smac97

As I previously noted: 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 don't even try to engage in substantive discussion. Just emotionalisms and logical fallacies. I don’t deny that same-sex sexual behavior shows up in a lot of species. That is a fact about animals. It is not a fact about morality, about right and wrong. “It exists in nature” only gets you to “it happens.” Infanticide, forced copulation, and eating the injured also happen. Yet by your reasoning these behaviors are good and moral solely because they 'happen in nature.'" Nobody treats those as a charter for human conduct. If “animals do it” were a moral rule, it would license a long list of things every serious ethic rejects. That is the slide from is to ought. A male penguin mounting another male also does not tell us what sex is for in a human life (or other forms of life), or whether a covenant called marriage should include that pairing. The penguin has no concept of marriage, chastity, or obligation. At most it tells you a nervous system can aim sexual behavior at the same sex. That is interesting for ethology. It is not an argument. I would not rest the case on “anything that does not produce offspring is biologically impossible.” Evolution is messier than that. A behavior can persist as a byproduct, as cheap noise, or as social glue in a troop. Grant the biologists that much. It still does not decide a human moral question. Function in a macaque is not permission for a person. If the claim is, as you have put it, "moral and good," then I would like to hear what you have to say. What is it about same-sex behavior that makes it "moral and good?" Please identify and explain the standard: God and commandment, a natural-law account of what human sex is for, consent-plus-harm, something. “Nature did it” is not a standard. It is a field guide asked to do a theologian’s job. So yes, the behavior occurs in nature. No, that does not make it moral, immoral, or morally required. Those are different questions, and they need an arbiter the woods do not supply. Lots of logical fallacies going on here. Appeal to emotion. “But they love each other” is meant to make dissent look cruel. Love is not a premise that entails “therefore this sex is licit.” A boyfriend and girlfriend may well love each other, but their sexual relationship is still illicit. Category mistake. Companionship and love are goods of relationship. They do not specify the kind of relationship or the use of sex. Friendship already has those goods. Equivocation on “biological.” Pair-bonding and affection have biological roots. That does not make every sexual expression of affection a “biological imperative,” any more than grief makes revenge an imperative. Is/ought, again. “Humans long for this” does not yield “they may do this sexually.” Special pleading. If love-plus-companionship justified sex, it would justify a lot of pairings nobody in that conversation wants to bless. They will smuggle limits back in (adults, two people, not relatives). Those limits come from some other ethic. They should say which one. Companionship and love are real. People in same-sex relationships can have both. That is not in dispute. What does not follow is that those goods are a “biological imperative” that licenses a sexual pairing, or that they tell you what sex and marriage are for. A "biological imperative," in the strict sense, is something like eat, flee danger, reproduce. Same-sex behavior is not a "biological imperative." Companionship and love are human goods. They are not a reproductive function, and they are not unique to a sexual relationship. Siblings, friends, parents and children, and celibate religious communities all do companionship and love without treating that as a reason to have sex. If the argument is “this pair loves each other, therefore the sexual conduct is moral,” the standard has quietly become affection plus consent. That is a different ethic than “sex belongs to husband and wife.” If that is where you are going, please say that plainly. Do not dress it up as biology. Love does not rewrite the act. Two men can be loyal and kind. That does not make their sexual conduct the same thing as the union that can generate a child and bind a mother and father to that child. You can honor the friendship and still say the sex is Y, not X. 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. Because the "fix" is technological, biological. No, it's a real one. I think you just will not or cannot address it substantively. That is simply not so. The "vast vast vast majority of sex" is between a man and a woman. Such behavior categorically has procreative capacity. Which has no bearing on whether opposite-sex sexual behavior, as a category, has procreative capacity. It does. It is fundamentally unserious to say otherwise. Likewise, same-sex sexual behavior, as a category, lacks procreative capacity. It is unserious to say otherwise, or to say "Well hey, maybe someday technology will help us overcome that biological incoherence." If that were to happen, that would be an expression of technology, not biology. I think you may be misunderstanding me. When I say "procreative capacity," I mean sexual behavior as a category. Sex between the two sexes has procreative capacity. This is so even if an individual instance is an exception. Similarly, same-sex sexual behavior as a category lacks procreative capacity. There is no way for two men to procreate together, nor two women. Well, that's an interesting perspective. I would like to understand it better. In my view, the primary purpose of sex is procreation. In a biological setting, that's beyond dispute. In a Latter-day Saint paradigm, the primary purposes of sex are A) procreation, and B) strengthening the union between a husband and wife. So we agree in part. That's something. You are running together things that are not the same. 1. “It exists throughout nature.” That is a description of animal behavior. It is not a moral argument. Infanticide exists throughout nature too. Is is not ought. Logical Fallacy Count: Naturalistic fallacy. 2. “Companionship and love are biological imperatives.” These are not "imperatives." They are human goods. They are not a warrant for a particular sexual use of the body. Friends and siblings have companionship and love without anyone calling that a reason for sex. Logical Fallacy Count: Appeal to emotion, plus a category mistake: a good of relationship is treated as if it specified the kind of sexual act. 3. The infertile-couple / birth-control point does not erase the procreative claim. Nobody serious said “every sexual act must produce a baby or it is worthless.” The claim is about the kind of union, not a fertility test administered to each night. A husband and wife are still a man and a woman joined in the kind of pair that can generate a child, even when this cycle, this age, or this surgery means they will not. Menopause, vasectomy, and contraception are facts about a given act or a given season. They do not turn that pair into a different kind of pair. In contrast, a same-sex pair is not an infertile marriage. It is, instead, a pair that, by the structure of the two bodies, is not the generative kind at all. It categorically lacks procreative capacity. You are treating “most particular acts do not conceive” as if it proved “generation is not what that kind of sex is for.” That is like saying, because most meals in a rich country are not eaten at the edge of starvation, nutrition is not what eating is for, and therefore the “primary purpose” of eating is companionship at the table. Frequency does not rewrite function. That is a fallacy of composition / accident: what is true of many instances is treated as if it canceled the point of the kind. Birth control is also a weak support for your conclusion. People block conception because they know what the act is ordered to do. You do not put a dam on a dry wash. Same-sex couples don't practice birth control because what they are doing sexually lacks any procreative capacity. 