The new website by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, www.mormonsandgays.org, was created for people who share same-sex attraction. It was designed to keep families of LGBT loved ones content with the church’s teachings on the matter, and to preserve membership numbers.
It is not a new stance on the tolerance of gay people — though it appears to be — but rather it is a distortion of the same old sin principle. It amounts to devising an artificial, newfound acceptance to hide the same old dogma.
No doubt the site is well crafted. It explains the church’s ingrained prejudge with condescending and highly pretentious banality. The site uses feel-good words like hope, understanding, love, eternity, God and family to surround the debate with cute euphemisms and to lightly tread around the core issues of passion, intimacy and the scientific basis for same-sex attraction.
It is not a smart idea for Mormons to keep their policy in place. During the last decade, the LDS church has been losing and alienating members by its lack of progress on the issue. The hierarchy wants to keep LGBT individuals who are dedicated, driven and successful people in church roles as well as young people who overwhelmingly support gay rights, while at the same time remaining steadfast in its position. The LDS church cannot have its cake and eat it, too.
I am certain many LGBT Mormons welcome the LDS church’s reframed approach that emphasizes tolerance in name but not in practice, and dissuades gay Mormons from acting on their feelings. If these people are happy living in celibacy and hiding from themselves, who am I to argue with them?
The active Mormon LGBT friends that I know do see the website as the first step toward full acceptance, but the future steps look uncertain at best.
One of the LDS church’s top leaders, Dallin H. Oaks, made it clear his institution will never associate itself with loving affinity or marriage between same-sex couples.
At the core of the website, after cutting through the euphemistic language, the LDS church refers to same-sex attraction as a “struggle” that members must presumably “beat.”
Though the LDS church takes the significant step of acknowledging same-sex attraction as natural, it does not go so far as to agree it is not by choice or changeable.
In “Suzanne’s story,” Suzanne is a lesbian with a deep love for God. However, if she remains Mormon, her family will always be limited. There was no mention of a life partner for Suzanne or of children.
Sharing a bed in committed embrace with another loving adult is no one else’s business to pass judgment on, and having the chance at raising a family is something from which no one should be prohibited. Anyway, as I have written before, what better test from God than to design us with differences and see if — and to what extent — we choose to accept one another?
The thickest smoke screen on the website emerges from the push for “eternal perspective” — that is, living lonely and isolated in this life with the hope that somehow the gay will go away after death.
Another church leader, D. Todd Christofferson, said in his video on the website, “Stay with us.” The motivation is to secure more names on church roles and more dutiful tithing payments by ensuring people feel — but not actually are — accepted.
I prefer a God who sees our care and kindness toward other people and invites all of us into the fold, and I like to think of the battle for equality as his test of us.