you start to drink, do it with friends. It's many times more pleasurable than drinking alone.

Drink slowly. There's no need to rush. Pace yourself. Drinking too fast is a classic newbie mistake.

Don't forget food. Alcoholic beverages are best enjoyed with food. If you have friends over and offer them drinks, serve snacks as well. Wine or beer is naturally paired with dinner. Mixed drinks are a good aperitif, or pre-dinner drink to get the conversation flowing.

It's generally a bad idea to drink on an empty stomach. An empty stomach will cause you to absorb the alcohol very quickly. You can feel drunk on a single drink if your stomach is empty. This is not a good idea.

Measure. If you mix drinks for yourself or friends, you should always measure the booze you use. There are several reasons for this. The first is that cocktails (mixed drinks) that are too strong don't taste good. The second is that if your drinks are too big, they are likely to lead to overdrinking. This is bad. You can always have, or offer a guest, another drink later. Leave the supersizing to Slurpees and Big Gulps. Serve, or consume, a single drink at a time.

Note: Some bars (outside of Utah) serve large drinks, drinks that really count as doubles (i.e., two drinks in a single serving). If this happens, realize that you are drinking two drinks and adjust accordingly.

Try drinks that are slightly sweet if you're new to drinking. People who are just starting to drink generally like flavors that are slightly sweeter than people who have been drinking for many years. For example, you may want to try wine, such as Riesling, that is not fully dry ("dry" means "no sugar"). Similarly, some mixed drinks are sweeter than others.

Drink in moderation. It turns out that drinking is good for you. No kidding. People who drink in moderation, which for a medium-sized man is defined as one to four drinks per day, have lower mortality than nondrinkers and heavy drinkers. The effect isn't subtle. Daily moderate drinking adds 3.5 years to average life expectancy. To put this in perspective, access to everything modern medicine has to offer adds seven years to life expectancy, compared to no health care whatsoever. HOWEVER, the health outcomes of heavy drinkers (for example, men who consume more than 5 drinks per day) get worse and worse as the amount of alcohol increases.

Know your limit. It turns out that people metabolize alcohol at different rates. Men who are between 150 lbs and 200 lbs can metabolize about one drink per hour. Most women are somewhat lighter than this, and should adjust accordingly. If you take SSRIs (anti-depressants), be aware that these drugs tend to affect your ability to metabolize alcohol. If you're on anti-depressants, you probably should drink to drink less than your peers who are not on these medications. Also, if you are completely new to drinking, you should take it easy and start slow. To get started, I recommend one drink per hour, with a maximum of four to five drinks in any 12 hour period. If you feel sick the next day (i.e., have a hangover or can't remember the previous evening), it's a sign that you've drunk too much. Don't do this. Being drunk is impolite. You will annoy your friends, and possibly endanger yourself.

Since everyone metabolizes alcohol at different rates, I recommend just being aware of your body. If your speech is slurred, and you feel that your motor coordination is impaired, slow down.

Drink lots of water. Alcohol tends to dehydrate you. You should drink one 8 oz. glass of water for each drink you consume. You'll be glad you did the next day.

If you're old enough to drink, you're old enough to drink decent stuff. Please, don't buy rotgut (the cheapest brands). You don't necessarily have to drink top-shelf hooch, but in general, quality makes a difference. If you like beer, try beer from local breweries. In Utah, Squatter's and Wasatch make decent beer.

Use the right glass. There are different kinds of glasses for different kinds of drinks. Use the right one; glassware is not expensive (try Ikea). And no plastic cups!!!

If you live in Utah, buy your beer at the State Liquor Store The beer sold in Utah grocery stores is watered down, 3.2% beer, which is generally nasty. Skip this and go for the good stuff.

Don't drink and drive. This is a big subject, but the best advice I have is to have a designated non-drinking driver or to take public transportation if you're going to be drinking.

Don't drink much before sex. This is also a big subject. The synopsis is this: alcohol reduces inhibition, which is one of the reasons it's so valuable socially. Parties go a lot better, and people will be less shy if there's something to drink. However, if you're in a situation where you expect sexual activity, you should exercise caution with alcohol. One of the biggest cofactors with HIV infection is intoxication-- you are more likely to forgo precaution against infection (or sleep with the wrong person) if you are drunk.

A lot of people who start drinking wonder if they might be prone to alcoholism. There's an easy test. If drinking a little compels you to drink until you get very drunk, and you have a history of not being able to drink moderately, you're probably a person who should be drinking at all. There's no shame in this; if that's you, just don't drink.

I have a personal testimony of drinking. It's a wonderful way to connect with other people socially. It's a great addition to delicious food and congenial conversation. It's a well-established part of social camaraderie, going back at least 18,000 years of human history. I love to think of our hunter-gatherer ancestors sitting around sharing a brewski and telling stories around the campfire.
-&-

Finally, here are a few tips for things to drink.

Beers: try microbrews, or beers from Belgium or Germany. Mass-market American beer really isn't fit to drink.

Wine: start with sweeter wines and work your way to drier wines. Wine can be expensive. If you're budget conscious, beer or mixed drinks are probably a better deal. Wine generally means "red wine." White wine is inexplicably popular in the U.S. It's perfectly fine to pair red wine with seafood dishes.

Mixed drinks: There are a lot of choices. Here are a handful classic cocktails that get served to guests in the MoHoHawaii household. Be sure to make these with good quality spirits.

Gimlet
2/3 oz. Rose's Lime juice
2 oz. gin (Beefeaters or Plymouth)

Shake with ice until very, very cold; strain into a cocktail glass.

Manhattan
2 oz. bourbon whiskey (Knob Creek, Woodford Reserve, Wild Turkey, etc.)
1 oz. sweet vermouth (Noilly Prat, red label)
Dash Angostura bitters

Stir with ice (don't shake, or you get unappetizing foam on top); strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a preserved cherry.

Manhattan (variation)
2 oz. bourbon whiskey (Wild Turkey, Knob Creek, Woodford Reserve, etc.)
1/2 oz. sweet vermouth (Noilly Prat, red label)
1/2 oz. coffee liqueur (Kahlua)

Stir with ice until very cold; strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a preserved cherry. This is amazingly delicious and doesn't taste like coffee.

My MoHo weekend

2011-06-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

My boyfriend Tobi and I had a houseguest for the four-day Pride weekend: Invictus Pilgrim! It's the first time that I've hosted a blogging colleague at my home, and IP's visit also corresponded with a reconnection of sorts for me with my LDS roots. As you can imagine, we talked a lot about the Church, spirituality, coming out, family relationships, etc. (Both IP and I like to talk. A lot. From about 8am to midnight. You can't shut us up. No surprise there. Tobi was very patient. :- ))

My friend John G-W has written before on his blog about the unique kind of fellowship he receives from his MoHo friends. I can really relate to that. I live my life in a very non-Mormon environment (although I have a large LDS extended family), so it was nice to be able to connect with a friend who understood the Mormon side of me.

Tobi, IP and I had a very full weekend. We had dim sum with a very charming straight couple who are active in the Mormon Stories organization. We went to a very well-attended MoHo breakfast (thanks, Moving Horizon, for hosting that). There were several concerts, street fairs, festive dinners at home and, of course, the main event which was our local Pride parade. The parade had 400,000 spectators this year.

I don't really have any deep insights to share in this post, except to express gratitude for the possibility of friendship in this life. We can love each other. We can support each other and bear each other's burdens. And, when that happens, it feels great. Thanks for being there, IP. I'm honored to have you as a friend.

To one and all, Happy Pride!

Patriarchy, redux

2011-06-22T15:41:00.000-07:00

A recent post on a Mormon-themed group blog asked the question What are some of the common themes that emerge in patriarchal societies? It then compared these societies with Mormonism. There were a number of parallels.

To me, the most interesting aspect of this article was what it didn't mention. Here are the salient items that I thought were missing:

Persecution of homosexuals. Iran and Saudi Arabia prescribe the death penalty for homosexuality. Other patriarchal societies criminalize it. In Mormonism, homosexuality is the sin next to murder, and the Church uses its political muscle against gay civil rights.

Homosexuality, especially male homosexuality, is a repudiation of the patriarchal order’s insistence on strict sexual roles. Gender roles, as Elder Bruce Porter recently put it, are “woven into the very fabric of the universe” for patriarchal cultures. They are the one nonnegotiable item of patriarchal power structures.

The Church’s most strongly worded statement of patriarchal gender roles, The Family: A Proclamation to the World, was issued in response to increasing civil tolerance for homosexuals. This isn’t a coincidence.

Male preoccupation with female modesty. Patriarchal societies in the Arab world and elsewhere enforce restrictive clothing standards for women, up to and including full veil.

In LDS culture, female modesty is a frequent sermon topic. (“Male modesty” doesn’t exist. The shirts and skins basketball game in the Cultural Hall is still around. Male modesty can only jokingly be referred to in LDS circles, usually in relation to homosexuality. Like a lot things in LDS culture, “modesty” involves gender.)

Denial of female sexuality. Patriarchal cultures do not generally do not admit the possibility of women as people with legitimate sexual needs of their own. Instead, women are viewed by their “roles” as wives (providers of sexual release to men) and mothers (asexual nurturers of children).

In Mormon culture, you often see women put on the pedestal of motherhood in a way that neglects the existence of female sexual desire and the need for female sexual fulfillment. The sexually empowered woman is not an LDS archetype.

An odd reflection of the patriarchal denial of female sexuality can be seen in how partriarchal societies treat male homosexuality compared to female homosexuality. In places like Saudi Arabia, female homosexuality is not against the law. Basically, it is not acknowledged to exist. The reason is that the patriarchal view of sex requires a penis to be present. No penis, no sex. No penetration, no sex. In LDS culture, male homosexuality receives the lion's share of attention. Lesbians are rarely mentioned by Mormon leaders. (Penises are, like, way super important in the dudeocracy.)

Polygamy.Patriarchal societies, such as Islam, often practice polygyny (and never polyandry).

Mormon culture has polygamist roots, and elements of polygamist teachings (D&C 132, along with asymmetrical rules for the sealing ordinance, for example) are still on the books.

Placement of responsibility for male sexual behavior upon women. Most patriarchal cultures view male sexual desire for women as a consequence of female seduction. In these cultures, women who are raped are punished for inflaming male desire.

In LDS culture, there have been recent sermons that tell young women that they are responsible for the moral purity of young men.

I'm probably not alone in finding this list a bit creepy.

Change is good

2011-06-20T21:24:00.000-07:00

One of the weirdest things that ever happened was when my college-age son and I were going through some old boxes and he found a copy of the Book of Mormon with his mother's and my photo pasted in the front with our testimonies. The photo was older than he was. This was from one of those ward missionary projects where everyone had to make a bunch of these personalized books and give them to the missionaries to hand out.

The stiff smiles in the photo and the boilerplate confession of faith (including set phrases!) sent me back years. I recalled the person I was at the time of the photo-- closeted, nearly suicidal, and just barely managing to keep the cognitive dissonance from leaking out. And judgmental.

My son was not raised in the church, so the whole thing was extra strange to him. I looked at him sheepishly and gave a what-can-you-do kind of shrug. It was awkward and funny at the same time.

Anyway, changes can be profound. To all of you who are in the process of reevaluating your position with respect to the Church, here's to you! Change is good.

Coming out video

2011-06-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a short coming out video that I enjoyed. It's by a very well-spoken young gay Mormon. I wish him well. He deserves all the happiness that life has to offer.

(Running time 4:11)

LDS message for Pride

2011-06-08T13:25:00.001-07:00

Timed for the annual gay pride celebrations, the LDS Church's official magazine, the Ensign, has an anti-gay manifesto in its current issue.

The article is written by Elder Bruce D. Porter a General Authority who was formerly a political science professor at BYU. The article's subject is political, not spiritual.

Placing political op-ed pieces in the Church's educational materials is not a good idea. In fact, mixing politics with religion, in general, is a bad idea. It results in bad politics and bad religion.

Three things struck me when reading the piece. First, there's the virulence of its anti-gay sentiment. The article contains no words of compassion, just condemnation and a call to political action against families the Church doesn't approve of. Then there's the cowardice. The article doesn't mention gay people by name, and it doesn't use the term homosexuality. It is written entirely using code words. And finally, the article repeatedly claims victim status for the Church. It evades all responsibility for the disaster that was Proposition 8.

You can read the essay for yourself, but I will respond to a few of the most egregious parts.

The first four paragraphs lay the foundation of a straw man argument. Porter presents as controversial the completely uncontroversial position that the family is an important social institution. (Can you see where this is going yet?) After this set up, Porter gets ready to attack his straw man:

[M]any of society’s leaders and opinion-makers increasingly seem to have lost their bearings when it comes to understanding the vital importance of the family.

...

We live in a day ... when good is called evil and evil good. Those who defend the traditional family ... are mocked and ridiculed. On the other hand, those ... who seek to redefine the very essence of what a family is, are praised and upheld as champions of tolerance. Truly, the world has turned upside down.

Sigh.

For the record, those of us who are on the receiving end of the Church's political campaigns do not mock the Church. We disagree with the Church's political actions, and we are harmed by the practical consequences of those actions. There's a difference between disagreeing and mocking, even if the Church doesn't see it.

As for the argument that proponents of marriage equality want to "redefine the very essence of what a family is," one can also ask if President Kimball redefined "the very essence" of LDS priesthood in 1978. Extending the rights and benefits of marriage to a small minority of people has no effect on existing marriages, just as giving the LDS priesthood to blacks did not "redefine" the priesthood already held by others.

As usual, just exactly how same-sex marriage is an attack on the traditional family or on traditional marriage is not explained, it is merely taken for granted. For a thorough discussion of these issues, I would recommend to Elder Porter the transcript of the federal court case that overturned Prop. 8 in California. (Why was Elder Porter, an expert from BYU, not a witness at that trial?)

Next, Porter dismisses tolerance as a virtue while simultaneously accusing any who engage in debate over gay issues as intolerant:

Latter-day Saints are often accused of narrow-mindedness or lack of tolerance and compassion because of our belief in following precise standards of moral behavior as set forth by God’s prophets.... Until recently in our national history, tolerance referred to racial and religious non-discrimination....

Today, however, the world is in danger of abandoning all sense of absolute right or wrong, all morality and virtue, replacing them with an all-encompassing “tolerance” that no longer means what it once meant. An extreme definition of tolerance is now widespread that implicitly or explicitly endorses the right of every person to choose their own morality, even their own “truth,” as though morality and truth were mere matters of personal preference. This extreme tolerance culminates in a refusal to recognize any fixed standards or draw moral distinctions of any kind. Few dare say no to the “almighty self” or suggest that some so-called “lifestyles” may be destructive, contrary to higher law, or simply wrong.

When tolerance is so inflated out of all proportions, it means the death of virtue, for the essence of morality is to draw clear distinctions between right and wrong. All virtue requires saying no firmly and courageously to all that is morally bankrupt.

I don't know where to begin with this kind of twisted and self-serving statement. First of all, the Church is hardly in a position to bring up racial tolerance. Its racist policies were firmly in place within recent memory (I grew up with them), and it used virtually the same language in arguing against civil rights for blacks as it now uses for gay people! The argument, then as now, was (mis)framed in terms of morality and supporting families.

Now, as then, the Church seems unable to distinguish between what influence it should exert over civil laws and the influence it has over religious laws. Why isn't Elder Porter railing against the evils of alcohol and coffee? Where's the Church's support for a referendum that would outlaw alcoholic beverages and Starbucks? And if religious views are so important to respect, where's Elder Porter's support of gay-affirming churches who want to bless gay unions?

The theme of Mormons-as-victims continues:

Curiously enough, this new modern tolerance is often a one-way street. Those who practice it expect everyone to tolerate them in anything they say or do, but show no tolerance themselves toward those who express differing viewpoints or defend traditional morality. Indeed, their intolerance is often most barbed toward those of religious conviction.

In other words, Porter thinks the right of free expression is stifled by open political debate. Porter confuses the right of free expression with an (imagined) right to say whatever one wants without having others who disagree get their chance to present their own arguments. But, apparently, the opinions of others (including those actually harmed by the Church's political actions) don't matter. According the Porter, the Church knows better than the people whose lives it seeks to disrupt:

By defending the traditional family [i.e., legislating against families the Church doesn't approve of], Latter-day Saints bless all people whether others recognize it now or not.

Excuse me for not extending my thanks as I watch my partner lose his right to live in the same country as me due to the Church's efforts to "bless" my life whether I recognize it or not. Please, spare yourselves the effort! The Church is accruing some pretty bad karma with its effort to 'bless' people like me by attacking the one thing in our lives we care most about: our families.