4. “If they could make biological offspring you still would not change your mind, therefore procreation was never your real objection.” That does not make the objection fake. It means the objection was never “count the babies.” On my view, X is sex between a husband and a wife for two purposes (procreation and strengthening the union). That is a man and a woman in a covenant ordered to union and to the possibility of children. A laboratory trick that lets two men produce a child would still not make them husband and wife. It would be a manufacturing workaround around the kind of pair they are. You asked a consequentialist question (“what if the outcomes looked the same?”) and then treated a non-consequentialist answer as a gotcha. That is moving the goalposts, and it is a straw man of the actual claim. I also do not take “connection and companionship” as the primary purpose of sex merely because many acts do not conceive. That is your redefinition. It is not a finding. You still have to explain why those goods require this use of genitals rather than friendship, and why the parts are irrelevant to an act whose whole design in mammals is reproductive dimorphism. 5. What I am actually saying, without the caricatures. Same-sex sexual behavior can involve affection. That does not settle whether it belongs in X. Animal behavior does not settle it. A thought experiment about artificial gametes does not settle it. If your standard is “they love each other and most sex isn’t baby-making anyway,” please say that. That is an ethic of fulfillment and consent. It is not a rebuttal of a view that says sex has a purpose, and that purpose is not whatever a pair finds companionable. Who cares? There are many things in the constitution that are good and right. Many that were wrong. Slavery for instance. You misunderstand my point. The legal mechanisms whereby unenumerated constitutional rights matter. A lot. A lot. "Who cares?" comes across as a "Who cares? The ends justify the means."-style rationalization. That is the sort of "bad" I had in mind. “Who cares?” only works if we were scoring moral vibes. We are not. I said the legal basis for turning same-sex marriage into a federal constitutional right was poor. That is a claim about Obergefell’s reasoning: unenumerated rights, “ordered liberty,” history and tradition, Glucksberg, and a Court writing a definition of marriage that the text does not contain. You can think the policy outcome is kind and still think the opinion is a bad piece of constitutional law. Plenty of people do. Pointing at slavery does not touch that. Slavery was a textually accommodated wrong that took an amendment to kill. It was not a Supreme Court invention of a new “right” out of due-process poetry. If anything, the lesson of slavery is that constitutional text and structure matter, and that we change them in the open—by Article V—not by a bare majority - five justices - deciding that "mystery" and "meaning" have now evolved. Logical Fallacy: Reductio plus false equivalence. “The Constitution has contained good things and bad things” is true, but also idle. It does not tell you whether this holding was a lawful reading or a policy preference in robes. If the answer to “was the reasoning sound?” is “who cares, slavery,” you have left the legal question. I care because once “I want this, therefore the Fourteenth Amendment contains it” is allowed, there is no principled stopping point (please note, again, how "limiting principles" appears to be something utterly beyond you and the things for which you advocate), and there is no reason for anyone else to respect the next invention they dislike. That is the issue. Not whether every clause in 1787 was morally clean. Also, we continue to catalog all sorts of logical fallacies: Whataboutism / tu quoque. “The Constitution once sheltered slavery” does not make Obergefell well reasoned. False equivalence. A written compromise later repealed by amendment ≠ a 2015 judicial creation of an unenumerated right. Red herring. “Who cares?” declines to meet the claim. Category error. Moral inventory of American history is not an account of due process doctrine. d Another bad faith argument. Another dodge. Another demonstration of my previous observation: that you are so immersed in your own worldview that you cannot accommodate even the possibility that viewpoints divergent from yours might be reasonable. So you summarily dismiss my arguments rather than address them with reasoning and evidence, and decline to advance your own argument. That is not a concession that swallows the point. It is a distinction you keep flattening. There are at least three questions here: Structure. A same-sex pair, by design, does not give a child both a mother and a father. That is a description of the household, not a mood. Two fathers are not a mother. Two mothers are not a father. No happiness survey erases that. Outcomes. How those children score on grades, income, or self-reported well-being. That is an empirical fight. It is not the same question as (1). What marriage is. Whether the institution is a husband–wife covenant ordered to that kind of union, or a companionate contract for any two adults. That is a moral and legal question. You asked a thought experiment about (2) and then treated my answer on (3) as proof that (1) was fake. That does not follow. I can believe all of this at once: a child in that home is missing a mother or a father; some of those children may do well on some metrics; I still would not call the pairing a marriage, and I still would not say the Church should bless the sexual conduct. “Better off in every category” would matter if my only standard were a spreadsheet of child outcomes. It is not. So refusing to let a hypo (an unsubstantiated and question-begging one) rewrite the definition is not bad faith. It is refusing to play a game where you change the scoreboard mid-play. If your ethic is “whatever arrangement produces the best average stats is the right arrangement,” say that. Then we can argue about the studies. Do not call a structural claim bad faith because it is not a utilitarian claim. A child can be fed, housed, and fond of her two dads and still have been designed out of a mother. Those sentences do not cancel each other. You only get “bad faith” by pretending I promised that outcomes were the whole argument. And more fallacies: Straw man. You recast “missing a mother or a father” as “I secretly think the kids always do worse, and I won’t admit it.” That was not the claim. Equivocation. “Better off” is treated as if it meant “nothing morally relevant is missing.” Stats are not the same as a mother. Category error. An answer about what marriage is is used to disqualify a claim about what the household lacks. Moving the goalposts. First: would better outcomes change your view of the morality of the union? Then: if no, you may not mention children at all. Poisoning the well. “Bad