Giving a child the knowledge to enable real choice

I could have posted this follow-up in “Giving a child permission to leave” (http://forum.staylds.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7971) but it occurred to me as I was writing that it might be helpful to other parents in the same circumstances and I didn’t want it buried.

This post is LONG. Buckle up.

Background information from that thread: I have a daughter who is lesbian/bisexual (physical/emotional). The Church doesn’t acknowledge leaving the Church as a moral choice, so my wife and I explicitly gave her our permission to leave if she had to.

I had a hunch that she didn’t really believe that leaving is a moral choice, even though she knew she had her parents’ blessing and unconditional support if it came to that. So two days ago, I started a two-hour conversation with her on the relevant facts while driving to and from a seminary activity. That did the trick. There were other good outcomes as well.

Here’s what we talked about. ydeve, I’m counting on you to correct me if I’m wrong about certain things in your area of expertise.

Mixed-orientation marriages. I told her about the 2x-3x divorce rate for mixed-orientation LDS marriages over heterosexual LDS marriages. We talked about why it’s so high, and why divorce is less likely the more bisexual the non-heterosexual partner is.

One reason – and this is a key fact that applies elsewhere – is that sexual orientation isn’t about sex. It’s about who you can be intimate with. It’s about who you can open up to, to the point where you share your most private, raw and vulnerable parts – physical, emotional and spiritual – to truly become one. We have attractions built into us for one sex or the other (or both) that jump-start that intimacy and help us maintain it. Intimacy without those attractions, or against those attractions, is anywhere from challenging to impossible.

We talked about how different aspects of attraction are more important for intimacy for different people. Physical attraction is really important to me, for example. I’m just wired that way. Emotional attraction is important to my wife. We don’t know yet what aspect of attraction is most important to my daughter. The conventional wisdom is that men tend to be wired like I am, and women tend to be wired like my wife is. But a recent study suggests that lesbians may be a little different from most women in this regard. It found that most heterosexual women are aroused (as measured by blood flow and heart rate) by pictures of naked members of both sexes. Most lesbians are aroused only by pictures of naked women. This could mean one or all of 1) heterosexual women are actually bisexual (which is how the study is usually reported); 2) arousal and attraction are two different things; 3) lesbians tend to be wired more like men are thought of as being wired, in that physical attraction is more important.

There’s another reason divorce rates are so high for mixed-orientation LDS marriages. In almost every relationship, one partner has needs that the other partner struggles to meet. If we don’t or can’t reconcile the mismatch in some way, the partner with unmet needs feels frustrated or rejected. Suppose your wife really needs you to tell her that she’s beautiful, and for you to really mean it, but you can’t muster it because you’re attracted to men. Suppose your husband needs physical intimacy to feel accepted, but you avoid it or engage in sex only mechanically because you’re attracted to women. In mixed-orientation marriages, unmet needs are much more common because meeting those needs is so difficult, and for some needs in some marriages, impossible.

Voluntary loneliness. Again, it’s not about sex – it’s not voluntary celibacy – it’s about intimacy and the capacity to love another person so very deeply. I helped her understand the difference between what it’s like to remain in the Church as a single heterosexual and what it’s like to remain as single and gay or lesbian. The difference is summarized neatly by their nightly prayers:

Quote:

Heavenly Father, please help me find my eternal companion.

Quote:

Heavenly Father, please help me to not fall in love.

The single heterosexual member can always hope. Sister Nelson was finally married at age 55. I have an aunt who was married in her mid-40s. On the other hand, a single gay member who has decided to remain can’t dare to hope for companionship.

My daughter told me that having to pray for loneliness must be wrong. I agreed. Then she wanted to know if the brethren had ever been wrong about something big, or if doctrine had ever changed.

Prejudice and revelation. I told her about the 1949 and 1969 First Presidency messages affirming the Church’s policy on not giving the priesthood to men of African descent and not allowing anyone of African descent in the temples. I told her that the reason (black people have the blood of Cain, and were put in that line because they were less valiant in premortal life) was taught as doctrine, despite what she might hear from others. I told her about Lester Bush’s Dialogue paper, and how, with 400 pages of source material backing it up, it showed convincingly that the ban and the doctrine justifying it originated with Brigham Young.

