LGBTQ Orientation is a Given, Not a Chosen

Issues of gender and sexual identity are complex. I believe we are living in a very dark time with regard to the church and these issues. I have many LGBTQ friends, many of whom do not feel welcomed at church. They are extremely pained over the conflict between their conscience and the current teachings of the church. Many are anguished by the many unthinking, insensitive, uninformed practices, beliefs, and attitudes we hold in our culture that dehumanize them. As one anonymous author wrote: “In a lifetime of church activity, I have yet to hear a single word of compassion or understanding for homosexuals spoken from the pulpit.” This wouldn’t be so tragic if it weren’t so true.

I disclaim any church posture that puts my LGBTQ brothers and sisters in the margins of a stigmatized identity. I also disclaim any posture that would make them feel that their orientation is something to be shamed.

LGBTQ inclinations are a given, not a chosen.

I do not believe LGBTQ orientation is a choice. No one willingly chooses to be gay or transgendered. No one willingly leads a life targeted by fear, hate, and intolerance without honestly, and miserably, shouldering these crosses. In our church culture there is plenty of mythology tossed around that is frankly very destructive to our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, as well as their families. Just the other day during Gospel Doctrine, for example, an older man compared the LGBTQ community to the “wiles of Korihor.” I’ve also heard the rancorous Old Testament rhetoric of calling LGBTQ orientation an “abomination in the sight of God” and a “perversion of nature.” This kind of language is simply disastrous. It’s exactly the kind of posturing that leads to broken lives, families sundered, and even suicide.

I do not want to make it a point that having LGBTQ orientation is the defining characteristic of a person’s existence. We are all children of God first which means our primary identity is rooted in divine parentage. However, while I believe we choose which characteristics define us, there is something immensely disturbing about denying relations between two happy, monogamous, legally married, consenting adults, and then equating those relations with inflammatory rhetoric such as “sinfulness.” This posture is unrelentingly dehumanizing. It wants to characterize an LGBTQ lifestyle by unbridled lasciviousness, when in reality many people of LGBTQ persuasion just want an intimate, loving relationship like heterosexuals have. To insist on using such rhetoric is, I believe, to be swallowed up in the unforgiving deep of legalism. We can do better than this. We must.

Until heterosexual members — prophets and apostles not barred — are willing to bear the cross of celibacy themselves, or would be willing to stand proxy for the pain and anguish their gay and transgendered ward members feel, I find their privileged positions lacking in essential Christ-like virtues and feel no need to take their posturing seriously.

Do not misunderstand me.

I very much agree with the church that celibacy should be required before marriage in order to keep the law of chastity. I am also fully aware that there are plenty of celibate heterosexuals in the church. Some would even argue that the reality of single, celibate heterosexuals invalidates the uniqueness of LGBTQ orientation. However, I don’t think this posture is really sustainable. Single, celibate heterosexuals always have the hope to eventually meet someone (whether in this life or the next) who they can then spend the rest of their lives with. LGBTQ people do not have this hope.

While everyone experiences the “desperation of temptation and the emptiness of sin,” LGBTQ people are essentially being told to carry an additional, unnecessary cross by being forever mortally denied basic human needs, intimacy, physical touch, and physical connection. They are starving for affection and emotional intimacy, and the only “hope” the church can offer them is to equate their mortal existence with an “unnatural” physical disability, or illness, one that did not exist in the pre-existence and will not persist in the next life. Many of my friends have explained to me that being changed or fixed in this regard in the afterlife would be like living in hell. I ask my heterosexual friends to therefore consider the following:

How would you feel if God fixed your heterosexual feelings in the afterlife and made them homosexual? I’m sure your answer would be the same: It would be hell.

I am not convinced that LGBTQ orientation is a disability, or illness. After all, it is a pretty well-demonstrated fact that numberless kinds of birds, mammals, and primates engage in homosexual behavior, but our species for some reason is the only one desiring to condemn it, calling it “unnatural,” even though it is the most naturally occurring reality — albeit marginal reality — among all species. It is privileged rhetoric that tells LGBTQ people they are disabled and abnormal, even though what they feel is no different than what their heterosexual friends feel. As many of my LGBTQ friends would say, “I’m not ill. I’m just in love.” This statement reveals that LGBTQ people are essentially desiring everything we hold valuable in our religion — families, committed relationships, loving each other, etc. Ironically, their desires for these things are being intimidated with disciplinary councils and excommunication if they act on them.

Again, do not misunderstand me.

I am not endorsing any sort of laissez-faire, promiscuous relations between LGBTQ people. I am not in support of those relations even among heterosexuals. I am merely arguing against the swaggering, puritanical certainty that exists in our congregations that compels us to reject the value of LGBTQ relationships, then assembles us to legislate laws through organized phone banks that deny them the same privileges that heterosexuals enjoy. I am arguing against our inability of admitting that good can come from family structures we institutionally disagree with. I am arguing against how convinced we think we are — how absolutely certain we know! — that relations between two happy, monogamous, legally married, consenting adults somehow merits our profound social and legal hostility.

I feel great compassion for my LGBTQ friends and will stand with them in whatever they decide to do. I will not demand that they become who they are not — nor will I guilt them with harmful rhetoric as the price of my friendship. I will look to find Jesus in them, who always stands disguised in those who suffer. I will look to them to be my teachers, their patience having been made deep by pain can impart profound lessons. I will encourage them that when their loyalty to church authority is held in dynamic tension with the demands of an informed conscience, to choose conscience. Choose the light within. Choose the still, small voice. These teachings I learned from my Mormon heritage, which I feel richly blessed by.