faith” attacks motive so you do not have to meet the sentence as written. False dilemma. Either you flip your entire view when handed a hypothetical dataset, or every child-related sentence was a pretext. It is not the same sentence. “God said so” is a command. “Sex has purposes, and this pairing does not have them” is a reason—an account of what the act is for. I can hold both. Revelation is how I think we know the purposes with authority. The purposes themselves are not a tautology. They are: binding a husband and a wife, and the possibility of children. A same-sex pairing is not that kind of union and does not have that kind of act. That is a description, not a shrug. You can, of course, reject the authority. That is a different debate (prophets, scripture, natural law). What you cannot do is pretend I offered no reason except a veto. I told you the telos, the ultimate end, purpose, goal. It is not solitary. There is much that comes before it. You answered by renaming the telos “God said so” so you would not have to discuss whether sex has a purpose at all. If your rule is “only reasons that would still move me if God were out of the picture count as reasons,” say that. Then we are doing secular philosophy, and the same structure remains: dimorphic bodies, a generative kind of pair, infertile opposite-sex couples still in that kind, same-sex couples not in it, and so on. You already tried to dissolve that with menopause and birth control. Frequency of non-conceiving acts does not erase the kind. So yes, I think God has spoken. No, that is not the entire content of the claim. The content is purpose. “There is no refutation” is just you declining to refute the purpose and unilaterally declaring victory. And more fallacies: Straw man. You reduced “divinely intended purposes” to a bare command with no inner structure. Equivocation. “Reason” is used to mean “reason I will accept without God.” Failure to convert you is treated as absence of a reason. Question-begging. You assume from the start that theological teleology cannot count, then announce there is nothing to refute. Collapse of knowing and content. How I claim to know the purpose (revelation) is not identical to what the purpose is said to be. This is kind of hilarious in a thread about surrogacy and how you think gay people shouldn't be allowed to have families. I don't think I have said that If I have, please point out where. What I have said is that same-sex couples and their sexual behavior lack procreative capacity. Hilarious is not an argument. Neither is “you don’t want gay people to have families.” I said a same-sex pairing is not a marriage in the older - and substantially more coherent - sense, and that a child in that home is, by design, without a mother or a father. That is not a ban on kindness, housing, or civil friendship. It is a claim about what the institution is. If you have to recast it as “no families,” you are not answering the claim. Sex frequency does not define the institution. A couple that has two children and then years of non-conceiving sex has not “severed” marriage from generation. They already did the thing the institution is built around, or they remain the kind of pair that does. You keep counting acts. I am talking about what marriage is for as a public form. Most conversations in a courtroom are not verdicts. That does not mean courts have been severed from judgment. No fertility quiz is not the confession you think it is. The state also does not quiz fiancés on whether they will be faithful. Nobody infers that fidelity has nothing to do with marriage. We do not administer a conception exam because the form is still a man and a woman, the kind of pair whose union is generative in kind. A same-sex pairing is not an infertile instance of that form. It is a different form. You are treating the absence of a bureaucratic filter as proof that the telos is gone. That is like saying, because we do not weigh every diner, nutrition is no longer what meals are. Surrogacy cuts against you, not for you. If marriage were still quietly assumed to be a generative union of the two spouses, you would not need a third party’s body to complete the picture because same-sex couples categorically lack procreative capacity. Surrogacy is what you reach for after you have already detached the child’s origin from the married pair. Pointing at that practice and saying “see, marriage isn’t about procreation” is pointing at the break and calling it the original design. The thought experiment still does not make the objection fake. “What if they could produce biological offspring?” asks whether I am a consequentialist about lab results. I am not. A manufactured child would still not make two men a husband and a wife, and it would still not give that child a mother in the home. Refusing to let a hypo rewrite the definition is not an admission that I never meant the definition. “Hashed and rehashed / none of this matters.” That is a fatigue argument. It is not a rebuttal. If you are done, be done. Do not declare the other side’s distinctions nonexistent because you are tired of hearing them. And more fallacies: Straw man / poisoning the well. “Shouldn’t be allowed to have families” is not what was said. Accident / frequency. 99.9% non-conceiving acts ≠ institution has no generative purpose. Equivocation. “Severed in practice by contraception and no quiz” is treated as “severed in concept.” False equivalence. Infertile or post-childbearing opposite-sex marriage = same-sex pairing. Boomerang. Surrogacy is evidence of the severance, not proof that the old concept was already empty. Goalpost / “fake objection.” Same move as before: if outcomes and gadgets would not flip the definition, you may not talk about generation at all. Here is a truncated recitation of the propositions I posted previously: What is your assessment of this proposition? Is it "reasonable" to believe that God exists, has a relationship with us, etc.? Or are all theists living entirely outside the bounds of reason? Thoughts? Is sex important or not? Is it a means to a biologically imperative end (procreation)? Or is it just an itch to scratch? Do you agree that sexual ethics are important? I assume you do, but you are not really articulating any coherent ethic, nor are you addressing the substance of mine. Is it "reasonable" to infer from Proposition 1 (that God exists and has a relationship with us) that God could have given us a set of sexual ethics whereby we govern our sexual impulses and behaviors? Do you agree or disagree that everyone has sexual ethics / boundaries / perimeters? Do you agree that you and I are the same insofar as we each claim to adhere to a sexual ethic, but that we differ as to the boundaries of that ethic (differentiating appropriate from inappropriate sexual behaviors)? Do you agree that the Latter-day Saints are, collectively and individually, as entitled as anyone else to publish their views on matters of sexuality, including differentiating between X and Y? Do you agree or disagree that the Law of Chastity is reasonable and defensible as the basis for a code of sexual ethics? That is is within the bounds of reasonableness? Have the Latter-day Saints made, in legal parlance, a prima facie case for how it differentiates X from Y? If so, do you maintain that this case is borne of "bigotry" and not reasoning? Is it possible that, regarding sexual ethics, there are viewpoints divergent from yours which are reasonable? Thanks, -Smac

