The issue of Gays and the LDS church has been a source of pain, anger and anxiety for me for years. I have attempted to explain my current view on it, but have found the issue to be too complex (and also too painful for me) to do adequate justice in a blog post. So, I will keep this simple.
From the time of my early teens I have had many friends, professors and relatives who were gay and LDS. and I have observed their pain and struggles to exist as what they were in the context of the LDS church. Some of those people are still alive, some dead, some dead by their own hands. The church made their lives a quiet hell and continues to do the same to gays still. The doctrines and culture of the church deny both happiness and self-respect to gays.
The church largely dismisses lesbianism as a non-issue because lesbians are just man-hating, angry, freakish women who want to "usurp the priesthood", hence the LDS cultural conflation of feminism and lesbianism--if you are one then you are also the other.
Homosexuality is considered, to this day, a form of spiritual or moral disease, and therefore a choice. For many years the LDS church taught and practiced forms of "cure" for that disease, including aversion therapy, electro-shock treatments administered at BYU Counseling Center, ecclesiastical injunctions to "repentance", and excommunication (more than one homosexual has been disfellowshipped or excommunicted merely for "being homosexual".)
Only very recently has the church, under the weight of much scientific evidence, reluctantly admitted that homosexuality might not be a "choice", might possibly be inherent. Even so, homosexuals are enjoined to live celibate lives. Yet, many leaders, including members of the quorum of the twelve, by doctrine considered prophets of God and infallible spokesmen for God, continue to preach publicly that homosexuality is a disease and/or a choice and can be "cured".
At no point is a gay, lesbian, hermaphrodite, transgendered, or anybody not strictly heterosexual considered a real, fully human, child of God able to love and accept him or her self just as he/she is. The cloud of incipient evil, self-hatred and a sense of betrayal hangs ever over them.
What the LDS church has done and continues to do to non-heterosexuals is not loving, not Christian. It is, in my considered opinion, evil. I will have no part of it.
Bravo. I agree, and I hope those GLBT community members who are Mormon, or any other doctrinaire persuasion, and who have not found peace can find it for themselves. I hope they find value in themselves even when religious leaders teach them otherwise.
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