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I can't tell if you are serious or not. Yes, if your goal is to reproduce, "same-sex behavior" isn't going to get you there. Nobody has claimed otherwise. Ever. But if your goal is to have a happy life with a social structure full of good people and friends that you can love, bond with, rely on, and be compatible with, then whether or not your relationship with them has procreative capacity isn't the only consideration, and might not be a consideration at all. For most people, sex is a tiny part of marriage. And procreation is a tiny part of sex. Your obsession with sex is weird.

For @Notatbm From the Keystone YouTube channel: "In April 2026, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints filed a federal lawsuit against the Open Stories Foundation (Mormon Stories) and Dr. John Dehlin, causing a stir of mixed reactions among members of the Church. Today I have the lead attorney of that very lawsuit, David Jordan, on the show to answer some tough questions, and even respond to a few public claims made by Dr. Dehlin. "David Jordan is the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah. He's currently a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP, specializes in commercial and complex civil litigation, and is currently spear-heading the Church’s ongoing lawsuit against John Dehlin and the Open Stories Foundation."

They didn't go after him before because his "trade dress" did not formerly mimic the Church's. Then he changed it, and that got the ball rolling. Doesn't matter if the stories sound outlandish or not. The problem is people who are unaware thinking that the podcast is affiliated with the Church. Go have a look at other anti-LDS channels. Mormon News Roundup. Nemo the Mormon. Mormonish. Generally Unquotable (almost all their videos are titled "Mormon News Updates"). How about Alyssa Grenfell and her mocking of temple rituals? Maybe the Church doesn't care if ex-members want to talk about it, but have a problem with those who try to imply that they are official Church information outlets by using Church trade dress? I suppose it's useless to try to convince you otherwise, but you're wrong. I'm posting a YouTube video today in this thread called "Church's attorney DEBUNKS Mormon Stories lawsuit rumors". It's an interview with the lead attorney on the case. Have a listen.

Here is my point. You defend your interpretation of marriage and the law of chastity by appealing to children’s welfare in terms of growing up in an optimal home, their right to both biological parents, the need to perpetuate the species, and how all of this benefits society. This all comes across as ad hoc rationalizations that contradict much of what’s in your scriptures and what they imply God values. Start with concubinage. There were two institutions for owning women and having a license to have sex with them: marriage and concubinage. The Bible distinguishes them (2 Samuel 5:13; Genesis 25:5–6). The Hebrew bible defines adultery differently than you do. You think adultery is having sex outside of your own marriage. In contrast, in biblical Hebrew law, adultery means having sex with another man’s wife or betrothed partner. Sex with a woman who is neither married nor betrothed is not classified as adultery, even if the man himself is married. See Leviticus 20:10. Deuteronomy 22:23–24 explains why the punishment is so harsh; it isn't because you betrayed your own wife by having sex with somebody else, it is because "he hath humbled his neighbour’s wife." The decisive marital status is hers, not his. There was no expectation of sexual fidelity on the part of the husband, and having sex with others didn't harm his wives and concubines. In contrast, Exodus 22:16–17 treats having sex with an unbetrothed virgin differently than having sex with somebody else’s wife: the man must pay the bride-price and marry her, unless her father refuses the marriage, in which case the payment remains due because her economic value to her father was still damaged. These rules make it clear that first and foremost, the law of chastity was about harming property that belong to other men (either the woman’s husband or father), and not about being sexually faithful to your own partner. A married man having sex with a woman who didn’t belong to somebody else was a no-harm-no-foul situation. And D&C 132 closes off the explanation that God merely tolerated these arrangements because of the surrounding culture. Verses 34–35 say he commanded Abraham’s union with Hagar. Verses 37–39 endorse the patriarchs’ concubines and say God gave David his wives and concubines. According to the D&C, these arrangements received explicit divine approval. Look at what the revelation promises Joseph: a throne (verse 49), rulership (verse 53), and a hundredfold increase in “houses and lands, wives and children” (verse 55). Wives and children are rewards bestowed on the man, along with houses and land. Emma, meanwhile, is threatened with destruction if she refuses the prescribed arrangement (verses 52–54). The man’s authority and promised glory are spelled out. So are the consequences for a wife who objects. The effect that all this has on the welfare of the children is not a consideration. Verses 61–63 authorize ten virgins under the prescribed conditions, explaining that the man does not commit adultery because “they belong to him.” But, of course, adding wives and children does not multiply the father’s time or income. Why would God command such things when they can be expected to harm children? The costs could be severe. In Sherilyn Farnes’s study published by BYU, Apostle Amasa Lyman’s household suffered persistent problems with financial support. He had eight wives and nearly forty children. In 1853, Eliza Partridge Lyman wrote: “I have lived without bread when some of the family [i.e. other wives and other children] had bread to throw to the pigs.” This was during his apostleship, years before his departure from the Church. Farnes also notes that high church office could bring pressure to take plural wives even when a man was not a good provider. Polygamy under Brigham Young wasn’t about an optimal family relationship that benefits children and society. Calling these sacrifices necessary for exaltation would concede my point: other religious objectives took priority over those children’s welfare. Why would God command arrangements that expose children to those costs? How does the father’s promised glory answer the child’s need for food and attention? If a man desires wives and concubines he can have them because he desires them and having them will give him glory. Their welfare isn’t part of the calculus. Then there is Paul, whose preference produces no children at all. In 1 Corinthians 7, he merely permits marital sex and tells spouses not to deprive each other (verses 3–5). But he prefers celibacy and recommends marriage for those unable to exercise self-control (verses 7–9). His reasoning concerns the present distress, the shortness of time, and undivided devotion to God (verses 26–35). Perpetuating the species is conspicuously absent from that argument and not something he valued. You seem to suggest that this is all just descriptive and that earlier prophets and apostles may have mistakenly attributed their cultural assumptions about marriage and sex to God. That is certainly conceivable. But assuming that the true law of chastity doesn't change with the times, why do you believe God’s pattern of revelation has now dramatically changed? Why is only God now telling prophets and apostles the truth about the laws of chastity when he didn’t do so before?

