Healthy LDS views of sexuality

1.5 hours. We are not going into detail on any one subject but rather to help members think in ways that hadn’t considered before so that they are then better prepared to then go and find resources with specific issues where they may need assistance.

I don’t think church should really get involved in teaching kids about sex. Leave it to the parents.

Oh, aren’t I such a niave idealists.

Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk 2

Most members aren’t ready to hear my full view on most of those – and I’m pretty sure GBSmith’s views would cause some serious gasps among the younger half and strokes among the older half. 😮 😯

I think it’s a great idea for a good discussion, but it’s going to have to be planned and moderated carefully. It could get interesting.

Our Ward is planning a fireside on the subject title above. We plan to address the following issues so that Latter- Day saints might have a better view and better resources to handle the following issues

Same Sex Attraction (I have no understanding of this so will not comment)

Parenting Youth to have a healthy view of Sexuality and still desire to resist sin (Sex is not a sin. It has consequences that need to be understood. I would approach it from that angle, but I agree with cwald the church has a lousy track record on helping kids with sex. They should stay away form it)

Healthy views on intimacy between a husband and a wife (MIght be a good idea, if you layout how there are misconceptions among Mormons about what proper sex is, and not focus on what proper sex is)

Pornography (Dont just talk about how bad it is, but try to understand what is causing it. I sure we all have an opinion why pornography is rampant in the church)

Shame vs. Sorrow with sexual sin (Again sex is not a sin, teach about the consequences not just that it is bad.)

sexual abuse (Way out of my league to comment on. Leave it to trained professionals)

How to better understand and protect one’s family from the ills of Media (There is some bad stuff out there but not nearly as bad as the church wants to portray. O fcourse if your underlying premis is that sex is a sin then sure you got a lot to talk about)

My question…. are there any additonal areas that should be discussed and also and ideas within each area that should be covered? (I would talk about how sex between a married couple is vital to the overall health of almost all relationships. It should not be used to coerce or control the other. Differences should be discussed and solutions should be found if possible.)

i agree that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew here. It’s too much to cover in a typical fireside length of time. Instead, I would focus on a narrower range of topics, and focus on those topics that overlap most directly with the church. I think guilt and sin is one of them. When I was a young adult, there was a pagan book going around called “SEx without guilt”. It thought a Mormon version would be aptly titled “Guilt without sex”. This is a big problem for some of us, particularly people who take things hard like I used to as a young adult. Even the slightest infraction would make me feel like dirt well beyond what it should have.

You could address the “sin next to murder” comment from SWK, as well as the highly objectionable statement that a good LDS parent would rather see their child buried than see them the result of sexual sin, whether imposed on them against their will nor not. If not directly quoting these things, using them as the basis for your antithesis for the event.

A safer route would be to focus on dating practices for LDS youth and young adults for parents to consider in their parenting, while weaving in a small section about the delicate balance between godly sorrow and excessive guilt. No doubt someone will say sexual sin is the sin next to murder …you will have to deal with that, and should as its a very terrible idea in my view. There is a woman who posted here for a while, a Temple Square missionary who had a beautiful and righteous daughter who was involved in premarital, goal-oriented activities (if you know what I mean), and was so shattered by it, felt unloveable, unmarriable in the temple afterwards she totally left the church. Focus on how the Ward can help children and others who have been guilty of sexual sin and temper our cultural harsh attitudes with kindness, love, and how to instill love in people who make mistakes, particularly young people. I think her name is Katspur or similar. You could do an advanced search on her name and look for the story about her daughter. It is a tragic example of how overemphasis on the gravity of sexual sin can be highly destructive to youth and young adults and even older adults.

Our Ward is planning a fireside on the subject title above. We plan to address the following issues so that Latter- Day saints might have a better view and better resources to handle the following issues

Parenting Youth to have a healthy view of Sexuality and still desire to resist sin

Pornography

Shame vs. Sorrow with sexual sin

How to better understand and protect one’s family from the ills of Media

My question…. are there any additonal areas that should be discussed and also and ideas within each area that should be covered?

