An Amazing Talk by a High Councilor about Being Gay and LDS

I’ve been pondering on this talk for about a week, and my reaction to it has been emotionally complicated. I’ve been trying to respond for days. I’ll just hit two points:

1-I wish that he would have talked more about homosexual orientation not being a choice, and the theological and practical implications. I absolutely think that this is where we have to start to make the church safer for LGBTs. BTW the eunuch argument can be parsed into non-existence by people who just don’t want to believe that Jesus said anything about gay people.

“I’m here because I’ve watched good things come into people’s lives in the Bay Area, not because we’ve innovated on church doctrine, which we absolutely have not, but just because we’ve tried to open up the culture of a few wards. “

This seems to be the central point of his talk–that argument that what church leadership in his area have done in not formally disciplining gay folks is not innovation–but a cultural change. He spends quite a bit of the talk discussing the finer points of formal disciplinary councils–when they are mandatory, vs. when they “may” be required. He seems to argue that being gay, or having same-sex relationships is not grounds for a mandatory disciplinary council.

I agree that making the church a safer place for LGBT folks includes tossing out the idea that formal church discipline must always be held in the case of same sex relationships. I do have a quibble with his argument, however. According to the 2010 CHI, disciplinary councils are mandatory in the case of patterns of serious transgression (homosexual behavior is considered a serious transgression in the previous section of the handbook). So if a priesthood leader interprets a same sex relationship as a pattern of serious transgression, he may believe that a council is mandatory. So, we’re back to square one on this one–it’s all a matter of how leaders will interpret “pattern of serious transgression”; in other words priesthood leader roulette.