I strongly recommend this whole series on Race and Priesthood because it covers everything, has access to primary sources (including from the church vault) that many historians didn't have before, and though faithful to the church is good at not whitewashing the history and keeping biases to a minimum. It covers the sources and the context, which is essential in any study of historical issues. But here is the specific episode that deals with this point in history. The podcast isn't very long if you do podcasts but there is also a transcript if you want to read it. https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/podcast-episode/1852-and-the-beginnings-of-the-priesthood-temple-ban-in-the-church/

This is just patently stupid. Same sex relationships exist throughout nature. They fulfill many biological imperatives, like companionship, and love. Which brings us to your next fake objection: We've already determined that even if we gave Same sex couples the ability to produce biological offspring, that wouldn't change your view on anything. So this too is a fake objection. The vast vast vast majority of sex lacks any procreative capacity. Birth rates alone show that the vast majority of couples engage in birth control. People continue to have sex after menopause, tubal ligation, and vasectomies. Sex's primary purpose for humans then is connection and companionship. It performs this primary role equally well regardless of what parts a couple brings to the picture. In a tiny tiny fraction of instances it also produces offspring. But again this can't be your objection because even if we gave same sex couples the ability to produce biological offspring, that wouldn't change your view on anything. Who cares? There are many things in the constitution that are good and right. Many that were wrong. Slavery for instance. Another bad faith argument. You've conceded that even if the children of same sex couples were better off in every category it wouldn't change your view of the matter. This is the same thing. God says it's bad. There is no refutation of this "reason" This is kind of hilarious in a thread about surrogacy and how you think gay people shouldn't be allowed to have families. Again the vast majority of sex (like 99.9% for a couple that has two kids and has sex once a week for 40 years) is not procreative. There is no question or quiz for people getting married about whether they can or are able or are willing to procreate. Marriage as an institution and concept is severed from its procreative aspect already. And again all of this is a fake objection because you've admitted that even if gay couples were able to produce biological offspring that wouldn't change anything for you. And none the above matters. It's been hashed and rehashed on this forum ad infinitum.

Where can I read more about this? So I agree there is no revelation on the records of the church for the priesthood ban. But Young sure seems to go beyond opinion and invoke his prophetic mantle when he says this: "if no other Prophet ever spake it Before I will say it now in the name of Jesus Christ. I know it is true & they know it."