In the middle of all the politics, Elder Porter does bring up one religious point. However, it's the heretical idea that has recently been introduced by LDS leaders to the effect that God's love is conditional.

God’s love is sometimes described as unconditional.... But while God’s love is all-encompassing, His blessings are highly conditional, including the very blessing of being able to feel and experience His love.

[This is an example of bad religion, and it's not coincidental that it is linked to unjust politics.]

Finally, it's back to politics for the wrap-up, with a call to political action:

The Church is a small institution compared with the world at large. Nevertheless, the Latter-day Saints as a people should not underestimate the power of our example, nor our capacity to persuade public opinion, reverse negative trends, or invite seeking souls to enter the gate and walk the Lord’s chosen way. We ought to give our best efforts, in cooperation with like-minded persons and institutions, to defend the family and raise a voice of warning and of invitation to the world. The Lord expects us to do this, and in doing so to ignore the mocking and scorn of those in the great and spacious building, where is housed the pride of the world.

The sense of persecution is just breathtaking, and in case you missed it, the call to "give our best efforts" means to donate money, and to do this "in cooperation with like-minded persons and institutions" means to give money to groups like the National Organization for Marriage, a political organization that was created by the Church to get Prop. 8 on the ballot in California. (Elder Holland's son Matthew was a member of the original board of directors.)

But there's more:

May we as members of the Church rise up and assume our divinely appointed role as a light to the nations. May we sacrifice and labor to rear a generation strong enough to resist the siren songs of popular culture, a generation filled with the Holy Ghost so that they may discern the difference between good and evil, between legitimate tolerance and moral surrender.

Many younger LDS people are not okay with this message. It is not "popular culture" that makes young Mormons sensitive to the plight of their gay peers; it is an emerging sense of justice. I know many devout members of the Church who are heartbroken over the harmful ideas that Elder Porter repeats here. Many members are ashamed of what their Church is doing, and rightly so.

Elder Porter, please know that demeaning someone else's family does not strengthen your own.

I thought things were changing with these folks. Apparently, they are not. Is the Church warming up for the fight in Minnesota in 2012?

There is a silver lining here. It's clear that Elder Porter's op-ed sermon is very defensive. He knows that the Church's position is unpopular with many members of the Church and that its involvement in Prop. 8 was a PR disaster. The subtext of the article is a sense of panic that the Church is losing this one.

It Gets Better - Background

2011-06-01T23:38:00.000-07:00

This is a recent talk by Dan Savage, creator of the It Gets Better project, given at Google. He explains the origin of the project.

What Savage says in this talk is very relevant for Mormons and quite thought provoking. Effectively, it's a story about the power of social media and the inability of institutions to control the channels of communication to young people.

(Run time 46:43, very worthwhile)

The It Gets Better project has had a big impact. While browsing through some of the videos, I found this one by an LDS lesbian which had an intriguing comment:

Natalie, I just wanted to let you know that my awesome BYU professor showed your video in class to help us understand a little more about how hard it would be to be LDS and struggling with ssa. Thanks for sharing!

They're showing friggin' It Gets Better videos in BYU classes now. Let that one sink in for a minute.

Edgar Allan Bro

2011-05-26T19:59:00.000-07:00

Edgar Allan Bro

Via: The Internet Today and Urban Dictionary

Bundles of sticks, and stones

2011-05-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

I have a good straight friend who used to call me a faggot. He just thought it was a funny kind of put-down. I knew he meant no harm (he's a great guy and very gay friendly), but I just never could get comfortable with him doing that. Eventually, I figured out why. Then, I sent him this e-mail.

Dear ___,

Just FYI, and I don't mean to bust your butt here, but as a word "faggot" is equivalent in violence and malice with nigger, kike and cunt. Imagine you were chatting with a black friend and said "you're great, even if you are just a fucking nigger halfbreed." Or to a trusted female colleague you say "I think you do a great job; too bad you're a fucking bitch cunt and not a guy." You can say these things, and it's possible that they would be perceived as funny, but more likely they'd fall flat at best. They are violent words.

In the case of "faggot," you should be aware that this is the word you hear right before you're beaten by drunk homophobic thugs. Like virtually every gay person I know, I've had epithets hurled at me on more than one occasion. In virtually every case "faggot" was among them. I don't think you know this, but I was once assaulted on the street when I lived in Salt Lake City. The cops showed up before I got hurt, but I'll never forget the reptilian look of hatred in those men's eyes, and I've never forgotten the words they used. My assailants called me a faggot. I don't take offense at what you say to me because I know your intent, but I do want to do a tiny amount of consciousness raising here. When you use words in a joking way that are expressions of violent hatred you may evoke associations and memories in your listener that you do not intend. This happens even if the person knows you're joking.

Again, please don't take this in the spirit of reproach. I really just mean to clue you in to the way I and, I expect, others who have been on the receiving end of this kind of stuff react. We don't do this because we are thin skinned or politically minded or out to prove a point; we do it because of the context in which those particular words have been used with us in the past. It's an involuntary response, like shielding yourself from a blow. Anyway, I hope you can understand where I'm coming from on this.

He quit using those words.

How change happens

2011-05-03T01:06:00.000-07:00

The law firm of King and Spalding has withdrawn from defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court. The elite firm had been hired by the U.S. House of Representatives after the Obama administration announced that it considers DOMA to be unconstitutional and will no longer defend it. Shortly after taking the case, King and Spalding had a change of heart and claimed that its engagement had been improperly vetted by internal review.

The Economist has an interesting spin on the significance of King and Spalding's rejection of the case. I think they put it nicely:

This is the way social justice happens. Not with a bang, but with white-shoe law firms becoming uncomfortable taking certain kinds of cases.

I've noticed a change recently on the large LDS blogs I read. Virtually no one defends the LDS Church's position against civil recognition for gay families anymore. Virtually no one tries to justify the Church's blanket condemnation of committed same-sex relationships anymore. There's been a huge change since Prop. 8 several years ago, when you would find bloggers on the large LDS blogs standing up for the Church on this issue. That's all gone now.

To paraphrase The Economist: This is how social justice happens. Not with a bang, but with well-educated Mormon bloggers becoming uncomfortable taking certain stands on social issues.

Things that shouldn't be celebrated

2011-05-02T01:17:00.000-07:00

N.B.: This post has nothing to do with the usual subject of this blog.

Three thousand people were killed on 9/11.

The wars that resulted from 9/11 have caused the deaths of 1,000,000 people, about half of them civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's payback of 300 to 1, if anyone's keeping score or if your morality requires an eye for an eye, which I hope we can all agree is a kind of thinking that really has no legitimate role of any kind in public policy decisions.

To dispatch these 1,000,000 people, we've spent 3 trillion dollars on two wars that have lasted ten years and show no signs of stopping. To put that in perspective, consider that 3 trillion dollars is 3,000 billion dollars. This means we have spent a billion dollars, or 1,000 million dollars to avenge the death of each and every person killed in 9/11. A billion dollars. Per person. So far.

My heart is sick over the public reaction to today's news about the death of Bin Laden. I have no idea if extra-judicial killing (by order of a U.S. president) in the case at hand is legal or advisable. Perhaps it is both; perhaps neither. I'm not going to weigh in on that question as tempting as it is. But I do know that dancing in the streets over the violent death of another human being is not something I will ever do. Ever. I don't care who the person was. Whether the killing had to be done or not, it's not something that requires a party.

Sometimes I feel very, very out of touch with the spirit of the times.

Gay history 101

2011-05-01T00:56:00.000-07:00

Here is a recent documentary from PBS. Worth watching.

Running time 1':20".

Watch the full episode. See more American Experience.

There's a blog post about this film on one of the big Mormon blogs. The comments on that post are almost all pro-gay. (LDS Newsroom, if you're reading this, go read those comments on fMH.)

Movie review: Eyes Wide Open

2011-04-17T21:53:00.000-07:00

Eyes Wide Open (2009) is a remarkable gay-themed movie from Israel that Tobi and saw recently.

It's one of the few movies made on the subject of mixed-orientation marriage, and it's the only one that I can think of that takes place in a conservative religious setting. The film very well done and in fact is so well done that at times it's painful to watch.

The world of conservative Judaism is foreign to outsiders, but I think the movie's setting will resonate with Mormon viewers. Group identity is so strong in this movie that a viewer can really understand why the characters see no way out. Nothing can replace their membership in the tribe. It's not so much that there are disincentives toward leaving; it's that the only life that can be imagined is within their community of believers. Religion colors every aspect of life from the moment these characters get out of bed in the morning.

I don't want to give spoilers, so I'll just summarize the plot as the story of a married Hasidic man and the younger man with whom he falls in love. The character of the wife is played with heartbreaking reality. To its credit, the movie never portrays the wife as a shrew. She is definitely a bystander but in a way that is human, believable and very poignant.

This action of the film is slightly more understandable if you already have some significant cultural exposure to Judaism. There are events in the movie that might seem poorly motivated without familiarity with practices like the mikvah (purifying bath) and the Hasidic concept of tzaddik (a righteous man of special devotion).

In terms of style, the film is clear-eyed and unsentimental. It has compassion for communities of faith and for those who don't fit the mold. It understands the emotional violence of ritual shunning and the compelling nature of the universal human desire to live among one's people.

There's a lot here that Mormons will recognize, a lot that gay Mormons will recognize, and a whole lot that Mormons in a mixed-orientation marriage will recognize.

(FYI, this movie is available in streaming format from Netflix.)

Letter to a 17 year old

2011-04-07T23:05:00.000-07:00

A Mormon-themed blog received this question from a reader:

I'm a 17 years old and I think I might be gay. I don't know who to tell because there really is no one. I have a very good relationship with my parents/family and I don't want to ruin it, but I can't seem to stop the way I feel. I don't want to be gay but I have never felt sexually attracted to a single girl. The only way I know how to describe what I feel is that when a cute guy walks past I stare at him, I feel interested. I don't even notice girls or if they are cute. Is there anything I can do to stop these feelings? I don't want to be gay.

The blogger, a "Licensed Clinical Marriage and Family Therapist," gave an answer which you can read for yourself. Her answer included a statement to the effect that contrary to the claims of organizations like Evergreen change therapy doesn't work. I'm glad that some therapists who are active in the LDS Church are willing to take stands such as this, but I thought the overal tenor of the advice was too tentative.

I left a reply addressed to the original questioner that said:

The first step is to break the isolation by finding a trusted person in your life with whom you can discuss your feelings. This person might be a teacher, a school guidance counselor, a family member or a friend. This is NOT a problem you can or should carry around alone. You need support, and you need it now. It's that simple.

I agree with the other advice given above, but I have to add one thing. There's an elephant in the living room, something that everyone knows is there but won't talk about. It is this: the official opinion of the LDS Church toward homosexuality is not held by many informed LDS people. As a result you will find that informed LDS people (such as [the blogger who answered your question]) will not steer you in the same direction as your bishop might. The answers you hear in Sunday School won't be enough, and you shouldn't assume that every active LDS person around you accepts them. As you start the journey of coming out, you will need to seek answers for yourself and evaluate what many people have to say. You're going to have to think for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

In all of this, be aware that you are not alone. Many of your peers share this issue (for example, on this blog). Others of us, myself included, have had to come to terms with our orientations during our lives. We can promise you: it gets better. It really, really does.

Stay safe and be gentle with yourself along the way.

Readers, what would you say to this 17 year old?

Pure and empty vessels

2011-03-30T14:20:00.000-07:00

We sometimes forget how strongly the idea of patriarchy informs LDS cultural views on sexuality and the expression of gender. I was reminded of this recently when I read a blog post on Feminist Mormon Housewives. For those you who don’t follow fMH, it’s a group blog written by fairly mainstream LDS women about religious and cultural issues in Mormonism. It’s a pretty orthodox crowd, but being from a younger generation they prefer a more egalitarian approach to marriage and church governance.

The post I read took issue with the fact that LDS leaders make women the gatekeepers of male virtue. The case in point was a speech by General YW President Elaine Dalton which claimed that young women shouldn’t send racy text messages or photos to young men because doing so might “cause [young men] to lose the Spirit, their Priesthood Power and their virtue.”

What I find troubling here is the implicit assertion that as sexual beings young men and women are not of equivalent vigor and passion. In other words, we can’t contemplate the idea that a young woman might have sexual motivations of her own; instead, we can only talk about the effect of her actions on the (well acknowledged) sexuality of young men.

The sexuality of men is affirmed in many ways in LDS culture. Lust should be controlled and channeled in specific ways, but male sexuality in general is thought to be a productive and creative aspect of life. Female sexual desire, on the other hand, is one of the topics in LDS culture that is simply never, ever mentioned. Basically, it doesn’t exist in LDS culture. A sexually empowered woman is not an archetype that Mormonism generally allows.

Negation of women as sexual beings is also evident with the LDS focus on female modesty. The idea of female modesty affirms the existence of male sexuality only. Women are the objects of male desire and as such must take care not to inflame male desire by exposing their bodies. On the other hand, the absence of any real concept of “male modesty” (it’s almost a funny term) is one of the signs of vastly different views of young men and women as sexual beings. In LDS thinking, there’s no concern that young men by their manner of dress might inflame the desire of young women. It’s a nonissue because female desire is not really acknowledged to exist.

For young women, not being given any validation of one’s sexual nature, being placed in the asexual role of guardian of what is possessed only by another, is a denial of full personhood. It’s an anachronism that needs to be called out and challenged, and I’m glad that Mormon women are taking this on.

One woman commented:

I believe the whole message of making women responsible for the sexuality of men has greater implications for a girl than just keeping her from getting pregnant as a teen. Once married … where is her sexuality in all of that? I went for a year or more thinking it was all about him… with no orgasms of my own to show for it. Once I could operate sexually more fully, I was left with a huge level of guilt, even though I was married and faithful. I felt guilty for simply being sexual. This went on for over 20 years… what a loss.

When women are given responsibility for something they can’t control, like the thoughts and actions of their husband, they are forced into a very controlling (but uncontrollable) position. If their husband looks at porn, whose fault is it? If their husband lusts after other women he sees… whose fault is that? So much of the time, a wife is blamed for her husband’s infidelity of any kind… and the teachings featured in the post are laying the foundation to make women responsible for something they cannot control.

Assuming responsibility for something you cannot control results in anxiety. How many Mormon women are on anti depressant and/or anti anxiety medication? I, for one, remember how desperate I felt in the quest to keep my husband virtuous. I’ve given up that responsibility only recently and cannot express the freedom I feel in only being charge of myself.

When we teach our girls that only men are sexual creatures and that women are in charge of men’s uncontrollable sexuality, what are we setting our girls up for… for life? My answer? A life of guilt and anxiety.

This comment resonated with me because as a closeted gay Mormon adolescent my sexuality was also completely denied by my surroundings. My culture provided no context for me to live and develop into a sexually mature adult; eventually I had to get this education outside.

It’s hard to describe the effect of having one’s sexual identity erased. If you don’t have a confident and well-grounded sense of yourself as a sexual being, it’s very difficult to assume the full mantle of personhood. You remain diminished or infantilized, with a distinct second-class status. This is one of the ways that patriarchal nature of LDS culture oppresses women and gay people. It’s a connection I hadn’t noticed before.

Short documentary film

2010-12-15T10:44:00.001-08:00

Here's a new short film (26 min) about three young gay Mormon men. It's nicely done.

Disciples by Jordan Currier.

It gets better, 5

2010-11-22T23:23:00.000-08:00

From the folks at Pixar Studios, here's a heartwarming "It Gets Better" video. I wish I could play this at a BYU devotional, at an MTC devotional and as a public-service announcement right before General Conference. This is a message that needs to be heard.

(Why is everyone who works for Pixar so danged cute?)

Moms are the best

2010-11-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

From Momastery, the reflections of a mother of Christian faith about what she would say if her child told her he was gay:

And I don’t mean, Chase, that we would be tolerant of you and your sexuality. If our goal is to be tolerant of people who are different than we are, Chase, than we really are aiming quite low. Traffic jams are to be tolerated. People are to be celebrated.

"Traffic jams are to be tolerated. People are to be celebrated." How I wish her sentiments were the mainstream LDS view! Read what she has to say.

Via: D. Gregory Smith

M&P*

2010-11-17T20:28:00.000-08:00

*(If you know what the acronym M&P stands for, you're a real Mormon.)

I want to take a minute to comment on what the new LDS Church handbook says about masturbation and pornography (yes, M&P). What's most surprising is what's not said.