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

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

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

Very interesting thoughts. Thank you for sharing. I wonder what we would consider "doxa" in a Latter-day Saint context. What doctrines do we take as a given (within our faith, that is)? God exists and has particular perfections and attributes (he is a loving Father in Heaven, not a distant and disinterested "Clockmaker"). The Plan of Salvation, centering on Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice. Joseph Smith's theophanies (including the restoration of the priesthood and deliverance of the Gold Plates). Witness Statements. The Book of Mormon is the word of God. Scripture. What it and Joseph said it is (a translation of an authentic ancient text, done so "by the gift and power of God"). Living Prophets. An open canon. The importance of faith, repentance, receipt of saving ordinances, and keeping covenants. Thoughts? Thanks, -Smac

What are your thoughts on all of the scriptures in the Old Testament, New Testament, and D&C that contradict your views about marriage and sex? I am happy to talk about particular passages. “All of the scriptures that contradict you” is not a list I can answer in good faith, because it assumes what it needs to prove: that those texts, read as a flat codebook, override living prophets and the Law of Chastity as the Church teaches it now. I do not read scripture that way. Proposition 1, that living prophets can teach and correct, is doing real work here. Heavenly Father and the Son send prophets and apostles with authority to teach, correct, and apply commandments in the conditions of a given dispensation. That is why Moses is not the last word on diet, why David’s household is not the template for marriage, and why the Church does not practice what Abraham or 19th-century Saints practiced. Descriptive history is not the same as a standing commandment. The record includes polygyny and concubinage in Israel’s households, levirate marriage and the captive-wife statute in the law of Moses, and the limited exceptions the Lord says He commanded in Jacob 2:30 and D&C 132. The same record includes monogamy as the standing law (Jacob 2:27), condemnation of taking wives the Lord did not give—including David’s sin in the case of Uriah and Solomon’s going beyond what was appointed—and the Church’s current teaching that sexual relations belong in marriage between a man and a woman. If a passage is historical practice, I treat it as history. If it is a commandment the Lord later limited or withdrew, I treat the later word as controlling. If it is the Savior or His apostles teaching holiness of body and covenant fidelity, I treat that as the through-line. That is not “ignoring scripture.” It is refusing to let every ancient arrangement become a veto on what prophets teach now. Scripture never authorizes sex outside a God-recognized husband-wife covenant, nor does it authorize group marriage—everyone married to everyone else—nor same-sex marriage. When the Lord has commanded plurality, it has been polygyny: a husband-wife covenant between a man and each wife, not a sexual commune. The wives are not married to one another and are not authorized to have sexual relations with one another. The exception to one-man-one-woman marriage, when it exists, is still marriage. It is not an enlargement of X to whatever consenting adults arrange. Levirate marriage (yibbum) is the same pattern: Deuteronomy 25 commands a brother to take the widow as wife to raise up seed to the dead, or to release her by chalitzah. It is a special-purpose marriage, not authorized sex outside marriage. In all of these, the essence of marriage - man-woman pairing, procreative capacity, constraints on sex outside of it - remains unchanged. Please feel free to name the verses you have in mind from OT, NT and D&C and I will take them one at a time. In particular, I am interested in you presenting scriptural passages showing God as commanding/authorizing sex outside of marriage, or between persons of the same sex. Thanks, -Smac