Agreed. If all things “give us [valuable] experience, and work together for our good”, then we're never being screwed over. Imo this is an idea for which there are many, many witnesses, some within the canon of the LDS Church, but most from outside the LDS Church. Ime near-death experiencers offer depths of insight in this area which are not articulated in our few applicable verses of scripture. Hence my posting of links to relevant YouTube videos, in case it's a topic of interest to anyone. Agreed. When permitted to do so, the intellect is very adept at coming up with self-serving justifications for unloving attitudes and behaviors. Imo this is a mistake; imo the intellect should be the servant of the soul, and not the master. Instead of letting the ego and/or intellect steer the bus, what if we choose to show up as love incarnate to the best of our ability in the moment, regardless of how we showed up in the preceding moment?

How much of this post do you think actually addresses the fact that there has never been a declared revelation from God on gay marriage in the church?

Your posts are sounding more coherent to me than my own. Very unfocused right now. Health of both my own and my daughter dominate my thoughts right now. I find the topic interesting, but unable to invest the energy into that it deserves, so will just bow out for now unless the language I am looking for to be more clear suddenly comes to me. Both of these statements are so, so true. (or maybe an unhappy face is more appropriate when we don’t understand this and think we are dealing with the same eternal truths) I would love to comprehend for myself as if I lived in that time the difference their understanding of what Truth involved made to their culture vs how our understanding has affected ours. I am not sure that is possible without actual experience, somethings cannot be truly understood with merely an intellectual understanding…knowing the words used but not the feelings attached to them.

I thought people were saying it was closer to 30%. Am I misremembering or just out of date? Definitely not keeping up with the news and research as much as I used to.

I don’t know about Scott Adams as I am spacing on that name…are we talking about the Dilbert guy? The rest were either demonstrated to be involved in criminal behaviour or were alleged to have been. Charlie Bird doesn’t seem to fit with any of those you have pointed out as behaviour critiqued so far.

Joseph Bishop did not do that. Nor Rob Porter. Nor Scott Adams. Nor Paul Adams. Tom Kimball was an former member. Okay. You may have a point. Thanks, -Smac

More mindreading and imputed motives. I have told you I am willing to listed to what you have to say. I have not. I can be persuaded on some things, not so much on others. Regardless of whether you could persuade me, I'd still like to hear what you have to say. Thanks, -Smac

Those people all publicly criticized the church and publicly put forth their views as correct, seeking to convert others to their perspective. Charlie has shared his life publicly but never set himself up as a standard for truth on the subject. The comparison between discussing the morality of his personal choices and the morality of the arguments others have made against the gospel and the church falls apart real fast in my opinion.

In the notes for the 1852 meeting, he also says (in the back and forth between him and Orson Pratt, who adamantly disagreed with him), “I may vary in my views from others, and they may think that I’m foolish in the things that I have spoken and they might think that they know more than I do but I know more than they do.” He clearly believed he was right, but he never invokes the idea of any revelation from God as the source of his rightness. Pratt brought up many times in his arguments that they could not deprive blacks from the rights to the priesthood based on color because God had not directed them to do so, and BY never contradicts him on that. In true BY style he just says "I'm right". I agree that scripturally the arguments against SSM are not well supported.

You aren’t persuadable. You admitted as much. It’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Why would I try and persuade you when the answer is “No. This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good." It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God. ”