M

Masturbation is mentioned in only one place in the handbook and that is in an instruction to bishops and stake presidents about what does not warrant a Disciplinary Council. (The handbook refers to it with the archaic term "self-abuse.")

That's it.

Masturbation is not mentioned in the section of the handbook that describes the law of chastity. The chastity section includes language that prohibits "unholy, unnatural or impure practices." You might imagine that masturbation could be construed as one of these practices, but there's a bit of evidence against this interpretation. The very next sentence says that engaging in these practices will result in Church discipline, which is not the case with masturbation. Breaking the law of chastity appears to require more than one person in the room.

While there still is a strong LDS cultural prohibition against masturbation, we're seeing less emphasis from Church leadership. There's virtual silence on the subject of masturbation from the pulpit in General Conference. It seems as if it's evolving into a don't-ask-don't-tell situation.

P

Unlike masturbation, pornography has been a common topic of discourse in General Conference. Yet, from the handbook you wonder what the fuss is about. The handbook mentions pornography in exactly the same section as masturbation: it's in the list of issues that don't warrant a Disciplinary Council. Like masturbation, pornography is not mentioned in the section that defines standards for the law of chastity.

Pornography gets its own dedicated section in the handbook. However, this section mainly presents pornography using a medical metaphor: the use of pornography is seen as a kind of addiction. The language in the handbook focuses on counseling and treatment options; it contains contact numbers for LDS Social Services.

-----------------

Frankly, I'm puzzled by what's going on here. I think the silence about masturbation is a sign that some kind of change is in the works, perhaps a movement toward the more mainstream view that masturbation is benign. The silence about masturbation seems at odds with the increasing rhetoric over the pulpit on the subject of pornography, rhetoric that is not backed up in the handbook by policy. Is it possible that pornography for the LDS hierarchy is more of a symbolic issue? I'm wondering if the fight against pornography is really a fight against cultural change and secularization. I don't have evidence for this conjecture, but it's an idea I'd like to explore further.

Do you have any thoughts on M&P and why the new handbook virtually omits them?

(Un)holy, (un)natural and (im)pure practices

2010-11-15T19:58:00.000-08:00

There's a recognizable phrase that's been floating around the Church for about 30 years. The first use that I can find occurred in a letter to bishops from the First Presidency dated January 5, 1982:

The First Presidency has interpreted oral sex as constituting an unnatural, impure, or unholy practice.

I remember when this statement came out. It was mostly ignored by my liberal, East Coast university ward.

The phrase "unholy, unnatural or impure practice" appears to be an expansion of a warning in the temple ceremony against some fairly venal sins such as "lightmindedness." We are to avoid these venal sins and "every other unholy and impure practice." The context in the temple is not at all related to sexuality, so I have to conclude that the the use in the 1982 letter was a novel one, only coincidentally related to the similar language used in the temple except to give the phrase extra authority by unconscious association with the temple rite. Also, the word "unnatural" is significant addition-- it's a word that is loaded with all kinds of sexual connotations. These days it usually refers to anal sex, but it has also been used to make reference to all sexual acts that don't have the possibility of pregnancy. For example, LDS texts in the 1950s to 1970s referred to the evils of "unnatural" methods of birth control.

Shortly after the First Presidency's letter was received by bishops in 1982, a question about "unholy, unnatural, or impure practices" in the marital bed was added to the list of questions used in temple recommend interviews. There was almost an immediate backlash. The first indication of the backlash was a second letter, just about one year later, from the First Presidency saying that bishops were not to pry into a married couple's sex life. (!) Eventually, by 1986, the question was deleted from the temple recommend interview entirely.

Of course, since that time, the Church has further backed away from its prohibition of oral sex in marriage. The most recent guidance seems only to say that "if you feel guilty enough about it to ask, you shouldn't do it." The most common advice you'll hear from bishops is that if the wife objects to it, a husband doesn't press her. In general, Mormon ideas of acceptable sexuality stick to a narrower range than the mainstream culture. For the most part, heterosexual anal sex, the use of pornography as a couple, role play or any kind fetish or kink are pretty much off limits for Mormons. Sex toys (for example, a vibrator) seem to be the wild frontier for the most adventurous Mormons, but even then the Relief Society sister with her trusty strap-on and a mischievous gleam in her eye is beyond imagining.

Although the sin it originally named is no longer a sin, the phrase "unholy, unnatural, or impure practice" is still with us. It is now found in section 21.4.5 of the Church's 2010 Handbook 2:

Adultery, fornication, homosexual or lesbian relations, and every other unholy, unnatural, or impure practice are sinful.

What the current phrase means is left to the imagination. You might be tempted to view it as a reinstatement of the old prohibition against oral sex or any other "unnatural" act that doesn't lead to possible pregnancy. However, the idea that sex needs to be procreative to be holy, natural and pure is contradicted by section 21.4.4 of the handbook:

Married couples should also understand that sexual relations within marriage are divinely approved not only for the purposes of procreation, but also as a way of expressing love and strengthening emotional and spiritual bonds between husband and wife.

This all leads me to the problem that Judge Walker addressed in the court ruling that invalidated Prop. 8. Essentially, the problem is that once you define marriage as a loving partnership that includes relational aspects and not just procreation and the control of property through coverture or inheritance, it makes no sense to exclude loving same-sex couples. In other words, when the Church adopts the position that sexual relations are pure, natural and holy on their own when performed by a loving couple who are emotionally and spiritually bound to each other, then it's much harder to argue that same-sex couples who use physical intimacy to strengthen these kinds of bonds are sinful.

(To be continued...)

Church changes stance on gay marriage in CHI 2010

2010-11-11T22:10:00.000-08:00

The 2010 edition of the Church Handbook of Instructions (CHI) contains a very different position on gay marriage than the 2006 edition. Here are the edits, with deletions in ~~strikeout~~ and additions in italics:

Same-Gender Marriage

Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God. The Church accordingly opposes same-gender marriages and any efforts to legalize such marriages. Church members are encouraged "to appeal to legislators, judges, and other government officials to preserve the purposes and sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, and to reject all efforts to give legal authorization or other official approval or support to marriages between persons of the same gender" (First Presidency letter Feb 1, 1994; see also "Homosexual Behavior" in the previous column).

As a doctrinal principle, based on the scriptures, the Church affirms that marriage between a man and a woman is essential to ~~God's~~ the Creator's plan for the eternal destiny of His children.

~~The powers of procreation are to be exercised~~ Sexual relations are proper only between a man and a woman who are legally and lawfully wedded as husband and wife. Any other sexual relations, including those between persons of the same gender, are sinful and undermine the divinely created institution of the family. The Church accordingly ~~favors measures that define~~ affirms defining marriage as the legal and lawful union of a man and a woman ~~and that do not confer legal status on any other sexual relationship~~.

~~While opposing same-gender marriage, the Church reaches out with understanding and respect to individuals who are attracted to those of the same gender. See also "Homosexual Behavior" on page 187.~~

This is a large change. The Church rolls back overt support or opposition of any specific marriage statute and replaces it with a vague statement that "affirms defining" marriage in a way that would exclude same-sex couples. ("Affirm" could mean just about anything in this context. It's not a strong word.) The admonition for members to get involved politically has been entirely deleted as well as opposition to civil recognition of same-sex relationships that falls short of marriage.

It's not exactly "I'm sorry, gays" but who am I to quibble? This is progress.

Kremlinology, con't

2010-11-10T13:25:00.000-08:00

Project Mayhem reports that the 2010 edition of the Church Handbook of Instructions has a significantly revised section on homosexuality.

Comparing the 2006 edition with 2010, here are the changes reported on Project Mayhem's blog. Deletions are in ~~strikeout~~, insertions are in italics:

Homosexual behavior violates the commandments of God, is contrary to the purposes of human sexuality, ~~distorts loving relationships,~~ and deprives people of the blessings that can be found in family life and in the saving ordinances of the gospel. Those who persist in such behavior or who influence others to do so are subject to Church discipline. Homosexual behavior can be forgiven through sincere repentance.

If members ~~have homosexual thoughts or feelings or~~ engage in homosexual behavior, Church leaders should help them have a clear understanding of faith in Jesus Christ, the process of repentance, and the purpose of life on earth. ~~Leaders also should help them accept responsibility for their thoughts and actions and apply gospel principles in their lives.~~

While opposing homosexual behavior, the Church reaches out to understanding and respect to individuals who are attracted to those of the same gender. [This was moved from being the 2nd to 3rd paragraph]

In addition to the inspired assistance of Church leaders, members may need professional counseling. When appropriate, bishops should contact LDS Social Services to identify resources to provide such counseling in harmony with gospel principles.

[If members feel same-gender attraction but do not engage in any homosexual behavior, leaders should support and encourage them in their resolve to live the law of chastity and to control unrighteous thoughts. These members may receive Church callings. If they are worthy and qualified in every other way, they may also hold temple recommends and receive temple ordinances.]

Okay, folks, this is a pretty big change. The biggest part is the Church's discontinuation of support for scientifically discredited therapeutic techniques that attempt to change sexual orientation. Homosexual orientation is now recognized to exist and is morally neutral. The Church now asks only for celibacy; you don't have to repent anymore for being gay.

I am especially gratified to see ~~distorts loving relationships~~ removed from the text. Break out the champagne, boyfriend! Our love isn't a perverted caricature of human affection after all!

There's a lot that's missing from this section. For example, the CHI is still silent on the advisability of mixed-orientation marriages, even though official statements of the Church have discouraged them. This lack of clarity does a lot of damage.

Winners: good sense and reason. Losers: LDS Social Services and the reparative therapy industry.

UPDATE After posting this, I was able to review for myself the relevant section in the 2010 CHI. The section on LDS Social services is *still* in the handbook, contrary to the report I relied on for this post. Therefore, the conclusions reached in this post are not valid, and I retract them.

The rewording in this section of the CHI does reinforce the notion that homosexual orientation is morally neutral, but it does not retract the Church's support for LDS Social Services.

Colt Hansen - Rest in peace

2010-11-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

Three days ago in Salt Lake City, Colt Hansen, a young gay man from a Mormon family, took his life. Colt participated in the SLC gay community and had worked at Try-Angles, a local gay bar. Colt's friends report that he struggled with his family over their refusal to accept him. This came to a head the night before Colt's death, when he and his father argued for the last time.

The obituary prepared by Colt's family is stunning. I'll quote a little of it. The whole thing can be found here.

Our beloved son, brother, grandson, and uncle passed away peacefully in Salt Lake City, Utah on November 3, 2010 after a severe battle with depression.

There is nothing peaceful about suicide. It is an extreme form of violence. I can assure you that Colt's last hours on this earth were the exact opposite of peaceful. It breaks my heart to think of it.

How much of Colt's "severe battle" was caused by familial rejection? Academic studies show that young gay people whose families exhibit rejecting behaviors toward them are eight times more likely to attempt suicide.

Colt loved being around his friends and family. ... Colt loved his dogs, Kasha and Travis. He was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

This paragraph breaks my heart. The last communication Colt had with his family was an argument over his rejection of the LDS Church. I guess the family got the last word on the subject. Even in death they couldn't leave this one alone. I guess it could be wishful thinking on the part of the parents or attempt to reduce the family's shame over having a gay son. In any case, identifying Colt as a member of the LDS Church dishonors his life.

Colt is survived by his loving parents, Rick and Connie Hansen

I know that I in similar circumstances would not have the gall to editorialize about myself in this way. Is that adjective really needed under these painful circumstances? Does no one feel even partial regret about actions they might rethink in the face of tragedy?

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the LDS Church Missionary Fund.

This part is over the top. I am speechless at the insensitivity. The subtext is one of utter cruelty. It almost gloats. It says that Colt's life, what he chose for himself, the hopes and dreams that he nurtured, are of no importance. This one statement is the complete invalidation of a particular human life.

Colt will be buried on Tuesday, November 9.

Reading reports of the needless deaths of our beautiful young gay Mormon people should distress us all and motivate us to action. We must stanch the flow of blood.

Via: Eric Ethington

WWJD

2010-11-05T17:19:00.000-07:00

I read the following letter to advice columnist Dan Savage.

I'm a 29 year-old gay ex-Mormon who has been almost completely estranged by my extended family since coming out at 16. They live in dense Mormon communities where homosexuals have to be closeted or risk being ostracized by literally their family/friend/church communities (I lost everyone and moved out of the state, alone, at the age of 16).

I was shocked this morning to find out that I have a 16-year-old cousin who is gay and tried to kill himself a few weeks ago. Because i'm not on speaking terms with anyone outside of my immediate family—and those connections took 10 years to reestablish—the news arrived to me as gossip.

Luckily living in 2010 it wasn't hard to track him down on a social networking site. I've had a few conversations with him, but in spite of the fact that my page is covered with "It Gets Better" videos and pictures of me with various boyfriends, he's still trying to keep up a straight facade—which is the only way he can survive in Utah.

When I was his age I was the victim of a gossip torrent outing me to everyone I knew that nearly pushed me to suicide. He knows I haven't spoken to any of his family in 13 years. I don't want him to feel like this is gossip rippling through the family (which it is) or that he's been outed to his whole family (which he has).

What advice can you give me Dan? I want to respect his right to come out to me when he feels comfortable, but I also don't want to overwhelm him or wait for the next attempt. There are zero resources in his (almost 90%) Mormon community, and at least for now it won't get better.

[FMB]

Dan writes back:

Don't fuck around, FMB.

Get this boy's number, call him, tell him you're gay, and tell he can come and live with you, if he needs to, and that he can finish high school in a saner place, surrounded by sane people, a place where it will get better for him.

Step up, FMB, and be the hero this kid needs.—Dan

FMB replies:

Should have thought of that—got him a ticket to come out next week. Thanks.—FMB

This, dear readers, made me cry.

Why I love Mormons

2010-11-05T16:49:00.001-07:00

I love Mormons... because of Mormons like William Bradshaw.

[Note: This video is not Bradshaw's recent lecture on homosexuality. Instead, it's a recent interview about his personal experiences with his gay son and Prop 8.]

Younger and blonder wives

2010-10-21T15:12:00.000-07:00

I have a guest post at one of the Mormon group blogs. Check it out!

LDS Church redefines marriage language

2010-10-13T17:49:00.000-07:00

Here’s what I noticed in the statement issued yesterday by the LDS Church in response to a letter it received from the Human Rights Campaign. The statement was read by Michael Otterson.

1) LDS Newsroom has begun to use words gay and lesbian without prefixing them with "so-called" or placing the words in quotation marks. You can see this in several places in Otterson’s statement.

Further, Otterson uses these words as nouns as well as adjectives, which is something you still won’t hear in General Conference. LDS PR is taking the next step in saying that people known as gays and lesbians exist.

(Prior usage would have been the clumsy and demeaning phrase "people suffering from same-gender attraction."

It’s also interesting to note that the use of the word gay is so new to the Church that its copyeditors didn’t catch the nonstandard phrase "gay young men" and replace it with the more idiomatic "young gay men." )

2) LDS Newsroom used the term sexual orientation without prefixing it with "so-called" or putting it in quotation marks to delegitimize it. The idea that sexual orientation exists is very new to LDS official discourse. This may be the first use of the term in any kind of official LDS statement.

3) The statement explicitly calls out the fact that the Church recognizes that same-sex attraction is not lust. Otterson offers that there are "emotional, social, and physical feelings" involved. The implication is that sexual orientation is important to the formation of pair bonds. This an important change in thinking and strongly contradicts Elder Packer’s remarks. (Elder Packer admits only sexual desire, and not the social and emotional bonding that exists for a same-sex couple.)

4) LDS PR speaks the name "Human Rights Campaign" and says that the Church shares some goals with HRC. This may be the first time any offical statement by the Church has dignified a gay-rights group by speaking its name. (Prior usage would have been "Some say that..." or "While proponents of so-called 'gay rights' claim that...").

You can look back on previous statements from the Church to see how novel the current language is. For example, even as late as the Oaks/Wickman interview, the Church used quotation marks to indicate that the word relationship when applied to same-sex couples could only denote a risible counterfeit of authentic human experience. That’s now gone.

Kremlinologists (and copyeditors) take note. Change is afoot. :- )

It gets better, 4

2010-10-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

This one moved me greatly.

I myself was that boy on the bridge at a particular moment in my youth. I'm glad I chose life.

It gets better, 3

2010-09-30T13:19:00.000-07:00

This is for all of the young people who might be following this blog.

(No Mormon references in this one.)