It's not true, either. Okay. So sexual ethics about these aspects of the human experience are based on reason, not bigotry. Would you agree with that? And you have not provided it. Here's one: I think my beliefs are reasonable. If you feel otherwise, I would like to hear what you have to say. In doing so, I hope you will present reasoning and evidence rather than just assertion. And another: I think my beliefs about sexuality, and appropriate parameters for them, are reasonable. I laid out much of my thinking in my previous post. And I have never expressed "dislike" of LGBT people, just disagreement with some things. That's an interesting perspective. I would like to better understand it, as you are not demonstrating or explaining it, just asserting it as if it were axiomatically and unquestionably true. You also larded it up with matters I have not addressed (racial attributes, national origin, religion). I would also like to see you critique the reasoning I presented in my previous post. For my part, I cannot articulate a reasoned basis for opposing a marriage of two people based on their "racial attributes," largely because people of different races can procreate and raise children with a mother and father in the home. Same goes for notional origin. I also cannot think of any basis for a categorical "religion"-based perspective. That just leave "gender" and "sexual orientation." In a strict sense, my disagreement with same-sex marriage is not based on sexual orientation, but rather on gender (that is, biological sex). Marriage was previously based on five defining attributes: age (no child marriages), consanguinity (against incest), mental capacity (must have requisite measure of it), consent (no forced marriages) and . . . sex (a man and a woman). In legal and sociological history, these five criteria traditionally formed the bedrock of valid marriage contracts across many jurisdictions. However, the legal landscape surrounding the fifth attribute has transformed significantly in recent decades. We have radically re-defined marriage to include same-sex marriage. I acknowledge that. It's the law of the land. I think there were, and are, ample grounds to disagree with this re-definition. By way of example, I think I can rationalize and justify the restriction on marriage as to consanguinity. Incest and inbreeding are pretty serious and damaging things to our society. There are some marginal cases, to which I admit I still retain some sociocultural aversion. For example, Utah allows first cousin marriages to persons both over 65 or, if 55-64, persuade a judge that they cannot procreate. In the main, however, I think it is reasonable for society to prohibit incestuous marriages. That doesn't mean that this is a universal sentiment. For example: It is not "bigotry" to critique and disagree with incestuous marriages, because there are a lot of downsides to such marriages. What are your thoughts about this? Also, what are your thoughts about restricting marriage based on age, consent, and mental capacity? It seems reasonable to me to not allow children to marry, or to allow compelled/coerced marriages, or to allow marriage to a person who lacks sufficient mental capacity. Again, what are your thoughts about this? That just leaves the last restriction: sex. I assume you think this is the line you will not cross. Could you explain why? Why did so many societies restrict marriage by this criterion? Was it wholly irrational and blind "bigotry" all the way down? Or were there other reasons? If so, what were those reasons, and why were they wrong? Well, no. Bigotry is inherently bereft of reason. My position is not that. Bigotry generally is intolerant. I have all sorts of tolerance for people who disagree with me. Again, I laid out my reasoning is some detail. I hope you will engage with it. I don't really subscribe to sexual orientation as a discrete and insular minority or class. I do believe marriage as between a man and a woman. That makes sense, sociologically and biologically and physiologically. Opposite sex sexual behavior propagates the species. Same-sex behavior does not. That's not "privilege" (as in an "unearned and mostly unacknowledged societal advantage"). That's just biology. Marriage, until very recently, was overwhelmingly between a man and a woman, in large part due to procreative capacity, and also because the optimum environment for raising children is where there is a mother and a father who are married and devoted to each other. That's not "privilege," that just sociological and historical reality. Same-sex marriage inherently lacks procreative capacity, and if a child (born through opposite sex behavior) is in such a family, he will necessarily and by design be deprived of a mother or a father. Actually, we haven't really been talking about marriage, but rather sexual behavior. There are lots of people whose behavior is outside of X, not just those who engage in same-sex behavior. You haven't engaged in the points I raised. I hope you will do so in the future. Principled and reasoned disagreement about sexual ethics (and about many other topics) is not bigotry, it is just disagreement. I think you likely agree with that sentiment as to other topics, but I think you are not willing to apply it here. Here, as to same-sex behavior, disagreement with you is "bigotry." No reasoning. No analysis. No engagement. 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. Thanks, -Smac