It is not. Biology is not window dressing. Distinctions in the law are not window dressing. Reasons that would be irrelevant to address. Because see above. Well, okay. How you think this comes across as persuasive eludes me. You're not the first advocate to dodge substantive reasoning, to fail to present any of your own, nor summarily dismiss - without evaluation or any substantive reasoning - perspectives which diverge from yours. Again: I think the "Bigot!" schtick is so frequently utilized because it's all you've got. I can articulate a reasoned basis for my position. I don't think you can, either that or you are so immersed in your own worldview that you cannot accommodate the possibility that viewpoints divergent from yours might be reasonable. So you retreat to name-calling. It's also "bad" because it is biologically incoherent. It's also "bad" because the legal basis for creating a constitutional "right" to same-sex marriage was quite poor. Same-sex marriage and behavior are also "bad" insofar as it categorically lacks procreative capacity. These are also "bad" not just because "God said so," but also because we know what the divinely-intended purposes of sexuality are, and those purposes are wholly absent in same-sex couplings. These are also "bad" because they sever the institution and concept of marriage from its procreative aspect. And so on. You have no obligation to defend your position. At all. I am persuaded that you are avoiding this because you do not have a coherent rebuttal to the points I raised previously. The "Bigot!" schtick is all you've got. Yes and no. As a sexual ethic, I value informed consent. I am upfront about this. I entirely agree with you that "informed consent" is a very important principle. I sure would like too see more than one sentence about it. For example, I addressed consent in my previous post: BCA is a crime-floor, not a sexual ethic. It answers “when may the state lock someone up?” It does not answer “what is sex for, and what does it do to the people who use it?” The Law of Chastity answers the second question. That is why BCA looks spacious and ends up thin. Consent does not address adultery, as there are injured parties who do not consent to the behavior (innocent spouse, children). The Law of Chastity does address adultery, and quite well. Adults differ in power, money, fame, sobriety, trauma, and desperation. BCA treats a yes extracted under those conditions as morally sufficient because it is legally sufficient. The Law of Chastity does not. It puts sex inside a public vow before the night, so the weaker party is not left to negotiate in private with someone who holds the job, the apartment, or the audience. Consent can be yes and still be a bad bargain. An ethic that cannot say “bad bargain” has nothing left but procedure. If the only question is consent, then sex is a preference-satisfaction device. That is why BCA is equally hospitable to casual hookups, paid sex, adult incest, open marriages, and whatever else two adults invent next year. It cannot rank them. It cannot say why one form builds a household and another burns one down. In contrast, the Law of Chastity is teleological: sex is for binding a man and a woman and for the possibility of children and for strengthening their marital union. Narrow on purpose. BCA is wide because it is empty. BCA treats pregnancy, infection, and attachment as optional or merely incidental side effects, to be managed with technology after the fact. They are not optional in the design of the act. Unwanted pregnancy and abortion are downstream of a rule that separates sex from the only relationship prepared to receive a child. STI risk rises when the number of partners rises; that is epidemiology, not Victorianism. Pair-bonding and jealousy are not programming errors. An ethic that calls the predictable wreckage “the hookup culture is pretty terrible” and then keeps the rule that produces it is not serious. The Law of Chastity does not have these flaws. In the end, nobody actually lives “anything consenting adults do.” People still condemn cheating on them, revenge porn of them, the partner who agreed to exclusivity and then didn’t. They use thicker rules for their own kids than they preach in public. BCA is the public slogan; covenant, loyalty, and “don’t make me raise this alone” are the private code. The Law of Chastity is at least candid: it states the thick rule in daylight. The Law of Chastity is harder for some people than for others. BCA is easier for everyone in the short run and then outsources the cost to spouses, children, clinics, and the next partner. Difficulty is not unique to chastity. It is unique to pretending that a harm-principle floor is a map of a good life. BCA is a usable test for what the state should criminalize. It is a poor test for what sex is for. It counts only the yes of the people in the room and ignores the spouse who was not asked, the child who may be created, and the household that has to absorb the aftermath. It cannot distinguish loyalty from appetite, or a covenant from a transaction. It therefore licenses adultery so long as the lovers agree, treats infection and unintended pregnancy as technical problems, and has no inner reason to prefer a faithful marriage to a sequence of consented nights. The Law of Chastity is narrower because it is answering a different question: sexual relations belong in a public, exclusive, man–woman marriage ordered to union and to children. That is not “discrimination against consent.” It is a claim about the purpose of the act. BCA refuses to make that claim and then wonders why the culture built on it is brittle. "This" being what? I agree. "Consent" is an end unto itself. "Additional reasoning" undercuts it. Meanwhile, the myriad shortcomings and harmful effects of this "sexual ethic" are huge. I do. And the scriptures. And my own reasoning. And my assessment of biology, sociology, the law, and so on. So on the one hand you try to limit my perspective to "Because God said so," but on the other you fault me for having substantive supplemental and additional grounds for disagreeing with same-sex marriage and behavior. Could you elaborate on this? You seem to be contradicting yourself. Since you have not even tried, I guess we'll never know. The "Invincible Ignorance" Fallacy: This occurs when a person refuses to provide evidence or engage in an argument because they claim the other person is completely closed-minded. By declaring that "you wouldn't change your mind anyway," the speaker creates a position that cannot be tested or disproven. It is a preemptive strike to avoid defending their own stance. It is not. It is. It's right there, in this thread. Along with your various posts not engaging any of it. I've had various women agree and disagree with my on various topics. I think I work hard to address arguments presented to me. Here, you have not presented any. I do listen, I just don't always agree, and I don't silence myself in the face of your "Bigot!" schtick. Why it's bad. I also think fornication is bad, both because "God says it's bad" and for other, observable and apparent reasons. I can even lay those out substantively. Individuals. Sex attaches. Outside a vow it attaches people who have not promised to stay. That produces a familiar list: used and discarded, comparison shopping, anxiety about the next person, infection, pregnancy with no household ready for a child, and a habit of treating the body as a short-term instrument. Even when no child and no disease appear, the habit is still the habit: intimacy without loyalty. Families. Marriage is the institution that turns sex into a public responsibility for whatever sex may create. Fornication keeps the pleasure and disregards the responsibility. Children who arrive anyway are more often born into instability—one parent, serial partners, split attention, split money. The next marriage, if it comes, starts with a body already trained to leave. Parents cannot preach “wait” with authority they did not practice. Society. A culture that treats sex as a private hobby still bills the public for the leftovers: fatherless homes, abortion as backup contraception, STI clinics, and a dating market that rewards intensity, punishes dependability, and skews toward the incredibly damaging "hookup culture." Marriage rates and trust fall together when the main path to sex no longer runs through a household. Consent between two adults does not pay those invoices. The Law of Chastity is the short form: sex belongs to husband and wife so that union, children, and loyalty stay in the same room. Fornication is the same act with the room removed. You could address arguments and reasoning. You don't. Thanks, -Smac