A lot of the videos in this series make reference to high school as the difficult years for young gay people. Watching these, I keep thinking of all the gay undergraduates at BYU who have such a hard time. When you watch these videos, just substitute "BYU" whenever you hear "high school."

It gets better, 2

2010-09-29T20:18:00.000-07:00

There's a special Mormon shout-out at 0:36 to 0:39.

It gets better

2010-09-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

Advice columnist Dan Savage and his husband Terry have started a YouTube project to prevent gay teen suicide. The theme is to tell young people who might be struggling that it gets better. There is something to hope for. You can contribute your own video. Here's Dan's and Terry's:

Movie review: Patrik, Age 1.5

2010-09-02T00:23:00.000-07:00

Tobi and I saw the gay-themed comedy/drama Patrik, Age 1.5 this week. This Swedish film had received very mediocre reviews, so we made sure to go see it during the discount show so that we weren't too invested in the outcome. :- )

Sometimes I think how well you like a film is related to your prior expectations. If you go in thinking you won't like it, you are often favorably impressed that it was better than you thought. If you expect it to be great, it's often a disappointment. True to form, this poorly reviewed movie surprised us. Tobi and I really, really liked it.

The story is about a married male couple, Sven and Göran, who have been cleared to adopt a child. They are expecting a toddler but bureaucratic mix-ups cause them to get a homophobic 15-year-old juvenile delinquent instead.

The twists and turns of plot that occur after the initial mix-up aren't particularly original, but the film has many other charms. For one thing, the acting is a delight. There are a number of characters, and all of them have colorful parts. There wasn't a single actor in the film who showed anything other than mastery of his or her part. The various technical aspects, such as cinematography, editing and soundtrack were top notch. The script, despite its many weaknesses, was entertaining and at times even touching. And, of course, the details of Swedish culture are interesting, too (Sven and Göran joke that they could take a baby of any nationality except Danish).

If you can bring yourself to forgive the less-than-plausible premise, this movie really has a lot to offer in terms of characters, humor and appreciation for the fact that loving families come in many flavors. If you can't catch it at your local independent theater, I'm sure the DVD will be available soon.

Here's the trailer:

Dealing with LDS families

2010-08-31T14:58:00.001-07:00

There's an interesting thread on Mormon Matters about LDS families with gay children. Readers of this blog may want to check it out and possibly contribute their own stories.

Carol Lynn Pearson - podcast

2010-08-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

Mormon Stories has a podcast with Carol Lynn Pearson, the author of Goodbye, I Love You, Facing East and No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons Around Our Gay Loved Ones.

The podcast is lengthy but very worthwhile. My favorite section is Part 4 where Sister Pearson talks about supporting gays in the Church and society.

This section is about 1 hour and 15 minutes long. It is worth every minute. Here's a quick guide to Part 4 of the interview:

1:05 Writing Goodbye, I Love You
2:00 LDS reactions to Goodbye, I Love You
10:00 Carol Lynn begins to get letters from gay people and their families
11:20 Writing Facing East (a play about parents who deal with the suicide of their gay son).
15:45 LDS reactions to Facing East
16:30 Writing No More Goodbyes
19:27 Prop 8. and its aftermath
29:20 Attempts at reconciliation by the Oakland Stake
33:02 Advice for young people wondering if there is a place in the church for them
37:45 Advice for a person considering entering a mixed-orientation marriage
41:10 Advice for a gay person trying to make a mixed-orientation marriage work
44:13 Advice for navigating a divorce
45:10 Advice for gay Mormons with respect to same-sex relationships
48:20 The possibility of long-term same-sex relationships and the benefits of social support for gay relationships
50:52 Comments about this moment in history
52:05 Are long-term gay relationships even possible? (rebuttal to hostile interview question)
58:50 Advice for a man who chooses celibacy
1:01:10 The need for partnership
1:06:25 Advice for parents of gay children
1:11:15 Suicide

You can view the entire interview (parts 1 - 5, about 4 hours) here.

Pearson is compassionate and wise. She has keen emotional intelligence (I believe this is what has helped her avoid run-ins with LDS leaders). Her activism on this issue within the framework of the Church shows tremendous moral courage. I don't when I've ever seen gay people better defended within the Mormon context.

A mixed-orientation analogy

2010-06-21T23:56:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's read this blog knows that I don't think we should be encouraging young people into mixed-orientation marriages. My outspokenness on this issue tends to offend people who are already in mixed-orientation marriages, even though my position on existing MOMs is positive. I support these couples 100%, wherever their paths take them.

I finally came up with an analogy that might make this clearer. Bear with me.

We all know that it's not a good idea for teenagers to get married. Marriages between 17 year olds have a very high rate of failure. Those that don't end in failure are often stormy. The couple often find themselves growing apart by the time they are 30. Etc. We can point to specific reasons why early marriage is an extraordinarily bad idea. There's no need to recite the list here.

Now, let's suppose you and your spouse did marry in your teens, and your teen marriage happens to be one of the exceptions to the rule. You've stayed married for two or three decades and are satisfied with your marriage. Maybe there have been some rough spots along the way but all-in-all you are content with the family structure you have built.

Question: Does the fact that your teen marriage is doing well decades later mean that we should soft-pedal our advice to young people who might be contemplating such a union today? Is the fact that we strongly discourage marriage between teens on practical grounds showing a kind of disrespect for your successful marriage?

I think it's pretty easy to see that the answer to these questions is no. No one is showing intolerance for your marriage by strongly advising young people against marrying when they are 17. That some couples are capable of maintaining their teen marriages into middle age doesn't change the fact that young people considering this step should be alerted to the extreme inadvisability of teenage marriage.

Now, suppose that you are well versed in the many problems of teenage marriage. Maybe you even were in one of these, and it was a spectacular and painful failure. Maybe you are acquainted with a large number of couples who have experienced sorrow as a result of underage marriage. Maybe you've read the statistics and the academic literature on the subject. Then, you happen to meet a happy couple who years earlier married young. What would your feeling be toward this couple? Would you disdain their relationship? The answer is no, of course not. You'd be happy for them.

What if you met a couple who happened to be struggling as a result of problems connected to marrying so young. Would you hope for them to fail as a way of validating your own anti-teen-marriage ideology or would you empathize with their issues and hope for the best? Again, it's not a stretch to imagine that you'd be on their side.

Finally, what if your own teen-aged son or daughter came to you and asked your advice whether they should marry their sweetheart. Would you encourage the pair of enamored 17 year olds to pray about it and ask God if they should marry? Would you pass along anecdotes of couples who married young and beat the odds? I don't think so. You'd tell them in clear terms what the story was, with no ifs, ands or buts.

In my mind, the parallel between these two situations (teenage marriage and marriage between people of unmatched sexual orientations) is strong, yet I end up thoroughly offending people in mixed-orientation marriages on a regular basis. I have yet to offend anyone who married young. My theory about this is that people in mixed-orientation marriages can be a lot touchier about the issue than people who might have married as teenagers. I'm not exactly sure why.

I'd love to hear from any of you in mixed-orientation marriages or from anyone else with an opinion on the topic. Does my analogy make any sense to you? I'm happy to take criticism. If you think I've been smoking something, let me know.

Best anti-plagiarism video ever

2010-06-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

I love this video. Be sure to turn on the subtitles if you don't speak Norwegian.

No gay or Mormon content-- it's a video produced by the University of Bergen to encourage students not to plagiarize someone else's work. There's enough going on that I recommend watching it high-def, full screen.

(After you watch it, you can see one of the many hilarious references here.)

Via: Stephen's Lighthouse

Brodie love

2010-05-31T09:07:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan of Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History, a historically accurate and extremely readable biography of Joseph Smith. There was an interesting discussion of this book on a Mormon-themed blog recently.

The interesting thing about this book is that the Church has spent two generations painting it as the personal vendetta of an apostate bent on destroying the Kingdom. The church's own apologist-in-chief Hugh Nibley did a particularly unscrupulous (and embarrassing) hatchet job on it and this has been continued by the FAIR and FARMS crowd. However, when Richard Bushman, a faithful LDS historian, finally got around to writing Rough Stone Rolling, the closest thing there is to an uncontested Joseph Smith biography, he borrowed so heavily from Brodie that he effectively vindicated her. The Church does not contest Bushman, but his book contains the same facts as Brodie! (In fact, I argue that it adds so little, it should not have been written.) The only difference is that Bushman changes the tone and paints Joseph Smith as more of a passive observer rather than a charismatic leader. The blog post I mentioned earlier has an interesting comparison between Brodie's Joseph Smith and Bushman's. For my money, Brodie's book is much, much better written. She has a gift for narrative that Bushman lacks. And after all those years of Brodie-hating, the Church has effectively granted all her points. I guess it's too much to expect an apology. In any case, I can't recommend NMKMH too highly.

To fill in the gaps left by Brodie, I also like Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith by Newell and Avery. Emma Smith's story is fascinating and puts a lot of the other material in context. Official Mormon history pretty much leaves women out. If your only exposure to LDS history is the correlated version you read in the lesson manuals, you really owe it to yourself to read these two books.

One more book I want to mention is Roots of Modern Mormonism by Mark P. Leone (Harvard Univ Press, 1979). This very readable book shows how Mormonism went from an interesting and freewheeling band of outsiders to end up as the stodgiest kind of establishment religion imaginable. Leone shows how Utah's statehood and its aftermath changed everything. It was a remarkable transformation. If you read Brodie and wonder what ever happened to that church, Leone's book tells you.

(I also want to plug the recent podcast about correlation, described here.)

Happy 101 Sweet Friends

2010-05-30T02:51:00.000-07:00

Reina La Reine tagged me. I guess that means I have to quit being a curmudgeon for ten minutes. I suppose it won't kill me.

I, MoHoHawaii, would truly be ungrateful this day if I didn't stand before you and express my gratitude for:

1. Reason and empirical methods. I stand in awe of people like Newton and Einstein and Alan Guth. What we now know about the natural world and the cosmos is mind boggling. Why don't we spend a three-hour block every week studying this?

2. Art. Art produces a feeling of transcendence in me that has kind of replaced what I used to look for in religion. It was a life-changing experience when I took my son to see the Ghent Altarpiece.

3. Friendship and love. This life is lonely. I couldn't do it without the people I love.

4. Books. My childhood was saved by books. They were a lifeline into a world outside. I never outgrew the habit of reading them.

5. The Internet. Delete items 1 - 4 if you must. I'll take the Internet over any one of them. (Just kidding.) Number 5a on this list would have to be FedEx and UPS. I list them in this section because they're as much a part of the Internet as HTTP.

6. The Performing Arts. I am a fan.

7. State and national parks. These restore my soul.

8. Museums. These are my holy shrines. See #2 above.

9. Food culture. Fresh, well-prepared food served with an appropriately matched fermented beverage and eaten over leisurely conversation is one of life's great pleasures. This gets such a bad rap in Mormonism. We learned at a young age that "eat, drink and be merry" is Very Bad. It is against the rules in Mormonism to serve meals that last more than 15 minutes. Individual servings (as opposed to "family style"), not to mention actual courses, are the first signs of apostasy, as bad as that subscription to Sunstone or Dialogue.

10. Japanese spas. My boyfriend introduced me, but now I would go even if he didn't ask. (The Japanese word for these is onsen.)

According to the rules of the meme, I'm supposed to tag 10 other people. I cannot in good conscience bring myself to do this. If you have read through this list, consider yourself tagged.

Teach the controversy!

2010-05-27T22:40:00.000-07:00

Funny stuff. :- )

--

Just as an aside, a recent Pew Research Center study showed that belief in the scientific basis of biology is lower in Mormons than any other religious group measured by the study, except Jehovah's Witnesses. Also, and completely by accident, I ran across an Ensign article explaining that both the Flood and the Tower of Babel are fully historical events. (Look it up on lds.org if you think I'm kidding-- The Flood and the Tower of Babel" by Donald W. Parry, Ensign, January 1998.)

This has kind of sneaked up on me. I had forgotten that Mormons are (officially at least) Biblical literalists and what the implication of that really is. It's been a long time.

I remember when I was in the MTC, our branch president, who was a BYU humanities scholar in his 50s, was reading aloud an Old Testament passage that mentioned a prophet (I don't think it was Methuselah) who died at 900 years of age. A young Elder in my group involuntarily gave a short laugh of surprise. (I was well aware of Biblical longevity claims so I knew better than to laugh.) Our branch president looked up briefly from the passage he was reading and made eye contact with the Elder. The room got quiet and the Elder blushed. I still clearly remember his narrow face as it went to pink and then to red. It was an awkward moment. Nothing was said. The BP looked down and continued reading aloud. To me, the message was very clear, and I felt a slight shadow of fear pass over me. Point out the obvious, and you'll be punished. It wasn't a big deal, but on the other hand I've never forgotten that day.

Facts matter. Nobody ever lived to 900. There, I said it. After all these years.

Photo via: LOL god

Polyamorous mom

2010-05-18T20:10:00.000-07:00

I just ran across a blog by a woman from an LDS background who practices polyandry. She has a husband and a male partner who himself is married to another woman. Everything is out in the open; there's no sneaking around involved.

The blog pretty much speaks for itself and doesn't need my commentary. Check it out.

APA v Evergreen/NARTH

2010-05-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

The American Psychological Association has a Web-based pamphlet with basic, factual information about homosexuality. (Also in PDF.) It's a good introduction and something that you could point your friends and family to.

One of the things it addresses is the fact that sexual orientation is distinct from the masculine/feminine gender spectrum and that sexual orientation is also not only about modes of sexual behavior. Sexual orientation is a determining factor in the formation of intimate attachment. It determines, in a profound way, which relationships are possible for most people. The basic distinctions between gender expression, sexual object choice and potential for nonplatonic relationships are hopelessly conflated in the Evergreen/NARTH/LDS literature, and in fact it simply sweeps the entire issue of relationships under the rug.

From the APA pamphlet:

Sexual orientation is distinct from other components of sex and gender, including biological sex (the anatomical, physiological, and genetic characteristics associated with being male or female), gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and social gender role (the cultural norms that define feminine and masculine behavior).

Sexual orientation is commonly discussed as if it were solely a characteristic of an individual, like biological sex, gender identity, or age. This perspective is incomplete because sexual orientation is defined in terms of relationships with others. People express their sexual orientation through behaviors with others, including such simple actions as holding hands or kissing. Thus, sexual orientation is closely tied to the intimate personal relationships that meet deeply felt needs for love, attachment, and intimacy. In addition to sexual behaviors, these bonds include nonsexual physical affection between partners, shared goals and values, mutual support, and ongoing commitment. Therefore, sexual orientation is not merely a personal characteristic within an individual. Rather, one's sexual orientation defines the group of people in which one is likely to find the satisfying and fulfilling romantic relationships that are an essential component of personal identity for many people. [Emphasis added.]

I thought of this when I chanced upon this comment from an anonymous LDS reader of another blog:

I'm a married (15 years, 5 kids) gay man and I can attest that one should never go into a marriage when one partner is gay thinking everything will be all right. I told my wife before we got married that I had "been gay" but was now over it. I thought over time my "gayness" would diminish and I'd end up being an almost normal LDS married man. (Evergreen needs to be banned). Last August I had a near mental breakdown. Since that time, my wife and I have had some excruciatingly difficult discussions. We are still married and highly motivated to make it work. I cannot say with certainty that it will, but I do know that it is extremely difficult. Like it or not, sex is a huge part of any union. You simply cannot have a true marriage relationship without it.

When we say things like "sex is a huge part of any union" we mean more than the physical aspects. The make-or-break problem with mismatched sexual orientations isn't just an asymmetrical desire for sex (A wants it more than B does). Instead, the crucial problem is the inability to form a durable pair bond in such a relationship (this is evidenced by an enduring feeling of loneliness or separateness). Having matched orientations (not the sex act itself) is the secret sauce.

I've heard the argument that putting your cards on the table before entering into a mixed-orientation marriage resolves the ethical issues and levels the playing field. The idea is that if both parties go into marriage with their eyes open, then problems can be avoided. I view this argument with skepticism. Going into a marriage with low expectations for sexual relations does nothing to prepare you for the inability to develop deep emotional attachment and comfort in the long term. That's the gotcha, and Evergreen doesn't even acknowledge it exists.

To all of you in mixed-orientation marriages, I wish you the best. The outcomes and experience will vary by age, duration of the marriage and temperament. Nothing is foreordained.

To those of you who are single, please take this seriously. Get information from the mainstream scientific community and not just from official-sounding repackagers of religious views like Evergreen and NARTH.

Sweet Mormon Boy

2010-05-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

This is for all of you returned missionaries out there. It's a song by the Seattle Men's Chorus about a Mormon missionary. (Words after the video.)

