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That’s kind of why I thought it would be good to just say, if the goal is monogamy, fidelity, family formation, love and companionship for all, orientation doesn’t matter. In our church and culture, you choose one person. It’s just that we’re all choosing from a different pool of people based on our place on the spectrum. I think the bisexual question is less clearcut for the points Bryce was making in the essay. Lots of older church members think bisexuality is just an excuse for rampant promiscuity. It’s harder to explain. The transgender question is another can of worms because of the variation, and both are lower % of the population than homosexuality. It was already pretty long, but remember who the target audience is. I think Bryce may do follow ups on these other segments in the future.
Roadrunner wrote:
I have a question about bisexuality that may need to be a different thread. Bisexuality is the piece I understand the least. As I understand it bisexuals are attracted to both sexes. So by choosing a single person to have a relationship with, a bisexual denies the need for the other sex they didn’t choose? Is that correct?
Incorrect. Straight women are attracted to many men. So in choosing a single person to have a relationship with, do they deny the need to be with other men they didn’t choose? It’s the same with bisexuals. We’re attracted to people of multiple genders. In other words, our bodies don’t see different genders as being different, at least in terms of being able to form intimate long-term relationships. We may find one gender more attractive generally, just like you may find different ethnicities more attractive than others. But most of us have no need to be with multiple people. Most bisexuals are monogamous. Bisexuality is unrelated to promiscuity.hawkgrrrl wrote:both are lower % of the population than homosexuality.
Actually, bisexuals are as large % of the population as homosexuals. We just get less attention.
Definitely agree about length and target audience. There are many misconceptions about bisexuality for the audience to get over and the article is long enough as is.
I read the entire essay. That seems like an important one for many people to read. I have a question: I know of a guy who used to be gay and now has a wife and kids and is temple worthy and actually teaches at BYU. How do we explain his case?
My dad did his master’s thesis on the topic of therapeutic treatments for homosexuality back in 1990. I don’t recall whether he came to any conclusion as a result, but I know it was a question that bothered him because of the Gospel…I mean, the question of whether sexual orientation can be changed, because the guy I mentioned above was one of his close friends while he was growing up.
Most of my family lives in CA where in 2008 Prop 8 was a huge deal and the Church told the membership to support it. Both my brothers (who are straight, BTW) left the Church at that point, and I lost a piece of my testimony, as I thought the Church was supposed to be neutral on political matters. My parents were going around putting “Yes on 8” signs in people’s yards and my brothers were going around tearing them OUT. My brother told my dad that gay marriage would be just like polygamy, and just like blacks and the Priesthood: one day the Church would change its policy. My dad said if that ever happened, then he would leave the Church. So there you go. Fun times.
squarepeg wrote:
I have a question: I know of a guy who used to be gay and now has a wife and kids and is temple worthy and actually teaches at BYU. How do we explain his case?
Bisexuals exist. Bisexuality is a spectrum. Seehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale Alternatively, some people are happy to be married to their best friend who they love platonically.
squarepeg wrote:
My dad did his master’s thesis on the topic of therapeutic treatments for homosexuality back in 1990. I don’t recall whether he came to any conclusion as a result, but I know it was a question that bothered him because of the Gospel…I mean, the question of whether sexual orientation can be changed, because the guy I mentioned above was one of his close friends while he was growing up.
Though not the case for the vast majority of people, sexual orientation can be fluid. It doesn’t mean the person has any control over how things change, though. Conversion therapy — treatments to change one’s orientation or gender identity — has been shown to be ineffective, as well as carrying high risk of inducing mental illness.bridget_night wrote:My thoughts: I have read this paper by Bryce Cook. PLEASE read it also. It’s long, but worth every single minute of your time. I cannot encourage you strongly enough.