Except that unlike the prejudicial priesthood ban against blacks, there has never been ANY claim of a revelation from God prohibiting gay marriage. As long as we're exchanging hypotheticals in this thread: If the Church were to publish a clear and unequivocal revelation affirming the parameters of the Law of Chastity and the definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, would you accept it? I find it interesting that you have never condemned the substantial majority of Black and Hispanic Californians who supported Prop 8. Were they just being prejudiced? Also, I have laid out a fairly substantial list of propositions and explanations as to my assessment of the Church's teachings about sexual behavior. You, like SU, have not addressed that at all, and instead just go with "prejudice." I can't get on board with comparisons to chattel slavery, as there are orders of magnitude of differences there. Chattel slavery was a hereditary legal status: people were property, sold, whipped, denied personhood, literacy, family integrity, and citizenship. Jim Crow added state violence, lynching, disfranchisement, and a color line that followed you whether you “acted” or not. Same-sex attracted people in the United States have been mocked, fired, beaten, and in some places criminalized for conduct. That is real. It is not two and a half centuries of a racial caste that treated human beings as livestock. Pastors who filed against the Michigan analogy put it bluntly: no other class, including people with same-sex attraction, was lawfully treated as property. Calling disagreement about what marriage is “the new slavery” reads, to them, as theft of a unique historical wound. See, e.g., here: Black pastors protest: Gay ‘marriage’ is nothing like the Civil Rights struggle Race, in the American system you are apparently talking about, was noted at birth, marked on the body, and enforced by the state regardless of behavior. The civil-rights demand was: this person is a citizen; stop using ancestry to deny the vote, the school, the lunch counter, the marriage that already existed (a man and a woman). Redefining marriage asks the law to treat a different pairing as the same institution. Traditional Black church teaching—shared with much of historic Christianity—already constrained everyone’s sex life (no adultery, no fornication). From that view, saying “two men may not marry” is a rule about the ordinance, not a racial caste. Equating the two collapses “who may enter an existing institution” with “what the institution is.” The civil-rights story, in Black churches, is preached as deliverance from a specific evil, with a specific canon (Exodus, the prophets, King). When a later movement borrows that canon to settle a debate about sex and kinship, some hear: our dead are being used as props. Fred Luter’s line was typical of that register: gays already had the rights of free citizens; enslaved people did not. Comparing the two is, in that view, insensitive to what Black Americans actually lived through. After Obergefell, the fight moved from “let the clerk issue a license” to “disagreement is hate,” corporate Pride, school curricula, and sometimes explicit “this is the new civil rights.” For people who already thought the slavery comparison was a stretch in 2014, watching it supposedly become moral "common sense" in media and HR training makes the insult feel current, not archival. Thanks, -Smac