More ad hominem / tu quoque, as opposed to discussing the topic. 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. Here is a set of propositions by which I have assessed my perspective on the Law of Chastity, sexuality, and marriage." I will lay them out and ask you to consider them. If you want to discuss them, we can start a separate thread: Proposition #1: Our Involved Heavenly Father I believe God exists, and that He sent us here to experience a mortal probation, to exercise agency, to choose between right and wrong, to develop and maintain faith, to repent, to serve our fellow man, and so on. I believe God is not some distant and indifferent "Cosmic Clockmaker." Rather, I believe His perspective is along the lines of "this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man" (Moses 1:39). And because He "so loved the world," He "gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). Furthermore, God - our Heavenly Father - and His Son have sent prophets and apostles, and endowed them with authority and revelatory capacity to communicate truths and commandments and corrections to us. Proposition #2: Sex is Important In effectively every dispensation of time, sex and sexuality have proven to be very powerful and important components of the human experience/probation. It is the sine qua non of the propagation of the species, both via reproduction and - hopefully and ideally - having children raised by both a mother and father. Proposition #3: Sexual Ethics are Important Among other precepts, the Lord has given us the Law of Chastity, which constrains sexual behavior to two purposes: procreation and the strengthening of the union between husband and wife. Elder Renlund put it this way: The foregoing constraints make a lot of sense to me, both theologically and practically. Many of the worst social ills in our society arise with varying degrees of proximity to violations of the Law of Chastity. Proposition #4: Everyone has Sexual Ethics / Parameters / Boundaries Because I believe the Law of Chastity is a revelation of God's will regarding His children, and because it makes a lot of sense, I accept it as a valid mechanism to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate sexual behavior. Metaphorically speaking, let's say that "Y" represents a box into which each and every form of sexual expression can be placed. Procreative sex. "Just for fun or to scratch and itch" sex. Same-sex sexual behavior. Married sex. Unmarried sex. Adultery. Masturbation. Sexual assault and abuse. Incest. All of it. Let's now say that "X" represents a smaller box, within Y but still differentiated from it. X is a subset of Y, a subset of appropriate and divinely authorized - even mandated - purposes and uses of sex and sexuality, with the rest of Y being comprised of behaviors prohibited by the Law of Chastity, by God. The Law of Chastity situates sex between a husband and wife, for the purposes of procreation and/or strengthening their union, as within X. All other forms of sexual expression are outside of X. Proposition #5: Latter-day Saints are Entitled to Articulate an X/Y Differentiation The X / Y differentiation described above can cause a lot of disagreement. For example, some people differentiate X from Y by using a “Between Consenting Adults” (“BCA”) standard. That is, X includes anything in which adults consent to participate. Thus X would not include sexual behavior with children, or nonconsensual sexual behavior (such as rape). However, the BCA standard facilitates some real problems. Adultery may be “consensual” by and between the participants, but not the innocent spouse who is being cheated on. BCA also greatly increases risks associated with STIs, unwanted pregnancies (and, therefore, abortions), emotional turmoil (the “Hookup Culture” is pretty terrible), and so on. Nevertheless, BCA or some variation on it is how much of the world differentiates X from Y. In my view, our society has become way too sexualized. Children are being exposed to far too much of it, usually in harmful ways. Today’s “hookup” culture is creating all sorts of damage to the emotional and mental and physical health of those who participate in it. Pornography is stunting and distorting perspectives on sexuality. Various forms of abuse are happening with increasing frequency. The Internet has played a big role in that, but so too has the weakening of individual sexual ethics and standards. We need to return to seeing sex as an important, beautiful, sacred thing. We also need to strongly resist the tendency to inject sexuality into areas where it does not belong. Casual and coarse conversation does this. Crass jokes and vulgar humor does this. Imputing a sexual dimension onto relationships that are and/or ought to be nonsexual does this. Whether we are willing to admit it or not, everyone approaches sexual behavior with the above two boxes. I suppose there are some few truly depraved persons and groups in whose minds X is coextensive with Y (that is, without any differentiation between the two, where literally any sexual behavior is allowed). We all, either as individuals or as groups, create boundaries to differentiate appropriate and acceptable sexual behaviors (X) from those that are not (Y). I therefore respectfully reject criticisms of the Church (and its members) for its differentiation of X from Y, since all groups and individuals do this, and are entitled to do so. Proposition #6: The Law of Chastity is a Reasonable Basis for Sexual Ethics I think the Law of Chastity makes a lot of sense. Sexual behavior needs to be seen as more than just a biological impulse, more than just an itch to be scratched. Instead, sexual behavior must be constrained, it must be allowed within a narrow "closed set" of circumstances (marriage between a husband and wife), and is otherwise prohibited. In a biological sense, it creates children, and those children are, sociologically, much more likely to have a safe and stable childhood, and to avoid dysfunctional behaviors, and to grow into productive members of society, when they are raised by a father and a mother who love each other and are emotionally and sexually faithful to each other. Sex also is, or ought to be, very important to the individuals participating in it. That importance is undermined, even negated, when sexual profligacy is the norm. Parameters are necessary. I acknowledge that different people have different views on these matters. Reasonable minds can disagree about all sorts of things, including important things such as what should and should not be in X. I am not suggesting that all conclusions reached by such “reasonable minds” are of equal value or validity, but I am saying that we need to allow each other some room for such principled and reasonable disagreement. I think such space gives us time and opportunity to utilize evidence and reasoning and analysis to persuade. Without such space, ideological narratives are sometimes coercively imposed onto us, narratives with baggage we may later find to be problematic. Even putting aside, arguendo, the argument about whether the Law of Chastity is revelatory, I think this point is difficult to dispute: It is reasonable and defensible as the basis for a code of sexual ethics. It may not be everyone's cuppa, but it works. If other people and other groups want to make X a larger box than it is for the Latter-day Saints, such are the perqs of living in a modern, pluralistic society. However, I think it is a very different proposition to assert that the Latter-day Saints are uniquely disallowed from drawing the boundaries between X and Y. That's just special pleading and fundamental unfairness and unreasonableness. Proposition #7: Treating the Law of Chastity as "Bigotry" is Unreasonable The Church’s sexual ethic (based on the Law of Chastity) is, though sensible, admittedly far more restrictive than the BCA approach. Despite the the fact that everyone differentiates X from Y, the differentiation espoused by the Church is often singled out as being terrible, awful, “bigoted,” etc. I submit, though, that the Church’s Law of Chastity makes a lot of sense. Sociologically, compliance with it helps the individual avoid all sorts of problems arising from unrestrained (or less restrained) sexual behaviors, such as avoiding unwanted pregnancies, abortions, sexually-transmitted infections, sexual assault allegations, “hookup culture” issues, and so on. The Church’s teachings also make a lot of sense in biological, sociological and other contexts. This is where your "Bigot!" accusation comes into view. It is unreasoned and unsubstantiated. It is an accusation without support. It is presented not to rebut, but to silence and shame. The value of the constraints of the Law of Chastity are routinely and emphatically ignored in facile criticisms of the Church's teachings, which teachings are unfairly and falsely characterized as punitive, weird, etc. Such criticisms implicitly refuse to grant the Church any ground to teach what it believes regarding sexual ethics. I think that is unfair and inappropriate, particularly given the “(almost) anything goes” licentiousness inherent in the BCA approach. On this point I offer a quote from Pres. McKay: There is a real social “cost” which Latter-day Saints bear when the espouse and defend the Law of Chastity. It is always unfortunate - and never justified - for any Latter-day Saint to harbor prejudicial or bigoted sentiments against LGBT people (or anyone else, for that matter). But "bigotry" being an across-the-board synonym for "you disagreeing with the sexual parameters I prefer" is just not reasonable. A few reasons: First, principled and reasoned disagreement about sexual ethics (and about many other topics) is not bigotry, it is just disagreement. Second, baseless accusations of bigotry are generally intended more to silence and shame and stifle divergent viewpoints than to persuade or explain. They are coercive. Third, I sense that there is a lot of the above stuff going on, and that it is frequently directed to Latter-day Saint children, teenagers and young adults. There is a fairly potent “Mormons Hate Gays”-style accusation present in online social media content and platforms, websites, and so on. While there are undoubtedly some individual Latter-day Saints who harbor prejudices against LGBT folks, they are not following prophetic counsel when they do so. I recognize that, in the context of some “LGBT” folks, the foregoing assessment of the Law of Chastity, of the constraints the Church places on sexual behavior, can be hard to hear. But when viewed from a broader perspective, sex and sexuality regain their importance, their sanctity, and their beauty. Again, I am happy to discuss these propositions with you, and to listen to whatever propositions you use to develop your preferred set of ethics. Thanks, -Smac