The way I see it, boys will be boys and trying to suppress their sexuality to the point of complete elimination from their early teens until their mid-twenties when they finally get married doesn’t make that much sense because this is simply not going to happen in the majority of cases nowadays. I’m not sure how you could say something like this in a fireside full of TBMs without having them freak out about it but maybe what you don’t say is just as important as what you do.

For example, acting like porn is the worst thing in the world and a scary and harmful addiction is not going to help the situation because many young men are going to keep on viewing porn no matter how terrible people act like it is but once they see how much it is frowned on they will be more likely to hide it and pretend they don’t like it. Well what happens when they are married and their wife finds out about their secret porn habit? Overreactions and people blowing it way out of proportion, that’s what.

My father was a good friend of SWK’s. For at least 15 years, maybe 20, he and SWK would get together once a month for a private meeting. This was during the years when SWK was Elder Kimball, not Pres. Kimball. I had a steady girlfriend in HS, and when I went on my mission she gave me as a going away present “The Miracle Of Forgiveness”–the book that came down like a mountain on even the slightest sexual transgression. The thing back then was that sexual sin was the sin next to murder in seriousness, and you were to avoid it like the plague, and even little sexual sins required confession. What this meant is that I and all of the missionaries I served with went around all of the time carrying a burden a guilt: guilt for sexual thoughts, occasional masturbation (not me, I actually never did, even one time before I was married…quite a record, I think). For my part, I felt it necessary to go into to see my mission prez and confess that I hadn’t confessed something earlier and felt the need to do so now: my girlfriend and I had engaged in passionate kissing a week or so before I left for my mission.

Sounds crazy to me now, but this was all very real to me and everyone else–very, very real. Which brings me to my story….

I’d been home from my mission for 5-6 years, I’d been as chaste as it was possible for anyone to be. I occasionally battled thoughts but I never never masturbated. But it seemed like 90% of my waking thoughts revolved around girls, especially during the summers when I was out of school and worked construction, as was the case at this particular time. I’d been working all day at a construction site and I needed a ride home, and a girl who used to make deliveries for the contractor offered me a lift. I knew this girl slightly, and I admit I spent a lot of time looking at her when she was around and I knew she liked me from the way she looked at me. So I accepted a ride from her. Long story short, we ended up on the floor in my apartment, rolling around, etc.

An hour later when it was all over, I was in shock. She was LDS also and felt pretty bad. “I guess I’d better go,” she said, and she got up and left. I went into my bedroom (my roommate was not at home at the time) and sat on the bed, and began to…what?…howl, I think is the word. I really and truly believed that all was lost, that I was going to be x-d; and that if I was going to be x-d I’d rather die. My roommate kept a pistol in his room. I know, because he’d shown it to me once. I started looking for it, opening his drawers, going thru his closet…. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I felt I had to get out of the apartment and so I went outside, hopped the bus and took it to my parents’ home on the upper avenues in SLC. It took me over an hour to get there, and when I walked in the door my dad was sitting in the easy chair in the living room reading the paper.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, and out it came, I told him everything.

He’d been a sp, also a mission prez, and so he knew the routine, and in those days the routine was minute questioning, all of the details out on the table. Who undressed who? Were your genitals exposed? etc., etc. And as my father questioned me here now I noticed that he began to smile, and the reason he was smiling was that nothing, really, had happened. We’d rolled around the floor, we were making out, I tried to undo her bra but she wouldn’t let me, then I tried to get her pants off and she wouldn’t let me, then I’d gone off–and it was all over.

“But dad, I’d tried to go all the way with her,” I said. “That was my thought, it was my intention!” I really and truly thought I was damned.

“But still nothing happened,” he said; “or not much. But in future you will want to be much more careful.”

What is the moral of this story? I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me. It’s just an experience from my past. If there is a moral, this is what it is, as far as I’m concerned:

It is possible to keep the exceedingly high moral standards of Elder Packer, Mark E. Peterson and SWK if you’re living in the church bubble (i.e., you are on a mission or you are a GA or a CES employee, or something in between, like my dad was). But to people living in the real world…to expect such people, normal men and women, to expect them to adhere day in day out to an unrealistic, practically impossible standard–well, you are just setting up such people for failure, for a fall, and when they fall…well, such falls can be not only be damaging, they can be fatal. I didn’t kill myself on that day, but I know someone who did….