No. This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good." It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God. Ding ding ding. The rest is just window dressing. I have plenty of additional reasons as well. Plenty of reasoning over and above religious sentiments. Biological. Sociological. Legal. And you aren't addressing any of it. Reasons that would be irrelevant to address. Because see above. It's bad because God said so. Why would I waste time discussing made up reasons that don't impact or shape your world view at all? It all boils down to God says its bad. So are yours. We each of us "make up" our reasoning and analysis. Yes and no. As a sexual ethic, I value informed consent. I am upfront about this. If you show me evidence that some sexual practice is in line with this, then that will persuade me one way or the other. I'm not trying to slip additional reasoning in. You on the other hand value your perception of your church leader's interpretation of god's will. But then you dress it up in additional non-religious reasoning. Addressing the non-religions reasoning doesn't change your view. It's pointless to engage with you on it. Because it's not where your view ultimately came from. It is not. It has been addressed at length. Every person that debates you (on your side of faith and mine) comes away feeling like you don't hear their arguments. You don't address their arguments. Ask any woman on here that has talked to you about women's issues. Ask anyone on my side of the faith line that has talked to you about basically anything. You don't listen. You split up posts until they loose all meaning. At the end of the day the only reasoning that matters for you is the one you admit here: No. This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good." It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God. So whatever would be the point to engage on anything else? God says it's bad. What else is there to talk about?

Jeremy Runnells Scott Owen Rob Porter Joseph Bishop. Paul Adams. Tim Ballard. Tom Kimball. I haven't noticed much reticence about critiquing the behaviors of these persons. Again: I think there is sort of a trend amongst some members of the Church in which they conflate the not condemning the sinner with championing sin or championing behavior that doesn't lead to, or is incompatible with, a covenant relationship with the Savior. It's not like Charlie Bird is in need of an "Innocent until proven guilty" sort of defense. He, as a Latter-day Saint, entered into a same-sex marriage. There is no dispute about that, right? The Church teaches that same-sex marriage is not marriage as God defines it, that sexual relations in that arrangement violate the Law of Chastity. There is no dispute about that, right? I found the behaviors, both definitively established and alleged, of the people in the above list to be profoundly incongruent with the Restored Gospel. I don't think anyone on this board disagreed with that, but neither did anyone suggest that such an observation is tantamount to assessing their "personal standing before God." I think the same has happened here. It's not out of bounds to observe A) the Church's teachings and the Lord's commandments on marriage and the Law of Chastity, and B) Charlie Bird's very public and social-media-drenched violation of those commandments. I think we can say that and at the same time avoid commentating on "his personal standing before God." Thanks, -Smac

