Latter Gay Saints

I am fascinated with Mormonism. Despite the (insurmountable) historical problems with its mythology, I agree with Harold Bloom that Joseph Smith's post-Christian creation is an amazing act of religious imagination.

I watched a 2011 video by a young gay Mormon and felt a lot of sympathy for him. It's even tougher for LDS gays than for Catholics, I think. Their community is much tighter, more conformist and more highly structured (not unlike a Catholic religious order) and their whole religion is founded on marriage and family: the Lords' Supper is a little matter of bread and water in your pew every Sunday, blessed by the adolescent boys of the Aaronic priesthood. Matrimony, eternal marriage as the path to progression unto godhood, that's for the inner sanctum of the Temple, where even Mormons need special permission to get in the door. And where Catholics separate marriage and the priesthood, Mormonism meshes them.

He outlines four options that gay Mormons face: to leave the church, to attempt marriage, to remain celibate, or to make some kind of compromise by living as gay and also staying in the church.

He rejects leaving because his Mormon identity feels as deep to him as his sexuality. He rejects marriage because it is unfair to a woman to ask her to take as a husband a man who can really only be a friend. "I wouldn't want that for a daughter of mine," he says.  He rejects celibacy because it requires him to give up not only hope of finding someone to love but any kind of more than friendly connection with other men. So he is going to try the fourth.

But by 2012, he gave up the church. The double life was too painful. Not an uncommon outcome.
Yet, I think it is the only one that makes sense*. Sometimes you have to leave a place where, despite your feelings, you don't belong. Sure it hurts. I know. But, frankly, be a man about it. Go.

Gay LGBT apologists want every institution in society to reform so that they are made completely equal, regardless of the consequences. Every institution in society must adapt to the desires of not more than 4% of the population**. Why should they do that? Especially if it unravels them? And why be surprised if people resent you for it? Especially when you refuse to accept that they have any right to a different opinion and that their opposition to you is nothing but hatred and bigotry.

The gay marriage push is the classic example. Rather than working for an alternative structure like a civil partnership, the only acceptable course is the dismantling of a fundamental institution under the guise of "inclusion." Because "equality" is The Most Important Value In Creation. And when they are resisted, the "LGBTs" cry out in anguish, as if one of the Great Crimes of History is being re-enacted.

It's all so out of balance. So histrionic. So teenager-ish. So...gay.



*There are rare exceptions. And my one Mormon friend is a fourth-option guy.

**Another example of the Rule of the Minorities in decaying Liberalism, where the Majority is cast as oppressive and so the Minorities must be protected from them, by ruling them.
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