Even when I was active, I found this an extraordinarily insufficient reasoning. I can appreciate that perspective. For my part, I find the "forced {} into existence" difficult to reconcile with my worldview. I was not referring to a "my kids owe me" notion. Sorry if I gave that impression. Thanks, -Smac

To you. Well, yes. We are all here sharing our opinions. I think I made it pretty clear: As Latter-day Saints, I think we must speak on behalf of the Restored Gospel. That may sometimes include saying something unpopular. 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. I think there is a lot of good will and goon intentions in there. We want to be kind and warm and welcoming, and that is all well and good. But I also think there is some measure of fear. We don't want to say things that go against popular sociopolitical worldviews. And we really don't want to be the subject of character assassination simply for speaking reasoned, but unpopular, thoughts. I wasn't presenting my opinion as fact, just as my opinion. I think what Charlie Bird is doing is profoundly incongruent with the Restored Gospel, both as to his marriage and as to his "Egg Donor" pageant. I don't think anyone is saying that you should be indifferent. I think since Nehor and SeekingUnderstanding are in this thread, the "Bigot!" accusations are a matter of when, not if. That they go draw water from the ad hominem well so immediately and so often is, to me, an indication of some things. The ad hominem stuff in this thread is, in my view, an effort to squelch viewpoints. Toe the line or shut up. I don't think that's a healthy state of affairs. We ought to be able to express an interested viewpoint on a topic, or else be indifferent to it. We ought to be able to have a discussion about the topic without being diverted by ad hominems. I think it matters a bit. Charlie Bird is trying to influence people to a particular set of principles relating to the Restored Gospel. I find some of the more important principles he is presenting are profoundly incongruent with the Restored Gospel. He is trying to influence people, and that matters. Others ought to be able to attempt to persuade and influence people away from the problematic things Charlie is advancing. True words. I would guess that Charlie Bird also agrees with them. You can definitely advocate for whatever interpretation of the gospel that you believe is most correct. Charlie and everyone else can do the same. Charlie seems to be advocating for, and seeking from others condoning treatment of, violations of the Church's teachings relative to marriage and the Law of Chastity. On these points I feel we must choose to listen to the cumulative counsel of the leaders of the Church (such as Elder Holland), or we can choose to listen to Charlie Bird. It's one or the other. Charlie has set himself up as a voice alternative and superior to that of the Brethren, and is, I think, implicitly asking other Latter-day Saints to listen to him more than to the Lord's anointed, at least in regards to marriage and the Law of Chastity. I think we should listen to the Brethren, and to set aside, and not endorse or condone or advocate for, the problematic things for which Charlie is seeking - and is getting - notoriety and influence. Thanks, -Smac

This is an interesting thought. Aren't we told that we chose to come to this earth and have a mortal probation? How then is any of us "forced {} into existence?" In the Latter-day Saint paradigm, our spirits preexisted prior to coming to this earth. That's another interesting thought. What debt do you owe them? I can discern the "state of servitude." "And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God" (Mosiah 2:17). This is particularly so relative to our family members. I agree as to the importance of consent, as it is an expression of the gift of agency. I am happy for you. Thanks, -Smac

Certainly tongue in cheek. Still quite unseemly and troubling. If he were not presenting himself as an active Latter-day Saint, I would be broadly indifferent. But he is, so I'm not. From Elder Holland: I'll leave divine judgment to God, but I think Latter-day Saints need to be on guard against the sorts of things Charlie Bird is trying to present as compatible and in alignment with the Restored Gospel. Thanks, -Smac

That more or less was my thesis. I was presenting some generalized observations and looking for feedback. Yes, maybe later. I also addressed this point: The child is the one party who never consented and is treated as the object of a deal. I also noted that I agreed with most of the others. Again, the purpose of the post was to open a discussion. Again, I would prefer to discuss the topic. Ad hominem impedes discussion. I didn't bring up Charlie Bird, but his association with surrogacy brought into sharp relief a number of the issues associated with surrogacy, the most obvious being the commoditization of women. Thanks, -Smac

Not sure about that. Splitting genetic, gestational, and social parenthood on purpose is said to complicate identity, kinship, and the child’s claim to know and be raised by the people who made and carried them. If the intended parents separate, die, or reject the baby (disability, sex, “too many”), the child can be legally stranded. Medical risk is real and not fully transferable by contract (preeclampsia, C-section, infertility, death). Intended parents get the child; she keeps the body. Bonding and regret: law can order her not to be a mother after she has been one physiologically. Critics call that a forced alienation, not a clean service. Parentage: who is the mother at birth—the woman who delivered, the egg donor, or the people on the contract? States and countries split. Utah and others allow it under statute; others ban or tightly limit paid surrogacy. Contracts about a person: courts are uneasy specific-performing a pregnancy (force her to abort, or forbid abortion, or take the child against her will). If you cannot enforce the core promises, it is not an ordinary contract. Payment: many jurisdictions distinguish “compassionate” unpaid surrogacy from commercial; the latter is banned or capped because it looks like baby-selling, which is already illegal. International deals: intended parents can be left with a child no country will recognize; the surrogate can be left with a child no one will collect. Citizenship, birth certificates, and succession follow blood or gestation in ways a private contract does not control. Equality / public-policy: some constitutions and human-rights bodies have treated paid surrogacy as incompatible with dignity or with bans on trafficking in persons. Are you saying these concerns are just ideological? A matter of preference? It seems not that way to me. These are real-world effects. Given our past history, going back years, I understand why you might impute such a thing. But as with the endless accusations of "Bigot!", it's not really substantive. I find it a bad and troubling idea to deliberately deprive a child of a mother or a father. Both play vital roles. In any event, I would rather we discuss the topic, as endless ad hominem and efforts and diverting attention to the individual rather than his argument or the topic slows down meaningful discourse. Thanks, -Smac