I told her how the First Presidency and Q12 produce revelation: that it’s drafted by the First Presidency and has to be accepted by unanimous vote by all 15 apostles. I told her that President McKay had wanted the ban lifted but couldn’t get enough support, and that President Kimball had used Bush’s work and one-on-one interviews to get support before drafting Official Declaration 2. I told her how the two most prejudiced apostles were absent for the vote: one in the hospital, and one out of country on assignment (though the latter did agree to it over the phone).

I told her that I believe prejudice easily gets in the way of inspiration.

(I was very careful to not say things in a way that would lead her to believe that the Brethren are bad – just that they’re human and can make big mistakes that hurt people. For example, I didn’t tell her what happened to Lester Bush’s family – how they were marginalized to the point where they withdrew from Church activity, and how Elder Peterson (the apostle on assignment during the vote) tried to get Bush’s stake president to discipline him for publishing his paper soon after President Kimball died. I wanted to avoid painting the Brethren as proud and petty, even though some can be that way. Her religious identity is important. I don’t want to tear it down.)

She said that things were starting to make much more sense to her. With the idea that the Brethren can be wrong firmly in her mind, she started to accept that homosexual relationships might be okay – and even good – after all.

She told me she was actually excited about falling in love now. She’s been dreading it for so long. I almost cried.

Men are that they might have joy. I brought up this scripture, and told her how my wife and children have brought me more joy than anything else in life. She talked about how much Heavenly Father wants her to be happy. She asked about how same-sex partners can have children, so I told her about adoption and artificial insemination.

Intermission. At this point, we had arrived at the city where the seminary activity was. She asked her younger brother, who was sitting in the back seat, if he’d been listening. He said he had. Her brother’s mode of listening is often pretty… checked out, we could say, so he was surprised when she said, “So you know I’m bisexual now?” (I had tried to keep the conversation to generalities at first, but she was comfortable talking about herself specifically, so I went with it.)

She’s on the stake youth committee, so we dropped her off and went to get food. When we came back, I saw her through a window, speaking animatedly to her peers. I’ve never seen her so wholly involved in a discussion consisting of more than two people.

The lesson half of the seminary meeting was on dating. Near the beginning, the stake president used same-sex marriage to compare the world’s standards with the Lord’s standards. I held her hand during this part. She’s going to have to learn how to take the good at Church and leave the bad. Maybe this was decent practice. After the lesson half, she was feeling drained, so we didn’t stay for the activity half.

On the trip back, the main things I wanted her to understand were 1) why she would have to leave the Church to pursue a homosexual relationship, 2) what kinds of things might happen if she did, and 3) how long she would have to wait for the Church to allow homosexual relationships if she stayed.

Church policy. I told my daughter about how homosexual dating would be received at church; i.e. not at all well. In this, the bishop has discretion on when to apply discipline. Non-intimate homosexual dating could earn her a probing interview and light discipline. A long-term, chaste, homosexual relationship could get her disfellowshipped or worse. (I think this is all correct so far.) Homosexual sex would almost certainly result in excommunication. The one activity in which the bishop has no discretion is same-sex marriage: he must excommunicated those involved. She understood all of this and accepted it.

I told her about how children of a same-sex marriage can’t be baptized until they’re 18 and that they must disavow same-sex marriage. I’m afraid I lost objectivity here and called the policy a bunch of bad things. She agreed, though.

I told her that the Brethren are working by analogy to polygamy. We talked about polygamist offshoots of the Church and the hell they put their women and girls through. I told her that I think the Church has a similar policy for children of polygamist marriages to try to keep from normalizing those kinds of marriages in the minds of the members by exposing polygamy to them as children. Then I asked her for a difference between same-sex marriage and polygamist marriage that makes the analogy a bad analogy.

“Same-sex marriage doesn’t hurt anybody,” she said. I don’t know why, but I had never thought of this as a difference that would invalidate the analogy. I told her about studies that support her statement. The difference I had in mind was that monogamy is a viable choice for everyone, whereas entering a traditional marriage is very often not a viable choice for homosexual members.