Lyrics:

One Thursday in July, 'bout a quarter after four
I heard a gentle knocking at my door.
I opened up to find a sight I'd witnessed before:
A pair of Mormon boys.

They stood at my door, this missionary pair
With name tags and perfect Disney hair,
With a burning in their bosom they simply had to share.
Oh, such faithful Mormon boys.

They go two by two, day by day, door to door,
'Elders' at age nineteen.
Earnest as an apple and wholesome to the core,
They keep their habits clean.
Sweet Mormon boys.

I asked the fellows in and poured some lemonade.
I said I'd be a tough one to persuade,
Still they forged ahead, unfazed and undismayed.
Oh, such loyal Mormon boys.

They go two by two, day by day, door to door,
On missions for two long years.
Earnest as an apple and wholesome to the core,
They keep their aspirations clear,
Sweet Mormon boys.

The taller of the two was delightsome to the eye,
Handsome and strong but shy.
His smile seemed to say that at any moment he might cry,
A peculiar Mormon boy.

His eyes were deep and gentle, a shocking shade of blue,
Intent, it seemed, at staring at his shoe.
He caught my gaze and blushed and looked away
And then I knew:
Oh, that poor Mormon boy!

A curious hour passed. I listened for a while.
The eager Elder talking all the while.
But all I could think of was the other fellow's trial
And the torment he must be going through.

If he truly is peculiar that's a rocky row to hoe,
Temple lost, he'll have no place to go.
They'll shun him all the way from the Salt Lake to Provo,
A lost Mormon boy.

They shook my hand and left; I stood waving from the door,
Wondering what their mission had in store.
Memories came to surface from many years ago,
Oh, when I was a Mormon boy. I was a Mormon boy.

They go two by two, day by day, door to door,
No looking back, their hand to the plow,
Earnest as an apple and wholesome to the core,
A Mormon always keeps his vow.

They go two by two, day by day, door to door,
Doing the work of the Lord.
Earnest as an apple and wholesome to the core,
But what if there's a secret, one that cannot be ignored?
What happens to such a Mormon boy?
Such a sweet Mormon boy?
Such a sweet Mormon boy.

You, me and the Church

2010-05-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

I came across an episode of the radio program This American Life where a young Mormon woman received annual birthday letters that were written to her before her mother died of cancer when the girl was 16. Her mother wanted to have an influence on her daughter's life, so she wrote a series of letters, essentially from her deathbed. (You can listen to the episode here. It begins at 9:25.)

Each year, following the wishes of her deceased mother, the young woman's father would mail one of the letters to her. There were 13 of them. At first the letters were comforting and a reminder of her mother's love. But they also contained counsel and moral instruction from an LDS perspective that over time became problematic. I recommend listening to the story.

I have often thought that in marriage the LDS Church is the third person in the bedroom (in kind of a creepy way). Something like this is also the case with LDS family relationships. The young woman in the interview eventually diverged from traditional LDS belief and went on to medical school. She was conflicted, though, because her mother's continuing instruction to her couldn't be reconciled with the person she was becoming. She was not a person of faith, but her life's work involved compassion, science and commitment to others. It was not a comfortable place for a young Mormon girl to be. Eventually, the letters stopped, and life went on.

I have tried with my own LDS family members and LDS friends and acquaintances to bridge the gap. From my side, I don't see why this shouldn't be possible. It's certainly not necessary that we all share the same opinion on matters of faith. I'm sorry to say that the results are not what I would have hoped for. (Interestingly, things were better before the Prop. 8 debacle.)

It's truly unfortunate that the quality of family relations seems to vary inversely with the doctrinal orthodoxy of the family member in question. For example, a gay Mormon friend of mine comes from a family of eight siblings. He’s in his fifties and his parents are still living. Some of his family members are close to him and treat him with kindness, even though they all have to deal with the dissonance that arises in the Church from having a gay family member. Others take a harder line and refuse to justify sin by allowing my friend to visit or associate with their children. If you line up his family in order of orthodoxy (liahona vs iron rod order), you see a correlation. The iron rodders just can’t deal with him. His parents, who are pretty much on the iron rodders side, are caught in the middle. It’s a big source of stress for the entire family. It's also complicated by envy-- my friend has had professional and personal success that some of his siblings resent. (Oddly, it's again the more orthodox siblings, which I can't explain.)

In my own case, the kindness toward me shown by the less orthodox members of my family is noticeably greater. (The exception is one TBM sister who has always had a soft and loving heart.) I’ve also noticed a huge difference between my generation (I’m 50) and my siblings’ children who are now in their 20s and early 30s. Across the board, my nieces and nephews treat me better than the older family members. I have had excellent relationships with my nieces and nephews since they were born. (The only problem areas are one or two very orthodox spouses who have recently joined the family.) My LDS parents have passed away, but I always had a very close relationship with them.

You might say, "But, MoHoHawaii, you're such a pain in the ass, of course your LDS family and acquaintances keep their distance." :- ) I don't really buy the charge. The problem is that it's a triangle-- it's not just "you and me," it's "you, me and the Church." And we know what the Church's position is-- it would shun me by powerful ritual if I hadn't left first. It seeks me out in the political sphere and tries to do me harm. It's hard for you to love me when this other thing you love hates me. If it were just "you and me" I think we'd be okay.

Maybe we will be someday. I haven't given up on my efforts to reconcile the irreconcilable with my LDS family and acquaintances. Sometimes it works; sometimes not so much. Sometimes it’s my own fault. In any case, it’s an ongoing effort.

--
Note: Radio program via Times & Seasons

Quote of the day

2010-05-04T21:40:00.000-07:00

Always remember and don't ever forget, my darling poppets: Men of science walked on the moon; men of faith stole airplanes and flew them into buildings.

- Muffy Bolding

Oh, and speaking of men of faith, George Rekers, NARTH board member, Baptist minister, prominent anti-gay activist, co-founder of the virulently anti-gay Family Research Council and expert witness against gay adoption in Florida, was caught taking a 10-day European vacation with a male prostitute from Miami. For real.

Celebrity crushes - science edition

2010-04-21T21:18:00.000-07:00

Crush #1 - Lawrence Krauss, physicist

This lecture is one of the simplest and clearest explanations of basic scientific cosmology I've ever run across. If you've ever wondered how we know things like the scale of the universe or its age or why we observe that all stars are moving away from us, watch this lecture. (Running time: ~1 hour)

(Warning: Krauss's point of view is secular, and he doesn't tiptoe around the idea that religious stories of origin are not factual. Some believers may be offended by his jokes.)

Crush #2 - Hot brain-on-brain action: Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss discuss topics related to science education. (Running time ~120 min.)

Now I need to go take a cold shower!

Blessing

2010-04-14T20:39:00.000-07:00

For all you who are in the process of coming out, here's a song.

This is American Idol's season one finalist and Christian recording artist, RJ Helton, singing Scott Alan's 'Blessing', a song that asks parents to accept a gay son, at Birdland, New York City, April 12th, 2010.

There are several versions of this on the net. Lyrics are here.

Via: Towleroad

Joke of the day

2010-03-28T17:56:00.001-07:00

Q: What are crows?

A: Seagulls that refused to eat crickets in the pre-existence.

:-)

I think I have a new favorite joke.

Via: Mild-Mannered Musings

Glee's not Buffy

2010-03-12T01:01:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to watching Glee (on DVD). It's a cute show, and I recommend it. People smarter and hipper than I am recommend it, too. (There are a few holdouts.)

I think the script has been influenced by shows like The Office. The characters are crude stereotypes with not much depth, but the lines are funny enough to make up for other faults. Still, when it comes to dysfunctional high schools, I miss Buffy. It makes perfect sense that a high school might be situated on top of the Hellmouth.

I do have to say that Glee's music makes me feel old. I know all of the show tunes and standards better than is seemly, and I don't get the hip hop at all.

Sentimental disbelief

2010-02-22T23:00:00.000-08:00

Nonbelievers have a problem with public relations.

One popular stereotype portrays atheists as cold and overly analytical, all logic and no heart. They are thought to have a deaf ear when it comes to feelings. "What is this thing you call love?" asks the alien of science fiction in a robotic voice. From an LDS viewpoint, this type of nonbeliever lacks the gift of faith and can be pitied. This kind of nonbeliever prays but receives no answer.

Another kind of nonbeliever in the popular imagination is the arrogant professor, exemplified Richard Dawkins. Too smart for his own good, this kind of atheist talks down you, and nobody likes a smarty pants. In the LDS world, this kind of nonbeliever gets 2 Nephi 9:28 thrown at them: "when they are learned they think they are wise, [but] their wisdom is foolishness." (Unfortunately, this familiar ad hominem attack doesn't say how to refute the facts and arguments presented by the unpleasant person of learning.)

To sum up, nonbelievers either lack feeling or they lack humility. As bad as this is, it gets worse. In many cases, nonbelievers are evil.

Joseph Smith took on the theme of the public skeptic in the Book of Mormon with the character Korihor. Korihor is definitely a nonbeliever we can love to hate, since he follows the conventions of villains from melodrama. Korihor isn't just a nonbeliever; he's dastardly. He's the third kind of nonbeliever: the villainous deceiver. What distinguishes Korihor is the fact that he means to cause harm. The moral of his story is that nonbelievers are evil people who want to lead us astray. We learn that they must be dealt with by force, either human and supernatural. Interacting with them or trying to understand what they are saying would be as ill advised as inviting a vampire to cross your threshold.

Clearly, nonbelievers have a public image that could use some polishing. Let's see-- as a nonbeliever you can be lacking in feeling, lacking in humility or just plain evil. These are not attractive options.

When I wonder what kind of nonbeliever I am, I start with these three possibilities.

The first one (Mr. Spock) might fit in some ways. I certainly had tremendous cognitive dissonance when I was a believer. Getting an answer to prayer that I could believe in was next to impossible. However, I am intuitive and also very emotional. I *never* (even to this day) have had any problem feeling the rush of affirmation that that people describe as feeling the Spirit.

When I compare myself to Prof. Dawkins, the second kind of nonbeliever, I think we might be getting closer. I can't really say for sure. I will say that one of the most profoundly moving moments of my life was when I really understood the implications of the scientific method. I'm the kind of person who gets very excited by repeatable experiments. So, I guess I have to leave option two as a maybe. It's possible that I lack humility, since I do value knowledge deduced from empirical data, and I prize academic achievement.

I feel pretty good about ruling out the last kind of nonbeliever, the ill-intentioned deceiver. I know my own heart pretty well, and if anything it's my commitment to independently verifiable facts that keeps me in a state of disbelief. I certainly have no desire to cause harm.

Ultimately, though, I don't feel comfortable with any of these atheist personas. My attempt to find a path through this life is no different from anyone else's. I'm as bewildered by this life as the next person. I'm just as awed by the magnificence of creation as the believers I know. Maybe I'm a sentimental nonbeliever. Is that a new category?

The celibacy timeline

2010-02-19T11:20:00.001-08:00

I have never met a man who made it from youth to age 45 as a celibate gay Mormon fully active in the Church.

There are lots and lots of 25-year-old men in this category, and you see the occasional person who perseveres to thirty-five. By 45 no one's left.

It's as if there's some kind of built-in term limit for men on the celibate gay Mormon role. Most leave the Church or at least quit participating; a few enter into mixed-orientation marriages at ages greater than the standard LDS marrying age.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Advice

2010-02-18T00:42:00.000-08:00

Words to live by:

Text from here.

On the nature of advice

2010-02-16T20:44:00.000-08:00

I like giving advice. It's kind of a hobby. Recently however, I came across this explanation:

Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

This is true, breathtakingly, maddeningly true.

I hate the person who wrote this.

One of the blogs I read is by a young Mormon man who is trying to pray away the gay. As I read his blog I'm struck by how history repeats itself over and over and over again. His story was my story when I was younger. Is there anything I could tell this young gay Mormon man that he could actually hear? Isn't it the case that he would have to go through what I went through himself? Isn't free advice is worth what you pay for it? For the record, I don't comment on the young man's blog even though that's my impulse.

I go back and forth on this. I'm not convinced. Young gay Mormons already get a lot of advice, most of it over the pulpit, some of it quite damaging. Maybe there needs to be a counterpoint for balance. On the other hand, I can't deny that my inclination to give advice comes from my own ruminations about the past I've lived. These memories come with a sharpness that is sometimes painful. Passing them to others feels redemptive but is probably nothing more than the sentimentality of the aged.

I think I'll be offering less advice in the future.

A few good posts from 2009

2010-01-31T16:28:00.000-08:00

Here are my 2009 Brodie nominations. The list is by no means exhaustive. There were a lot of memorable blog posts this year.

Best YouTube channel: MorMenLikeMe. With the goal of preventing suicide in gay Mormon youth, this YouTube channel has interviews with men who survived growing up gay and Mormon. (Many now work in the performing arts in NYC.)

Most poignant story: Dear John by Utah Cog. Cog decides that Utah is no longer a safe place for his family.

Best doctrinal topic: Unconditional Love by BiV. BoredInVernal critiques the growing LDS tendency to make God's love conditional.

Best book review: It's Time to Play: Anti-Mormon... Or Not?. Chanson review asks the question: "Anti- or Not?" as she reviews recent LDS-themed books.

Best post on religious differences: Andrew S on Internet Mormons and chapel Mormons.

Best discussion of political issues: Holly Noelle on why the Church's PR about the Main Street Plaza kiss wasn't credible. Holly gets right to the bottom of it.

Best polite call to repentance: D. Michael Quinn on Marriage Equality. Historian Michael Quinn suggests a few things the Church could do to make things better for gay Mormons.

Best total freak out: The Faithful Dissident on commercial hunting reserves owned by the LDS Church. Honestly, I had no idea about this either.

Funniest post: Emily Pearson's Mormon lightbulb joke.

Best response to apologetics: profxm's discussion of Bruce Hafen's anti-gay rhetoric.

Most poignant story: Lorian's post-Prop. 8 guest post on Feminist Mormon Housewives

Best deconversion post: Evolving Lesbian on why gay Mormons leave the Church.

Most poignant story: Scott on selfishness in marriage.

Overall a**-kicker of the year:
Chino Blanco. Chino Blanco is a straight ally for gay rights.

Overall most faith-promoting: J G-W. Did you have any doubt?

Best investigative journalism: Chanson visits the polygamists!

I hope you all have a great year blogging. Keep cranking out those posts! All of our voices need to be heard. Your voice needs to be heard.

On the ethics of courtship

2010-01-27T12:16:00.000-08:00

I recently read a personal essay by a middle-aged gay man named Patrick Muirhead who wants to have children and a stable home life. Disillusioned by twenty years in the gay demi-monde, Muirhead has an epiphany when he sees a father and his young son at a barber shop. He writes:

A handsome young dad entered with a small, fair-haired boy at his side. The man took a seat and hoisted the wide-eyed child proudly on to his knee. The first haircut, I speculated inwardly, as an unfamiliar fatherly glow and feeling of mild envy swept over me. I could not tear my attention away from the mirrored reflections.

From time to time, the dad leant forward as they waited and whispered close to his son’s ear, tenderly kissing his fair head. Touching stuff.

But then my eyes lowered and I became transfixed by the sight of the boy’s tiny pink fingers gripping his father’s huge, workman-like fist. And I almost wanted to burst into song.

I think my life changed at that moment.

That’s love, folks. Simple really. A proud dad, an adored little boy and a beautiful display of dependence and responsibility. It was the epiphany I had needed and I emerged with a dashing new haircut and a desire to procreate.

His solution is to find a woman to marry and reproduce with.

But before he goes out and does that, he feels the need to write a number of paragraphs generalizing his own unsatisfactory experiences into general condemnation of gay couples. For example,

[Same-sex marriages] really are little more than theatrical shams involving men making a point in matching wedding cravats, of embarrassed grandparents and monstrously camp multi-tier cakes.

I wince when gays describe boyfriends as “husbands”, subverting a solemn institution created to provide stability for child-rearing.

[Etc.]

Muirhead's intent to marry a woman is fueled by two things: 1) his desire to be a father and 2) by his own disdain for all things gay.

I find it fascinating that these reasons were precisely what motivated me as a young gay Mormon man to find a woman to marry those many years ago. Having been raised in the LDS Church, I had only heard the lie that gay people were sexual outlaws who took drugs and lived trivial lives of dissipation and excess. Although I had had no sexual experiences with either sex, I knew that what I perceived to be the "gay lifestyle" was not for me. I wanted a life of substance and responsibility. I knew I wanted children and that I could be a loving and devoted father. I knew I wanted to settle down and not be alone. As a result, I courted and married a young woman.