And yet I laid out, with substantial detail and explanation, my reasoning. I legal and other settings, a "conclusory statement" is a claim or judgment presented as a fact without providing the specific evidence, facts, or reasoning needed to support it. You are acting as if I have not laid out my reasoning, nor have you even attempted to critique it. You just jump to a conclusory statement. Well, sorta. My legal training has also been a big influence. And my own research. And my own efforts to listen to what people who don't agree with me have to say. I've been doing this for a long time. I've also been observing folks like you for a long time. Advocates such as yourself lean very heavily on appeals to emotion, begging the question, dodging/ignoring questions, motive psychoanalysis and imputing motives, motte-and-bailey, concept creep (“harm,” “violence,” “erasure,” and “safety” expand until disagreement is morally equivalent to physical violence), "lived experience" as a trump card, false dichotomies, institutional capture framed as "consensus," ignoring the costs/ramifications, denial as evidence ("You're a bigot." / "No, I'm not." / "That's exactly what a bigot would say"). failure/refusal to acknowledge or address or allow limiting principles, and ad hominem to silence and/or invalidate viewpoints which diverge from yours. Not quite. I have gone to great lengths to test the validity of the Church's teachings here and elsewhere. I have not reflexively accepted them, but rather provisionally. I have since tested and examined the Church's position for many years, and am persuaded that it is correct. I have also done quite a bit of my own research and reasoning and analysis. Biology militates against same-sex behavior. It is a genetic dead end. The plumbing does not work. Sex utterly and categorically lacks any procreative capacity or intent or purpose. Zero. Zilch. This is unlike heterosexual sex, which categorically does have procreative capacity and intent and purpose, Sociologically brand new and not particularly coherent. Legally and sociologically, the creation of a brand new constitutional "right" to same-sex marriage via Obergefell was . . . strange. Civil marriage was a legal response to a biological fact: opposite-sex sex makes children, and children need an assignment of parents. Same-sex marriage keeps the legal status and both drops the fact and is categorically incapable of facilitating it. What then, is the purpose of the State taking any particular interest in what are undeniably real but biologically self-ending private relationships? That is sociologically strange even if one favors the policy. Constitutionally, it was strange in a second way, namely, the circuitous way the Court "found" an unenumerated constitutional right. See, e.g., here: And here: As a matter of fundamental constitutional jurisprudence, the justices were required to loosen the test for “ordered liberty” so that a historically unknown form of the institution could be declared already implicit in it. Those are different claims—one about what the family is, one about how judges may rewrite it. Obergefell ran them together under “dignity” and loneliness. Your thought experiments below (better grades, lab babies) do the same thing: they change the purpose of the institution and then treat your refusal to follow as proof you never had a purpose. It is not identical. Interracial marriages can procreate. Interracial marriages can facilitate the raising of a child by a mother and father. Same-sex relationships can do neither of these things. Motive psychoanalysis / genetic fallacy. My mind can be changed, or modified/adjusted. That happens all the time. Perhaps. No. But "morality" is mostly a matter of faith and belief. I also think, as an abstraction, that unmarried couples who have sex and have children outside of marriage are not behaving morally. However, I do very little with this. There is no value in me going around expressing judgments along these lines. The interesting thing about unmarried couples, though, is that they do not have a huge infrastructure of activists, ideologically captured institutions, money, and so on to advance the moral legitimacy of their behavior. Nor do that have self-appointed advocates go dole out "Bigot!" accusations for strangers who decline, even on reasoned and principled grounds, to toe the movement's line. I think the hypothetical is too absurd and unrealistic to take seriously. Probably not. That would just be a technological workaround, not a categorical capacity for procreation. And that's only part of the problem. The other is the intentional deprivation of a mother or father from the life and rearing of the child. No. This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good." It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God. So are yours. We each of us "make up" our reasoning and analysis. It happens, though, that my reasoning is fairly substantive, and you are not addressing it. At all. I have plenty of additional reasons as well. Plenty of reasoning over and above religious sentiments. Biological. Sociological. Legal. And you aren't addressing any of it. Well, you could address the substance of my reasoning. You could also present reasoning of your own. I am happy to listen to what you have to say. It is quite reasonable and defensible reasoning from a legal and biological and sociological perspective as well. I have laid out my reasoning. You have not addressed it in any meaningful way. You have no obligation to, of course. But this is one of the reasons I am persuaded that my position is correct, but that yours is effectively indefensible. Again, no reasoning. No rebuttal to reasoning. Just emotionalisms shot through with logical fallacies, culminating in a failure or refusal to even attempt to persuade. I think if you had a viable and coherent exposition on and defense of your perspective on same-sex marriage, you would present it rather than retreat to logical fallacies and withdraw from the discussion. Thanks, -Smac

I'm happy to follow wherever the research goes on this. Similar to same sex marriage, there is no recorded, voted upon, thus saith the Lord revelation on the priesthood / temple ban. I am unaware of Young ever referring to the matter as just his personal views, and if that is the case, I'd like to see it. I am aware of this quote (here cited at ByuStudies): https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/spencer-w-kimball-and-the-revelation-on-priesthood That sure seems like Brigham Young thinks the ban is divinely mandated. As for scriptural basis, the ban had a number of scriptures often cited to support it (now disavowed), just like prohibitions on same sex behavior. Those scriptures cited prohibiting same sex behavior are few and far between. We pretty much ignore the entirety of Paul's sexual ethic, as well as the entire sexual ethic of the old testament (where marriage is a contract transferring the sexual availability and procreative capacity of a woman from her father to her husband). This certainly seems to leave a lot of wiggle room for accepting loving same sex couples should the church's leaders ever choose to do so.

This came across my computer today. Perhaps because Pew is well known and already well-respected, they are known to have more of a random sampling method rather than the convenience methods that dominate most attempts to collect data on Latter-day Saints. An interesting, fairly comprehensive report. I note that disaffiliation/retention has been a hot topic this year. This report shows LDS retention (specifically of those "raised as Latter-day Saints") at 54% with some breakdowns by age and gender. This seems to be similar to what others are saying about LDS retention -- somewhere near half. Anything that strikes you as discussion worthy? https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/09/22/tradition-and-change-among-latter-day-saints-in-the-us/