Waiting for the Church to change. My wife and I have discussed this before, and have separately come to the conclusion that the Church probably won’t recognize homosexual relationships as being moral for at least 30 years. There are a few reasons.

First is the recent entrenchment via the November 2015 policy updates that make excommunication mandatory for same-sex marriage and ban minor children of same-sex couples from joining the Church. I didn’t tell my daughter about how Elder Nelson said the policy changes were the result of revelation.

Second, Elder Bednar doesn’t think there are any homosexual members of the Church. What he means is that homosexuality shouldn’t be part of anyone’s identity. (I didn’t understand until yesterday how hurtful it is to teach this. See below for why.) I can’t see anything normalizing homosexuality passing a unanimous vote until after he dies, and he’s only 64.

Third is momentum. Leaders, including apostles, tend to choose like-minded people to replace them. Their replacements tend to uphold their policies.

We talked about indications that things are changing, and how they might change. Perhaps the biggest driver of change is millennials seeing for themselves that homosexual relationships, especially same-sex marriages, aren’t evil like they learn in Church. A secondary driver is parents, like me, but in higher leadership positions, who have LGBT children. It’s one thing when a sibling is LGBT. It’s very different when a child is LGBT. You feel a child’s anguish so much more keenly than a sibling’s. And millennials are opening up to their parents about these issues much more than their parents’ generation did, partly as a result of the Church recognizing that same-sex attraction isn’t a choice.

Leaving the Church. I told my daughter that I’ve been mentally collecting stories of LGBT members and ex-members, though not where I’ve been getting the ex-member stories. (Turns out the ex-Mormon subreddit is a treasure trove, though you do have to carefully account for emotional backlash when trying to determine what’s actually true.) I’ve identified three major themes.

The first theme is how hard it is to leave the Church. Most LGBT members go through years of anguish before they broach the subject of leaving with their parents, often because they correctly predict their parents’ responses. For example, many parents lash out in fear, accusing their children of breaking up their eternal family and worse. (My daughter said that this is a terrible thing for a parent to do. She’s got a good head on her shoulders.) It seems most LGBT members who leave lose a significant proportion of their family connections. Some lose all of them. This is their greatest source of pain after leaving.

The second theme is how much happiness they find outside of the Church. I’ve read many accounts by LGBT ex-members who have just found love or just gotten married. Statements like “I never imagined how happy I would be” are common, as is “They told me I could never find joy in a homosexual relationship, but they were so wrong.”

The third theme is anger against the Church because of lost time and lasting psychological harm. I left this one out of our discussion, as it’s not relevant to her anymore.

(If we were to turn these themes into trends, they’d appear stronger than they should due to selection bias, as ex-Mormon Redditors tend to fit a certain profile. They’d still be quantifiable trends, though.)

What I wanted was 1) for her to understand that we’re protecting her from the worst effects of leaving, and 2) to plant the idea that some backlash from extended family is expected. I can’t speak for my wife, but if I’m forced to, I’ll choose my daughter over my parents or siblings any day.

Outcomes. The only outcome I hoped for was for my daughter to understand that leaving really is a moral choice. There were plenty more, however.

She intends to stay for now, keep the law of chastity, and learn about herself.

She understands the difference between the Church and the gospel, and that sometimes the Church teaches things that are counter to the gospel.

She understands that the Church and its teachings don’t always support her best interests.

She still believes in the gospel and knows that it’s good.

She’s excited to fall in love instead of dreading it.

She feels like she actually has enough options for happiness.

She’s come out to her brother.

She finally accepts herself as she is. I’m certain that this is responsible for another great outcome: she told us yesterday that she has “started seeing other people as actual people.”

This last outcome was surprising. I learned a lot from it. In particular, I learned that it’s damning for someone like my daughter to not accept herself. It’s been harmful for her spiritually to not allow sexual orientation to be part of her identity.

I don’t know what I’ll do with what I’ve learned from this discussion and its outcomes. I want to do something. For now, it’s enough to get it all out. Thanks for sticking with it for this long.