It ended, not surprisingly, in almost unimaginable sorrow.

Like me at the time of my marriage, Patrick Muirhead does not claim to have changed his orientation, despite the curious fact that the title of his essay is The Day I Decided to Stop Being Gay. He writes:

Does this mean that I no longer like men? No, of course not, and I won’t pretend.

He then pulls out a familiar chestnut, one that I used myself:

But in the streets and avenues of this country there must be many husbands whose interests are divided but whose choices are determined not by sexuality but emotionality.

This is exactly what I thought. To put it another way, "sexual attraction is a base motivation that can be trumped by duty, self-control and a higher, nonsexual kind of love."

I cannot tell you wrong this turned out to be for me and my wife. This view simply does not account for the unbridgeable incompatibility that can arise in a relationship when sexual orientations do not match. I'll say this until I'm blue in the face: it's not about sex, it's about the dynamics of pair bonding.

Forming a durable pair bond with a special person is a compelling and nearly universal human need. Once this bond forms, if you or your spouse had physical injuries that prevented sex, you’d still have each other. You would still be each other's beloved. Mature, loving couplings have remarkable durability, in sickness and in health. (Let's just say that it’s not unfulfilled sexual desire that causes all those suicides in gay LDS youth.)

There is no loneliness in this world like the loneliness you can feel as a part of a poorly matched couple. There is no more painful kind of rejection than what a spouse can feel when her husband can't love her back "in that way." It can destroy a person's sense of self.

I feel for Mr. Muirhead. I really do. The desires he expresses are human ones. They are universal aspirations. It's just that determination and grit are usually not an adequate basis for forming a durable pair bond with another person. Sexual orientation matters. This is inconvenient and frustrating, but it matters. The amount of silent misery that this issue causes is astonishing.

I feel even more for the woman Muirhead might marry. He concludes:

And lately I have, almost imperceptibly, been laying the groundwork to make parenthood happen in the old-fashioned way. I have been flirting with someone at my local pub, thinking about her at odd times, making excuses to call her and wondering if she likes me. It’s rather strange.

Yes, it is strange, as well as extremely dubious from an ethical perspective. He doesn't even pretend to be looking for a companion; instead, he's "laying the groundwork to make parenthood happen." WTF?

A man who is fully aware of his homosexuality and who courts an unsuspecting straight woman because he wants to escape the gay lifestyle and use her as a means of achieving parenthood is ... well, you don't want to know what I think.

Ah, you might say, but what if the man discloses his homosexuality before the marriage and the woman consents? Doesn't this fix the problem?

Not really. In my own case, I fully disclosed my sexuality to my future fiancee and her family after just a few months of dating. This was three months before we decided to get engaged and almost one year before the marriage. Of course, I'm glad I told her, but I don't think this lets me off the hook. When a person is in a state of limerence (as she was), powerful biological forces are at work that conspire against rational evaluation of the situation. In that state you don't really understand the ramifications. You think that you will beat the odds.

Most don't.

My biggest problem with Muirhead's essay is his attitude of women as chattel. He is blind to the fact that a marriage involves two people. Not once does he consider what consequences marrying a gay man might have on the woman he plans to seduce.

Via: -L-

----

Note to readers who find themselves in mixed-orientation marriages. I know that some of you think I am attacking your marriage or showing disrespect. This is absolutely not my intent. I fully support you on your path and wish you the best.

On mixed-orientation marriages

2010-01-17T21:52:00.000-08:00

I made a comment a few days ago about the structural difficulties of mixed-orientation marriage. J G-W followed up with a post in a similar vein. This spurred a bit of controversy, which I want to respond to here.

Carol Lynn Pearson talks about mixed-orientation marriages in her book No More Goodbyes (pp. 9-10). She says:

I have gay friends who have married heterosexual partners. Most of those marriages have ended in extreme sorrow. A few of the marriages are still intact, with the partners experiencing some satisfaction along with significant difficulty. They believe this is the right choice for them. I respect that choice, and I wish them well.

Carol Lynn has had more exposure to mixed-orientation marriages than any person I know. Since her memoir was published in 1986 she has been sought out by countless LDS folks (hundreds if not thousands) who find themselves in mixed-orientation marriages. She is also a very wise and compassionate person. This all adds up to making her a very reliable witness.

My own experiences and what I've seen in others are consistent with Carol Lynn's conclusions.

Carol Lynn observes that "most of those marriages have ended in extreme sorrow." This is also what I have seen in the more than 25 years since I have been talking to people about this issue. (My own marriage was one of these casualties some 22 years ago.) Most of the mixed-orientation marriages I have been aware of over the past two and a half decades have in fact ended by now. (I think the general MOM divorce statistics are in the 90% range.) "Extreme sorrow" is a poignant and accurate term for these breakups. If you doubt this, read Amity Pierce Buxton's The Other Side of the Closet.

Carol Lynn says, "A few of those marriages are still intact, with the partners experiencing some satisfaction along with significant difficulty." Again, this exactly mirrors what I've observed. I know a few mixed-orientation marriages that have stabilized and are no longer at risk of divorce. (In all of the stable MOMs I know the spouses are age 50 or older.) Carol Lynn's characterization of these surviving marriages is apt: some satisfaction along with significant difficulty. (In contrast, I would characterize most matched-orientation relationships I know, both gay and straight, as having significant satisfaction along with some difficulties.)

Carol Lynn says, "They believe this is the right choice for them. I respect that choice, and I wish them well." I can absolutely relate to this. I also respect the choices that my friends in mixed-orientation marriages have made over the years, and I support them. Like Carol Lynn, I wish much success to anyone reading this who finds himself or herself in a mixed-orientation marriage and wants to stay there. You deserve our love and unconditional support. I do not doubt your devotion or level of commitment to your spouse!

The ethical dilemma I face is this: what do I say to young people who might be contemplating entering into a mixed-orientation marriage? I might be tempted, out of consideration for the sensitivities of people already in mixed-orientation marriages, to soft pedal my advice. Maybe the point of contention is whether I should downplay the seriousness of mismatched orientations as a problem for long-term marital satisfaction. Knowing what I know after all these years, I cannot in good conscience do that. I can think of no circumstance where I would advise young people to enter into a new mixed-orientation marriage.

I don't see it as contradictory to root for those who are currently in mixed-orientation marriages and at the same time to recommend that new mixed-orientation marriages not be formed.

-----

If I have hurt your feelings during these discussions, please accept my apologies. I do support you and wish you well. It's possible that our life experiences lead us to different conclusions about what general advice should be given to young people who are not yet married, and that's fine, too. Mine is just one voice arising from personal observation.

Movie review: A Single Man

2010-01-10T22:28:00.000-08:00

While I was in New York City between Christmas and New Year's, Tobi and I decided to go see the new movie of Christopher Isherwood's novel A Single Man. I was interested because this novel, written in 1964, was the first of a new genre of fiction that portrayed realistic gay characters without apology. The movie differs in some details from Isherwood's story but retains its spirit.

The story is a day in the life of a man whose longtime lover has been killed in an accident eight months previously. Set in 1962, the world that the protagonist inhabits treats gay relationships as if they do not exist. As one reviewer put it, it's the story of a grief that can't speak its name.

There are a number of interesting aspects to this movie, and I have to concede that it's one of the best gay-themed movies I've ever seen.

The movie was directed by fashion designer Tom Ford and as a result has an unusually stylish look. I at first found this odd, but as the movie progressed it started to make a more sense given what you learn about the characters. Ford spends a lot of effort getting the details of 1962 America to read on film. (The art direction was by the same people who are responsible for the TV series Mad Men.) The result is as visually stylized as a perfume commercial. Some find this distracting; I liked the effect.

The acting, especially the roles played by Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, is excellent. There will be Oscar nominations for these roles.

The film is currently in limited release. I understand that it will roll out to more theaters in April (i.e., after the Academy Awards provide all that free publicity). If you live in one of the major metropolitan areas where it's currently playing, definitely check this one out.

Here's the trailer:

Resolutions for my bishop

2010-01-08T10:04:00.000-08:00

I have some New Year's resolutions for LDS church leaders. Let's make 2010 the best year ever!

Resolution 1: End the outdated practice of ritual shunning through excommunication.

Like many things in the church, change is underway, but it appears to be happening slowly as part of a gradual process. I'm old enough to remember the bad old days when BYU security conducted secret investigations and kept lists of suspected homosexuals. I'm old enough to remember when they announced the results of church courts publicly in Priesthood meeting. I'm old enough to remember when you could be excommunicated merely for admitting homosexual orientation. I remember when excommunicated members were treated as if they were radioactive.

A lot has changed. Church discipline today is used much less often. It mostly depends on the views of the man who happens to be the bishop or stake president. Over time the importance of Church discipline seems to be diminishing.

Let's just put a bullet in this thing now. As a call to repentance, it's ineffective. As a social practice, it's barbaric in its cruelty.

Resolution 2: Repudiate the theological justification for rejecting gay family members.

In October 2009 LDS Apostle Dallin Oaks gave a speech in which he encouraged parents to withhold familial love from adult children who do not follow the LDS life template. Oaks provides a theological basis for rejecting gay family members, arguing that since God's love is conditional ours should be, too. I have read a number of blog accounts of how this advice has been applied by families against gay family members.

(Oaks is also known as the person who encouraged LDS parents not to acknowledge the same-sex partner of their adult child socially or provide hospitality.)

Carol Lynn Pearson's No More Goodbyes argues eloquently against the doctrine of conditional love. Someone should tell the correlation committee about this one.

Resolution 3: Train bishops in basic social service practices and ethics.

LDS bishops engage in counseling with no training in suicide prevention, family systems or ethics for providers of social services. A small amount of training would help avoid cases of pastoral malpractice such as this one:

I have asked Bishops if it was better for me to kill myself or live my life with a husband and they told me they didn't have the answer.

Bishops, let's work to make 2010 a year when we work to prevent the suicides of gay Mormon youth, not cause them. We've come a long way from the days when General Authorities would say that it was better for us to tie a millstone around our necks and throw ourselves into the Great Salt Lake than be gay. In 2010, let's make this official.

Resolution 4: Allow openly gay members of the Church to participate in meetings.

Again, I see a lot of gradual change happening here. I know of several folks who have married their same-sex partner and still attend church. Although the official rules require that these believers remain mute, church leaders appear to be unofficially easing this restriction.

It's a trend that many have been praying for.

Resolution 5: Don't withhold temple recommends from supportive family members.

There seems to be wide variation in how gay-supportive family members are treated in church. There have been reports of bishops and stake presidents who refuse to give temple recommends to members of the church who are otherwise eligible but who are too "gay friendly".

The start of a new decade would be a great time to quit pushing away sincere adherents.

* * *

I was going to end with a resolution about staying away from anti-gay politics, but thankfully this one was implemented in 2009.

Happy 2010!

Christmas in Utah - 3

2009-12-31T10:43:00.000-08:00

I was in Utah again for Christmas this year, just like 2007 and 2008. My son and I spent the holiday with one of my sisters and her family. My boyfriend Tobi had to stay in New York City because of work. Otherwise, he would have been there, too.

My sister and I are in an odd situation. She is a conservative, by-the-book kind of Mormon while I am a secular or cultural Mormon. Since our parents have passed away, we don't have them to mediate our relationship. Although we try to avoid it, the difference in our religious views remains something we have to tiptoe around. I'm close to my sister's kids, who are now in their mid-twenties and early thirties, and it's really important to me that my son have the opportunity to stay close to his cousins.

Everything was going just fine during our visit until the Tuesday night before Christmas. I don't know how it started, but Prop. 8 became the topic of conversation. I could not believe how offended I became when my own family (to be fair, the worst offenders were in-laws and not blood relatives) repeated some of the absurd false statements of the Prop. 8 campaign. After a few minutes I stood up and said, "I ask for very little from this family, but out of respect for me I want you stop this conversation now." And then I left the room. They stopped the discussion.

Scene, with aria.

A number of people in the house that night did not get much sleep. I went to bed and shook with adrenaline for several hours. My son and one of his (gay friendly) cousins stayed up most of the night talking about it. His cousin was deeply embarrassed by some of the attitudes in his family. My brother-in-law went to bed sulking because everyone always thinks he's the bad guy. Etc.

In the end, I don't really care what my relatives think about the issue. I just want them not to discuss it when I'm in the house. I have my limits, and that's one of them.

I don't know what the resolution will be. My sister said that we'll have to "agree to disagree." Even though this keeps the peace, it does not promote strong family bonds. Another year of stasis. Prop. 8 in my family is like a wound that won't heal. It's not getting any better, and it's not life threatening in any way, but every now and then it oozes pus.

(On Christmas day, we all opened presents and then I left for the airport so that I can spend the week between Christmas and New Year's in New York with Tobi. There will be more on this in a subsequent post.)

Unbelievable cuteness

2009-12-16T19:02:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think I'm becoming a YouTube aggregator instead of a blogger. No matter. Here for your consideration, apropos of nothing, is a video clip of an incredibly cute five-year-old Japanese boy doing a cover with his ukulele of Jason Mraz's I'm Yours.

This kid also does a very entertaining Beatles cover, which you can see here.

Via: Bil Browning at Bilerico

Something seasonal

2009-12-13T00:33:00.000-08:00

Here's a Christmas song by the London Gay Men's Chorus about coming out to one's family. (I guess I'm easily amused.)

Enjoy.

Lyrics:

(to the tune of Hark! The Herald Angels)

I intend to drop a bomb
On my dear old dad and mom,
For this year without a doubt
Is the Chrismas I come out.

First, I'll get their full attention.
Then I'll drop a subtle mention:
"Lovely tree, and by the way
Some of my closest friends are gay."
That should do the job okay
When I come out on Christmas Day.

Oh say can you see it now--
Watch my parents have a cow.
Or perhaps if fate is kind
They'll insist that they don't mind.

Then they'll say, "We always guessed.
After all, look how you're dressed.
Seven earrings in each ear--
We're not quite that dense, my dear."
They'll adore me anyway
When I come out on Christmas Day.

Coming out to everyone
Makes the winter doldrums fun.
It's a noble thing to do,
Why don't you come on out, too?

Make a choice! Damn consequence!
Lift your voice, get off the fence,
Shout it from the highest roof,
"Gay is great, and you're the proof!"
Make this Christmas bright and gay,
Come on out on Christmas Day.

Words by Craig Sturgis, 1992

BONUS: And there's more! The Twelve Gays of Christmas (a funny and amazingly good dance routine)

Who would Jesus house?

2009-12-08T20:50:00.000-08:00

The LDS Church recently came out in support of a nondiscrimination law in Salt Lake City. They said, effectively, that everyone deserves a place to live. Reactions, as you may recall, were mixed.

Then this post on lds.net came to my attention. A person asked the following question on the LDS forum:

I'm somewhat confused on what to do right now. I am currently living in an apartment with 3 bedrooms. My roommate (The one moving out) that has the bedroom with a private bath is the room a 2 gay guys want to rent. ...

The gay couple will be in the room in the front of the apartment. Separate bathroom, but we all share the laundry room which is in the closest of their room.

The guy I met is really nice and he agree to not show affection and such...

... but what to do?

Before ceding the floor for comments the poster ended with something rather surprising:

I feel like I need to follow the Church non-discrimination stand on this one. They recently supported that in Utah...

Wow! Wow! Wow!

But then he hesitated:

... but I want to be careful.

In other words, "the Church told me not to discriminate in housing, but I'm still scared of gay people because I know they are bad, so please, LDS Forum members, tell me what I should do."

You can read the comments on the thread if you're interested; the majority were benign.

I don't know about you, but as weird as this is I see it as progress. When the Church makes a stand the members notice and change their behavior. The opinions of LDS leaders are enormously influential among the rank and file. This is why the Church's support for basic civil rights for gay people was an important, meaningful step. Congratulations to all those in Salt Lake who worked for it.

Ode on a Typeface

2009-12-04T23:29:00.000-08:00

This parody video is just about the nerdiest thing ever-- it's dedicated to a typeface. If you're a design geek or into fonts or an out-of-control Lady Gaga fan or all of the above, you'll be humming along. (I recommend viewing in HD, full screen.)

Plus, the guys are extremely cute.

Via: Voenix Rising

Liebestod

2009-11-15T22:42:00.000-08:00

Waltraud Meier sings the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. I was going to introduce this aria for those who might not know it, but words fail me. The clip is about 7 minutes long, with lyrics below. Use headphones.