It is EVERYTHING. In all the years on the front lines working for LGBT equality and the millions of pages I’ve read on this topic, this is far and away the BEST of it all. Every single member of the church should read this. THANK YOU for this amazing labor of love, Bryce. May it change hearts and minds, and save lives. ❤
If the doctrine of the LDS Church matters to you, especially in relation to LGBT family, this is a must read. This article is a masterpiece. It is a compilation of everything I have felt in my heart but didn’t have all the resources to connect all the dots. The waters of LDS/LGBT theology have been muddied to the extent that it really does take a 60+ page article to unwind. Much like blacks and the priesthood, the temple ban had been practiced for so long,
:thumbup: This is so great! Thanks so much for sharing.Conversion therapy is wrong. Full stop. I read it. There’s a lot to get through but it’s not difficult at all. In a weird way I enjoyed it. I did think it was interesting that Cook pointed out that God’s plan apparently included incest between Adam and Eve’s descendants, I had just drawn that same (horrifying) conclusion myself.
:sick: Really just part of the larger point of “we don’t know what God wants, since He apparently changes His mind all the time.”Cook also didn’t mention asexuals. (I wouldn’t expect him to; it’s not really within the scope of the paper.) And I think that’s an interesting test case. The church has no problem with asexuals – they all either enter into mixed-orientation marriages or remain celibate, which is exactly what the church wants. And yet at the end of the day the church would say the exact same thing to an asexual person as it would to a homosexual one: “you have to be resurrected as a 100% heterosexual person or else you miss out on the highest degree of glory.”
Since I have a child whom I suspect may be the A in LGBTQIA+, that’s definitely something I think about. At the end of the day, it’s not just people who are 100% homosexual that present a problem, it’s people who are anything other than 100% heterosexual.
God only approved of incest if you take the Garden of Eden narrative literally. I don’t, since I see Adam and Eve as symbolic representations of the first, evolved, self-aware and God-aware creatures who are known now as humans (and an explicit insertion of a spirit into an existent embryo is left as an option in the Church’s official statement about evolution), so that isn’t an issue for me, at all. /back to primary thread topic
Agreed. I know too much about biology to take the Adam and Eve story 100% literally – but I know a lot of people who do. My husband is one of them. And when I ask him about the incest factor, he will typically say something like “God’s ways are not our ways.” It seems odd to me that we can say “God’s ways are not our ways” when it comes to
rejectingsame sex relationships, but we are incapable of applying the same logic to acceptingthem. I sometimes think when we say “God’s ways are not our ways” what really mean is “I’m right, now shut up.” Joni wrote:
Agreed. I know too much about biology to take the Adam and Eve story 100% literally – but I know a lot of people who do. My husband is one of them. And when I ask him about the incest factor, he will typically say something like “God’s ways are not our ways.”It seems odd to me that we can say “God’s ways are not our ways” when it comes to
rejectingsame sex relationships, but we are incapable of applying the same logic to acceptingthem. I sometimes think when we say “God’s ways are not our ways” what really mean is “I’m right, now shut up.”
Or it could be a way of saying “I don’t understand it” while not being willing to dive in too far in so as to protect their own faith.
ydeve wrote:
squarepeg wrote:
I have a question: I know of a guy who used to be gay and now has a wife and kids and is temple worthy and actually teaches at BYU. How do we explain his case?
Bisexuals exist. Bisexuality is a spectrum. Seehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale Alternatively, some people are happy to be married to their best friend who they love platonically.
Thanks, ydeve. I guess I figured he wasn’t bisexual because I understood that he identified as purely homosexual. But he could be something like a 4.5 on the Kinsey scale, maybe, and that would allow a heterosexual relationship, that includes sex, to work long-term?
Yeah, labels are descriptive, not definitive. If you’re a Kinsey 5, it may be more convenient to say that you’re gay, even though you do find some of the opposite gender attractive. Heck, you may not realizeyou find some of the opposite gender attractive. If it doesn’t happen often enough and you don’t get a full-blown crush to wake you up, it’s easy to dismiss. Can’t wait to try and tackle this tonight if I can. Knowing the church has a historical tendency to fall on the wrong side of culturally important issues, I continue to hope that LGBT and women’s priesthood will someday be shown to follow the same trend. Maybe this article will become the Lester Bush article on blacks and the priesthood. That article certainly moved the needle in the right direction quite a bit. That would be exciting if this article proved to do the same!
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