Love is the most painful thing in life and, along with art, the most redemptive.

Mild und leise
wie er lächelt,
wie das Auge
hold er öffnet, -
seht ihr's, Freunde?
Säh't ihr's nicht?
Immer lichter
wie er leuchtet,
sternumstrahlet
hoch sich hebt?
Seht ihr's nicht?
Wie das Herz ihm
mutig schwillt,
voll und hehr
im Busen ihm quillt?
Wie den Lippen,
wonnig mild,
süsser Atem
sanft entweht: -
Freunde! Seht!
Fühlt und seht ihr's nicht?
Hör ich nur
diese Weise,
die so wunder-
voll und leise,
Wonne klagend,
alles sagend,
mild versöhnend
aus ihm tönend,
in mich dringet,
auf sich schwinget,
hold erhallend
um mich klinget?
Heller schallend,
mich umwallend,
sind es Wellen
sanfter Lüfte?
Sind es Wogen
wonniger Düfte?
Wie sie schwellen,
mich umrauschen,
soll ich atmen,
soll ich lauschen?
Soll ich schlürfen,
untertauchen?
Süss in Düften
mich verhauchen?
In dem wogenden Schwall,
in dem tönenden Schall,
in des Weltatems
wehendem All, -
ertrinken,
versinken, -
unbewusst, -
höchste Lust!

How softly and gently
he smiles,
how sweetly
his eyes open -
can you see, my friends,
do you not see it?
How he glows
ever brighter,
raising himself high
amidst the stars?
Do you not see it?
How his heart
swells with courage,
gushing full and majestic
in his breast?
How in tender bliss
sweet breath
gently wafts
from his lips -
Friends! Look!
Do you not feel and see it?
Do I alone hear
this melody
so wondrously
and gently
sounding from within him,
in bliss lamenting,
all-expressing,
gently reconciling,
piercing me,
soaring aloft,
its sweet echoes
resounding about me?
Are they gentle
aerial waves
ringing out clearly,
surging around me?
Are they billows
of blissful fragrance?
As they seethe
and roar about me,
shall I breathe,
shall I give ear?
Shall I drink of them,
plunge beneath them?
Breathe my life away
in sweet scents?
In the heaving swell,
in the resounding echoes,
in the universal stream
of the world-breath -
to drown,
to founder -
unconscious -
utmost rapture!

For those who can live with poorer audio fidelity, try Birgit Nilsson's version as a heart-stopping alternative.

Tobi love

2009-11-15T22:05:00.000-08:00

This about sums it up:

Created from this blog via: Worlde.net
Hat tip: Darkdrearywilderness

Who would Jesus handcuff? - part 3

2009-11-04T10:06:00.001-08:00

The Main Street Plaza incident lives. Here's Stephen Colbert's take.

(Fair warning: The clip is funny and innocuous, but some LDS viewers may be offended by the irreverent tone.)

Steak house or gay bar?

2009-11-01T13:02:00.000-08:00

Check out this time waster. It's a quiz to see if you can tell the difference between the names of steak houses and gay bars. Despite the difference in clientele, there's often little in the name that would indicate which type of establishment the name refers to. The quiz is harder than you might imagine.

Enjoy!

Post your scores below, for 25 tries. I got about 65% right.

P.S. The quiz does not have any pictures. It's safe for work or family viewing.

Via: Andrew Sullivan

Halloween costumes - keeping it butch

2009-10-28T19:31:00.000-07:00

I love satire that points out the absurdity of prejudice.

Here's a very funny clip from The Onion about butching up your sissy boy with an appropriate Halloween costume. (To think that we still worry about this.)

Via: Dan Savage

No more goodbyes, please - part 4

2009-10-26T23:50:00.000-07:00

Those of you who follow this blog know that my boyfriend Tobi has had an immigration crisis for the last twelve months. I've blogged about it here, here and here.

There's recent news. It's good news and bad news. The good news is that Tobi has a very promising job possibility that would allow him to stay in the U.S. The bad news is that he has had to move across the country to get the job.

I put Tobi on a plane this Saturday with a one-way ticket. It was just about the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. We now live on opposite coasts of the U.S.

This crisis over the last year has taught me something. It has let me know how much I love this man. I love him truly, sincerely, durably. I want to spend my life with him.

Tobi and I don't know what the future will bring. I have enough flexibility that I should be able to spend time with Tobi in his new city fairly often, and I plan to do this. Maybe he'll be able to move back here with me after he gets permanent residency in a few years. Maybe I'll figure out a way that I can move there and be with him. Maybe we won't survive the separation. In any case, we're not going to spend time agonizing about that now. We're just going to move forward, knowing that we love each other and are willing to face this challenge together.

(Tobi's immigration problems are not yet over. I'll give another update in a couple of months when the next round of paperwork has been successfully processed. It's not quite time yet for celebration on that score.)

In the meantime, gambare, Tobi! My heart is with you in your new adventure.

Coming out advice for young people

2009-10-21T22:17:00.001-07:00

Here's some advice for coming out to parents who are religious conservatives.

Via: Daddy Bear

The changing of the guard

2009-10-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

Blogger Ziff has a post that predicts which of the LDS Quorum of the Twelve will succeed in becoming president of the church and which will not have that role. Ziff's post made me interested in a related question: For each year in the future, who is the president of the LDS Church likely to be?

I ran the numbers and produced a graph that shows each of the existing candidates and the chance that they will be president of the church in each given year. Graphically, the data looks like this:

(Click on the diagram to zoom in.)

The blue line coming from the upper left shows survival chance of Thomas Monson. You'll notice that not all apostles are equally represented. There's a good chance for Packer, Oaks, Holland and Bednar, each in different years. The other apostles are not nearly as likely to become president. Note that although we can almost rule out some of the candidates, the most likely successors are by no means assured of their place.

The red and blue bell-shaped curves to the left show something rather scary: they represent the possibility of Boyd Packer and Dallin Oaks becoming church presidents. (These two apostles represent the hardest edge of the old guard.)

The following diagram shows the probability that either Packer or Oaks is church president in a given year:

In other words, between 5 and 15 years from now there is an excellent chance that either Elder Packer or Elder Oaks will be president of the church. In fact, there is a lifetime probability of about 70% that eventually at least one of them will take over the presidency.

If you look at the current church leadership, you can divide them into two groups based on age and temperament. The older group (in order of succession) is

Monson (age 82)
Packer (age 85)
Perry (age 87)
Nelson (age 85)
Oaks (age 77)
Ballard (age 80)
Scott (age 80)
Hales (age 77)

The younger, probably more progressive group is lead by Jeffrey Holland:

Holland (age 68)
Eyring (age 76)
Uchtdorf (age 68)
Bednar (age 57)
Cook (age 69)
Christofferson (age 64)
Andersen (age 58)

Since succession in the LDS Church is by strict seniority, it is possible to ask when the church presidents from the older group will be replaced by their younger, more progressive colleagues. The following chart shows the probability of any member of the younger group being president of the church:

Basically, during the next 10 to 15 years the LDS Church will have very conservative leadership, perhaps even more conservative than today. Then, from 10 to 20 years from now there will be a time of transition. Starting 20 years from now, it is very likely that all of the old guard will be gone.

I don't know if these numbers are encouraging or discouraging.

Note on methodology: Ziff's numbers are based on life expectancy data for white males in the U.S. in 2004. I used the same data set as Ziff for the life expectancies, except that I reduced annual mortality [q(x)] by 10 percent across the board to account for the fact that members of the LDS leadership are probably longer lived than the general population.

This one's a must-read

2009-10-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

Here's some must-read satire from The Onion: If God Had Wanted Me To Be Accepting Of Gays, He Would Have Given Me The Warmth And Compassion To Do So.

I don't question God. The Lord is my Shepherd and I shall put none above Him. Which is why I know that if it were part of God's plan for me to stop viciously condemning others based solely on their sexual preference, He would have seen fit—in His infinite wisdom and all—to have given me the tiniest bit of human empathy necessary to do so.

It's a simple matter of logic, really. God made me who I am, and who I am is a cold, anti-gay zealot. Thus, I abhor gay people because God made me that way. Why is that so hard to understand?
Here, let's start with the basic facts: I hate and fear gay people. The way they feel is different from how I feel, and that causes me a lot of confusion and anger. Everyone knows God is all-powerful. He could easily have given me the capacity to investigate what's behind those feelings rather than tell strangers in the park they're going to hell for holding hands. But God clearly has another path for me. And who am I to question His divine will?

Try to understand. If I were capable of thinking and acting any other way, then I'm sure I would, but God seems to be quite adamant about this one. He's just not budging at all. So unless our almighty Lord and Savior decides to change His mind about my ability to empathize on even the most basic level—which I find highly unlikely—then everyone is just going to have to accept the fact that I'm going to keep on hating homosexuals. And I know that He will fill me with the strength to remain mindless and hurtful in the face of adversity.

Read the whole thing.

Conference report

2009-10-04T23:01:00.001-07:00

The Salt Lake Tribune reports on continuing advice to parents of gay adult children by LDS Apostle Dallin H. Oaks in the October 2009 General Conference. According to the paper, Elder Oaks said:

Following the example of an all-wise and loving God who has given commandments for the benefit of his children, wise parents condition some parental gifts on obedience. If an adult child is living in cohabitation, does the seriousness of sexual relations outside the bonds of marriage require that this child feel the full weight of family disapproval by being excluded from any family contacts, or does parental love require that the fact of cohabitation be ignored?

The Trib comments:

The apostle said he had seen both responses, neither of which is appropriate. Indeed, gay activists recently have criticized Mormon parents who cut off communication with their gay children.

Elder Oaks's world view scares the pants off me. (Apparently, being a gay couple is all about sex, sex, sex all the time, even if the "cohabitors" have kids, joint dental insurance and a mortgage.) For the record, I would never relate to either of my two adult children in the manipulative way he proposes. It wouldn't matter what the nature of the disagreement was.

Incidentally, in denouncing child abandonment, Elder Oaks uses the weakest language imaginable. He thinks that severing parental bonds, the ultimate act of emotional violence if there ever was one, is "inappropriate" but on par in terms of fault with parents who love and accept their children without strings attached. Unbelievable.

This reminds me of the tragic story of Spencer W. Kimball's "conditional-love" relationship with his brainy, overachieving but (unforgivably) nonbelieving son Spencer LeVan Kimball. As a son, SLK was no slacker-- he won a Rhodes Scholarship (!), became a distinguished law professor and devoted himself to a life of teaching and service. Yet, his father SWK chose to severely damage the relationship over religious differences.

All I can say is that I'm glad that I don't happen to be Elder Oaks's gay child. Can you even imagine?

When I came out over 20 years ago, my kindhearted LDS parents treated me with nothing but love. They listened to me as I struggled to tell them the part of my life that had been hidden from them. They cried with me as I worked through the issues (including a painful divorce). It is not an overstatement to say that their loving response made all the difference in my life.

The articles of faith

2009-09-27T22:37:00.000-07:00

This blog has an alternate version of the Articles of Faith.

I am particularly fond of Article 2:

2. We believe that church ball players should be punished for their own fouls, and not for unsportsmanlike aggression.

I also think Article 9 is inspired:

9. We believe in all that we have scrapbooked, all that we will now scrapbook, and we believe that we will yet scrapbook many great and important things pertaining to our family, friends, pets, and vacations.

I guess you had to grow up in the Church....

September is masturbation month

2009-09-25T17:50:00.000-07:00

Fellow blogger Abelard has asked for masturbation posts in September.

Here you go, from the musical Hair:

Sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty
Father, why do these words sounds so nasty?
Masturbation can be fun
Join the holy orgy, kamasutra,
Everyone!

I love this song.

Here's one more masturbation tip:

Masturbation is a normal part of sexuality. Just be sure to use enough lube so that you don't hurt yourself.

What you do with your own body, in the privacy of your own room, is nobody's business.

Coming out in middle school

2009-09-23T23:07:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has an interesting article about the recent trend of gay kids acknowledging their sexuality as young adolescents.

The article is worth a read.

Here's my favorite quote. The writer listens to a gay middle-schooler and his mother argue over dating rules. He writes,

I couldn’t help remembering what Ritch Savin-Williams, the professor of developmental psychology at Cornell, told me the first time we spoke: "This is the first generation of gay kids who have the great joy of being able to argue with their parents about dating, just like their straight peers do."

There's some cautionary advice for LDS parents.

Johnny [a gay adolescent] said his mom has made it very clear that he’s not allowed to bring a boyfriend over to the house. “She’s like, ‘O.K., I accept you, but you better not bring any of those people around,’ ” he told me.

That’s one of about 50 “rejecting behaviors” identified by Caitlin Ryan of San Francisco State University, who has spent the last eight years studying the link between family acceptance or rejection of gay children and their mental health in early adulthood. (Ryan found that teenagers in “rejecting families” were significantly more likely to have attempted suicide, used drugs and engaged in unprotected sex than those who were raised in accepting families.)

References for Ryan's studies can be found here.

The arc of history

2009-09-20T01:34:00.001-07:00

We sometimes assume that arc of history moves us forward, that successive ages bring us to more humane place. Unfortunately, this isn't the case; just look at Iran in the 1950s versus Iran today. What was once a developing, open society is now closed to science, economic development and education (especially of women).

In recent decades, the LDS Church has seemed to move forward in its policies toward its gay and lesbian members. In the past year and a half, though, it has reversed this course and taken a number of steps backward.

The latest is a talk given by Bruce C. Hafen of the Seventy. You can find it here. It's a big step backwards; I don't have the heart to quote from it. What's remarkable about the speech is its ignorance. A big tip off is Hafen's regurgitation of the utterly discredited Freudian theory of homosexuality. It also is much more of a secular political speech than it is a sermon.

The chickens, as they say, have come home to roost.

Via proxfm (whose summary is worth reading).

Darwin

2009-09-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

From time to time, the topic of evolution comes up on the Bloggernacle. It seems that there are four possible views:

1 Young-earth creationists assert that the earth is approximately 6,000 years old and that all species were unchangeably created at the moment of origin by divine miracle.

2 Old-earth creationists reject natural selection as an explanation of biological species, but they do accept the age of the earth as established by scientific techniques such as radiometric dating. In this view, each "day" described in Genesis was a long time. The mechanism of creation is identical to the young-earth theory.

3 Theistic evolution is a common Christian view. In this view, evolution was the method of divine creation. This is the official position of the Catholic church, for example. I have also heard this position articulated by BYU biology professors who teach evolution.

4 Scientific evolution holds that all organisms come to be through entirely natural processes. In contrast to theistic evolution, scientific evolution holds that there is no design for living creatures and no necessary progression in evolutionary change, only adaptation to local circumstances.

I'm guessing that very conservative Mormons are young-earth creationists, that mainstream Mormons are old-earth creationists and that liberal Mormons believe in theistic evolution. I would guess that very few Mormons believe in scientific evolution (undirected adaptation). It would interesting to know what proportion of the LDS population falls into each of these buckets.

There's a strong association between creationist views and anti-gay sentiment. (People who hold one of these views tend to hold the other. Young-earth creationists, in particular, tend to be extremely anti-gay.) It's interesting that when creationism began its ascent in the U.S. in the 1920s, one of the main issues was race. Evolution was seen as justification for the mixing of races, which at the time was extremely controversial. Today, the issue is no longer race, but conservatives are anxious about the loss of strict gender roles and about homosexuality. A purely natural explanation of biological origins seems to intensify this anxiety.

--

Search YouTube for "Darwin's Legacy Stanford" for a series of useful lectures on evolution. Lecture 2 is especially relevant to the issue of religious views.

The three Fs

2009-09-01T22:10:00.000-07:00

Julia Child was earthier than you might imagine. Once, when asked the secret to her long-lasting marriage, she replied, The three Fs: food and flattery.

LOL.

She's absolutely right.

Funkyzeit mit Brüno and Tobi

2009-08-02T00:23:00.000-07:00

On a whim and against our better judgment, Tobi and I went to see Brüno, the widely panned, sexually explicit and thoroughly offensive gay mockumentary.

We loved it. Go figure.

I went to this movie prepared to be bored and offended but was neither. I think it helped that I never saw Sacha Baron Cohen's previous film Borat. The schtick is pretty much the same in both films, and it's not something that you would necessarily want to see twice. It also helped that I had read fairly terrible reviews. Somehow we have a tendency to judge a movie relative to our expectations rather than on an absolute scale.

So, with those disclaimers let me say why I think this is a funny, subversive but ultimately harmless piece of fluff.

The central character, Brüno, is a ridiculous cartoon, not an actual person. He's like the roles in Wilde's ultrafunny Importance of Being Earnest, as largely drawn as Lady Bracknell. No one tries to understand Lady Bracknell's back story; she's just too absurd for that. Similarly, Brüno is best seen as a vehicle for jokes and nothing else. Lack of realistic characterization is not necessarily a fault; Wilde's Earnest, packed as it is with unbelievable characters, is just about the funniest script in existence.

Brüno is the distilled essence of every offensive gay stereotype you can imagine. He's the absurd projection of bigoted fears. In a way he's a Rorschach ink blot. Those who are uncomfortable with gay people, and who buy into the character, will find their prejudices amply confirmed. Yet, the film makes it clear in subtle and not so subtle ways that the fears themselves are the subject of parody, not gay people.

Like almost all good satire, no one is safe in Brüno. It's not only about homophobia (although the interview with the odious Paul Cameron was worth the price of admission). Overall, I found it surprisingly gentle. It's not particularly mean spirited, just silly.

I do understand that Brüno is not for everyone. It is sexually explicit. It does use offensive gay stereotypes for comedic effect. Brüno does in fact proposition Ron Paul. However, if you do decide to see this film and go with your sense of the absurd primed and ready for action, you might be pleasantly surprised, as I was.

Who would Jesus handcuff? - part two

2009-07-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

The Salt Lake Tribune used a public records act to obtain the LDS Church's security videotape that was provided to Salt Lake City prosecutors handling the Plaza Kiss incident.

In the video LDS Security comes across as bullies or worse.

The couple's body language in the video is telling. You can see the posture of people being physically intimidated.

What I found striking about this video was that the physical aggression on the part of LDS Security occurs only 40 seconds into the clip. After watching the video, I find the Church's claim that Aune and Jones were treated "just as any other couple" not credible. There is no way that a straight couple in a similar situation would have received this level of force. Can you even imagine?

WWJH? (Who would Jesus handcuff?)

2009-07-23T01:07:00.000-07:00

When Mormons use the phrase "enemy of the Church" they mean someone who attacks the Church. What phrase do we use when the Church attacks, when it's the Church that does the destroying and the defaming? What do we call those the Church wishes to harm? Can we also call them enemies of the Church, that is, enemies the Church itself has chosen?

I promise I'm going to let my outrage over the Main Street Plaza kiss fade, but in the meantime I feel as if this incident shows that the Church has set its sights on gay people and calmly pulled the trigger. They made the kill, but who wins? Certainly not the Church-- the PR fallout was definitely not worth whatever they gained by establishing the former Main Street sidewalk, the sidewalk they promised to keep open to the public, as a straights-only zone.

I love the 11th Article of Faith. I see the right to free exercise of religion as fundamental. I mean the Church and its members no harm, and I understand that religious views differ. I'm pretty sure, however, of the Church's contempt and ill will toward me. I guess that does make me their enemy.

The Dreyfus affair

2009-07-19T15:55:00.000-07:00

The Plaza Kiss incident and the passions that surround it remind me of the Dreyfus Affair that tore apart French society in the 1890s and early 1900s. The divisiveness then was fueled by the issue of anti-semitism. Strong opinions over the guilt or innocence of the accused Jewish soldier split families and ended friendships. It's hard for us to fathom the magnitude of this social divide these many years later, but it was seismic.

Was the guilt or innocence of Alfred Dreyfus really a pressing issue that affected daily life? No, but it was the flash point for a deeper social conflict, namely the place of Jews in Belle Époque French society.

Similarly, what exactly happened that night on Main Street Plaza isn't really all that important, but it reignites a controversy that is already simmering. Two controversies, actually.

Personally, I don't find the Church's version of events especially credible, but then I guess you already knew that I was a Jew-loving Dreyfusard. Sacré bleu!

P.S. History tells us that Dreyfus was indeed framed for a crime he did not commit. The Dreyfusards were right all along. This is often the case when a despised minority is accused by a dominant, conservative institution with a powerful media presence and plenty to hide. We should exercise caution when the charges against a member of an unpopular minority (cf. Emmett Till) seem to grow over time as the story spreads. Just sayin'.

With a big grain of salt

2009-07-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

The LDS Church put out a statement laying blame for the Main Street Plaza incident on the guys who were trying to walk home. The statement includes new accusations of lascivious behavior. According to the Church, it wasn't just a peck on the cheek and a hug, it was "groping"!

The Church's statement lacks credibility. Here's why:

1) Timing. One side (Jones and Aune) issued a detailed statement less than 24 hours after the incident in question. Jones and Aune put themselves on record well before the media hoopla. In contrast, the Church waited more than a week to construct its version of events. Do I believe a detailed statement issued less than 24 hours after the event by the parties actually present, or do I believe a statement issued by nameless bureaucrats more than a week later?

2) Balance. Jones and Aune admitted fault in their statement. Jones and Aune said that were mistaken on two counts: 1) they thought there was an easement on the property that gives the public free access and 2) they thought that LDS Security did not have the right to physically restrain them or ask them to leave the property. These two mistakes make it much easier to understand why they started a discussion instead of just leaving immediately. It's easy to see, with this information, how the situation escalated. In contrast, the LDS Church's statement was purely an attack on the other side. It contained no apology or admission of fault of any kind. All things being equal, balanced statements that admit fault are more credible than statements that avoid any responsibility. The Church loses this one. (Hat tip to Marvelous Blunder.)

3) Specifics. The Church's statement lacks detail. This makes it less credible than the detailed statement by Jones and Aune, which is full of detail. Where is the written, unedited report written at the time by LDS Security? There has to be an incident report. Why didn't the Church release it?

4) Eyewitnesses. The account by Jones and Aune is the statement of eyewitnesses. The Church's press release does not quote eye witnesses. The testimony of eyewitnesses is more credible.

5) Motive to lie. Jones and Aune had very little motivation to lie. Something had happened to them, and they reported it. (Remember, their statement was issued before the PR storm that came later.) The Church's statement was entirely motivated by public relations. It was issued by a professional PR department. The Church's statement was communication with a goal, that goal being to repair the image of the Church. When two parties disagree, it's useful to consider which would have a motivation to bend the truth. Here, it's clearly the Church that has such a motive.

6) Tone. The Church's press release describes the location of the incident as "Church Plaza, which is an extension of the Salt Lake City temple grounds and Church headquarters." Everybody else seems to say "Main Street Plaza". This choice of wording reflects the Church's desire to obliterate all memory of the 150-year history of traditional use of that sidewalk as a public thoroughfare. The tone of the Church's statement is kind of creepy. It reads as if the Church wants to be seen as the victim. It's a familiar style from the Prop 8 press releases.

7) Corroboration. Jones's and Aune's statement is consistent with details in the police report. The Church's accusations of public indecency are not supported by the police report.

It grieves me to see this kind of public slander go unchallenged. I would really like to see the original, unedited incident report by Church security. (However, if it follows the tradition of missionary reports and home teaching statistics, even that would have to be taken with a grain of salt.)

What it means to be seriously gay

2009-07-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

This is a modified version of a comment that I left on this thread on an LDS blog.

There is a trend for kids to come out much earlier than in the past. This is increasingly happening between the ages of 13 to 17. See here for a New York Times article about a family whose teenage son came out to them at age 13. I think the parents in the article show a sane, compassionate and shrewd response. Most telling, the boy’s grades improved after he came out, and he became happier and much better adjusted socially. Read the article.

I think early disclosure of sexual orientation is a positive trend because it gives parents the opportunity to be a stabilizing influence as the child goes through adolescence. (Adolescence is a turbulent time and for a gay teen even more so.) It does not result in a higher rate of homosexuality than in the bad old days of the endless closet.

If your 14 year old son makes a tearful confession, you’d be wise not to just pass it off as a phase. The best parental strategy is to listen reassuringly and to occasionally remind the child that, even though they may be gay, they still have to do their math homework. :-)

A conservative LDS reader left the following comment:

For me, I don’t know how homosexual stigma would fall. ...

I tend to think that the successes many people have spoken of are reflections of them being good people and associating with good people who have seen such success. I have seen that success as well.

I have also seen failure in homosexual circles where the stigma is not an influence as much as hedonism and the lack of moral or relational commitment- things I would reflect small-scale community behavior than general community behavior.

I don’t think anyone can really tell how it would go for society as a whole. We just don’t know.

This is an interesting point. To state it another way, what can be done to make gay life more wholesome and goal oriented? How do we curb the excesses?

I know of no gay person who didn’t suffer to some extent from the social stigma of being gay. I think the social stigma contributes to the excesses the commenter mentions. It’s not as if the stigma just melts away once you find a circle of like-minded friends. If anything, the gay ghetto exists because of wider social disapproval. I’m no fan of ghettos, gay or otherwise. They are not a crucible of social integration. Instead, they tend to develop their own mores, for good and ill.

I think the way to encourage a serious-minded ethic in the gay population is to normalize homosexuality in society. If gay people know that they are fully and openly integrated into society they will also know that they have the same responsibilities as everyone else. This is why gay marriage is actually a conservative social policy. It reins in and civilizes gay sexuality just as it has straight male sexuality for millenia.

A good example of this approach is The Netherlands. Being gay is completely accepted, but you are cut no slack because of it, and nobody really wants to hear you talk about it. Dutch society, despite its reputation as permissive, is anything but. Community standards for educational achievement and civic participation are strict. “Slacking” is not acceptable in Dutch society. The Dutch have a self image as being tough, disciplined and resilient, and no whining is allowed. The result is that gay people blend into society in Holland and their social outcomes are good. In other words, in Holland you can be gay, but you still have to do your math homework.

Diversity training at the COB

2009-07-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

This is an actual partial transcript from a recent diversity training class held by LDS Church Human Resources for Temple Square security personnel.

FACILITATOR: Okay, now that Bruce and Hyrum have shared their perspectives, you officers have some idea of what it's like to walk in their moccasins. Man, what an eye opener! Thanks so much for sharing your stories, guys; that was really moving. You guys are great, and I'm definitely going to check out Will and Grace.

(to the class) Let's put what we just learned into practice. Suppose you are on duty at Main Street Plaza, and Bruce and Hyrum here need to use the sidewalk to get home. You see them enter on South Temple and walk up the sidewalk laughing and talking about the production of Wicked they just saw. You overhear Bruce telling Hyrum that the costumes and lighting were fabulous. Bruce opens his arms wide to indicate just how unbelievably fabul--

SECURITY PROFESSIONAL 1 (interrupting): That's gross. Disgusting. Totally inappropriate. President Packer said something about this in general conference one time, that it was OK to beat the crap out of gay guys. Right? We don't carry baseball bats, so I guess I'd just taser them. Definitely. I'd get out my Taser and ....

FACILITATOR: Now, now, not so fast. Remember, these guys are just walking along what for 150 years was a public sidewalk. They've walked up that sidewalk all their lives. There really is no alternate route, and after all, the Church did promise the city as part of the controversial privatization of a vital urban thoroughfare that the public would always be given free passage through the property. The transfer of title was supposed to be a mere technicality that let the plaza landscaping hook into the Temple Square sprinkler system. And besides, the boys are minding their own business, just trying to get home from the show.

SECURITY PROFESSIONAL 2 (agitated): Men can't talk about musicals like that! That offends me. You can't tell me that any real man would use the word "fabulous." Words like that have eternal consequences. "Fabulous" is just the tip of the iceberg. Wicked is the gayest show ever. Something really inappropriate is going on here. I bet these guys' apartment has accent lighting and a mid-century sofa. That orange and ocher sofa limits my freedom of religion and demeans the sanctity of my marriage! There's no doubt; I'd definitely confront them and tell them how disgusting I thought they were. Then, I'd demand that they immediately leave the property.

FACILITATOR: Aren't they already "leaving the property"? I mean, they're halfway to North Temple by the time they comment on the choreography and the touring company's nontraditional but truly inspired casting of Elphalba. Twenty more seconds and they'll be crossing the street.

SECURITY PROFESSIONAL 3: That doesn't matter. We need to engage them in a demeaning argument about how disgusting they are and then, when they react, claim that they became "confrontational." If we can bait them into using profanity, then we can tackle them to the ground and restrain them in handcuffs so roughly as to cause bruising. We call the city cops and ban the perps from walking down Main Street for six months. After they cool their heels in handcuffs for a half hour they get cited for trespassing. The best part is that we start the argument that stops them from leaving and then they can't leave because of the handcuffs! Sweet! Man, I can't flippin' wait. The adrenaline would be such a total rush that I'd go home after my shift all charged up and ready to sweep my gal off her pretty feet. (SP3 does the universal "touchdown" dance.) You know, I used to be a real cop. Want to see my old badge?

FACILITATOR: Now we're talking, gentleman! Was that so hard? (dreamily) Do you mind if we end a few minutes early today? Brother Christiansen, can I borrow those shiny handcuffs of yours? I have a team-building exercise with Bruce and Hyrum after class.

The Main Street easement

2009-07-10T18:02:00.001-07:00

LDS Church security harrassed and detained a gay couple walking down Main Street in Salt Lake yesterday. The offense? A kiss on the cheek. The men were forced to the ground and roughly handcuffed. Etc.

You can read the whole episode here, here and here.

I remember the public dispute over selling part of Main Street to the Church. ~~Apparently, there is an easement that guarantees public access but gives the Church an unusual amount of power over the terms of that access.~~The Church promised during that debate that all would be welcome on the newly privatized street.

This is a PR disaster, BTW. The LDS Church's brand strategy seems to be increasingly tied to its disdain for gays. This doesn't play well in the America I live in.

Update: Apparently, there's no easement. The city sold it to the Church in 2003. It's unclear to me what rights if any the public now has to walk down this section of Main Street. A timeline of events can be found here.

Coming out story

2009-07-07T18:26:00.000-07:00

This is a nice LDS coming out story with a happy ending.

Mormon families seem to take one of two paths when they learn that they have a gay child. I love it when things turn out as they did in this video.

Via: Chino Blanco

Web site story (funny)

2009-07-05T11:12:00.001-07:00

You have to check out this parody of West Side Story.

A very funny send up of the hetero-only dating site eHarmony begins at 2:40. The whole thing is worth watching.

A nonbeliever's thought of the day

2009-07-03T21:12:00.000-07:00

Lack of faith, without works, is dead.

Gay/straight friendships

2009-06-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has an interesting article on friendships between gay men and straight men.

I have a fair number of straight male friends, and they do some of the things mentioned in the article, like asking me for advice about women. I also hear a lot more of their soft sides-- feelings, insecurities, etc.-- than they share with their straight friends. They'll say something like "You have to promise not to tell the other guys, but ...."

I'm a fan of difference. It keeps things interesting.

Anyway, read the article.

Required viewing

2009-06-30T12:39:00.000-07:00

President Obama, speaking to GLBT leaders at the White House.

My favorite part is from 7:35 to 8:45 when he reiterates his promise to act. Maybe I'm a sucker, but I believe this guy and am willing to give him time to act.

The gift of the Holy Ghost

2009-06-27T11:30:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine is the minister of a large Presbyterian congregation in South Carolina. I told him the story of how I was recently on a business trip to India and went to a Hindu temple. At the temple I was overwhelmed by the very recognizable attitude of worship that I saw in the people there. My LDS upbringing let me instantly recognize an outpouring of the Spirit. The icons and symbols were completely foreign to me, but the devotion, faith and hope for divine intercession in daily affairs were utterly familiar. In fact, I was unable to distinguish what I experienced there from the fervor of an LDS testimony meeting.

My friend the pastor listened to this story and then told me that he feels that God has called him to be faithful within his tradition but that his community of faith is not inherently privileged, more valued by God or “correct” than any other. His moorings seemed to be quite intact. He was confident of his relationship with God and the value of his ministry to others. I was struck by how his acceptance of other traditions gave his faith strength, resilience and even a kind of maturity.

When I tell this story to fellow Mormons, the air gets thick. Before I even get done with the story, the answers are already formed. Sometimes the answers start even before the story is finished. :-) In essence, the Hindu religious experience can’t be real because there are no priesthood keys to confer the gift of the Holy Ghost. This devolves into hair splitting over the definitions of light of Christ versus Holy Ghost, etc. It ends up being a long, tortured and thoroughly unsatisfying discussion, at least for me. The problem is that I've been to testimony meetings and I've been to Hindu temples in India. You can't tell me that the experiences aren't identical. It contradicts direct observation.

My conclusion is that a belief in exclusive access to gifts of the Spirit based on ordinances and priesthood keys is not a pillar of faith. It's a pillar of sectarian division.