So I found Charlie's Facebook post, with an embedded video of an event he and his husband used to select, from a panel of women, a winning "Egg Donor." And this comment from him: "Egg donor pageant." Also, on the TV in the room there is this: "Whose genetics will take the crown?" Apparently to clarify what they mean by "genetics," they also have a scoreboard for the "Egg Donors" (not "women," not "prospective mothers") : In the "Questions about donor night" section of the video, someone asked "What were the highest preferred qualities for you guys?" The response in part: They said this, but then proceeded to rank the prospective "Egg Donors" using these criteria. The event was, in their own words, an "Egg Donor Finalist Night" and "Egg Donor Selection Night," in the style of a "full scale egg donor pageant." From the OP: "Commodification: pregnancy and birth are not like renting a room; paying for them treats the woman’s body and the baby as market inputs." Grok in the OP presented this as one of the "moral, legal and ethical arguments typically cited in relation to surrogacy." Is that what Charlie and his husband are doing with their Egg Donor "Pageant?" They were literally treating and referring to these women as "egg donors" and ranking them according to specific criteria: Intelligence Health/Athlete Egg Yield Beauty Family Fit Vibes / 'It' Factor Logistics / Cost Charlie Bird: "We really didn't want it to {be} about ranking people or deciding whose genetics were 'better' (ew)." Also Charlie Bird: "{Which 'Egg Donor's'} genetics will take the crown?" I did not see, in the Instagram vid or the FB post, whether the winning "Egg Donor" will be involved in any way in the child's life. I find this troubling. Charlie wanting to be a father is understandable. What I cannot call consistent with what the Church teaches about family is treating a child’s mother as optional—or as merely one of a panel of potential “Egg Donors” to be evaluated based on "egg yield," "beauty," educational achievements, "genetics," and so on. The Church teaches that a child is entitled to a father and a mother in a covenant marriage, and that a husband and wife are the appointed pattern for giving bodies to God’s children. Charlie's plan specifically and intentionally chooses a course of action in which a child will not have that, and he then assembles a genetic mother and a separate birth mother as parts. If a married man and woman, or a lesbian couple, lined people up the same way, I would find it unseemly too. Thanks, -Smac

As I count it, outside the quotes your post was 569 words long. Supposedly trying to better understand your church's policy on surrogacy. Your post was mainly in response to a grok summary of the issues surrounding surrogacy. I was trying to lay the groundwork for a discussion, yes. I didn't really commit to most, if any, of the proffered reasons to oppose surrogacy. I'll take your percentages at face value. The detrimental effects on children of being raised by single mothers, with no father in the home, are apparently not really in dispute, anywhere. So I did not spend as much time assessing this because, well, I doubt anyone would dispute it. On the other hand, whether there are "detrimental effects on children" from being raised in a same-sex-couple household is very much in dispute. I quoted sources from both sides of the discussion, and concluded: "The jury still seems to be out, I guess." I did not. It is the most contested point Grok raised (by far, I think), so I presented for-and-against sources, then concluded that the "jury still seems to be out" about it. Well, that is what I was trying to discuss: the potential origins of the Church's policy. I suspect at least some of the items Grok noted may have been involved in the formulation of the policy. Grok: "Same-sex and single intended parenthood is sometimes opposed on those family-structure grounds." Is this correct? I don't know, but I suspect it has probably been postulated in some circles. Has this happened in the upper echelons of the Church? I see no evidence of that. I asked Grok: "Is there any published statement or evidence that the policy on surrogacy in the handbook of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was influenced, to any extent, but arguments along the lines of 'Same-sex and single intended parenthood is sometimes opposed on those family-structure grounds?'" The response: Children born through a surrogate are not born in the covenant; a sealing needs First Presidency approval. That is the whole published rationale: the husband-and-wife pattern in 2.1.3 / the Family Proclamation. It does not mention same-sex couples, single intended parents, or “family structure” as a reason to discourage the practice. What is documented nearby, but is not the surrogacy paragraph. Fertility treatments (38.6.9) are for “a married woman and man” / “a lawfully married man and woman.” Donor gametes from anyone but husband or wife are discouraged. The older Handbook 1 rule on artificial insemination was explicit about singles: “Artificial insemination of single sisters is not approved.” Those who “deliberately refuse” were subject to discipline. Same-sex marriage is opposed on doctrinal family-structure grounds in 38.6.16 and the Proclamation. That is a separate heading. So the Church does oppose same-sex and (in the older AI rule) single-woman use of assisted reproduction. It has not published a sentence that says those objections are why surrogate motherhood is discouraged. What commentators infer. Some scholars read the structure as doing that work anyway: the policy is addressed only to “husband and wife,” and the First Presidency sealing gate can keep children of same-sex parents out of a sealing. That is an inference from how the rules fit together, not a disclosed drafting history. There is no First Presidency letter, newsroom Q&A, or handbook commentary that says “we discourage surrogacy because it is a path to same-sex or single parenthood.” Bottom line. On the evidence that is published: the stated influence is the husband-and-wife procreative pattern, not the family-structure argument against same-sex or single intended parents. That latter argument is real Church teaching in other sections. Connecting it as a cause of the surrogacy paragraph is plausible and undocumented. It would not be accurate to say the Church has acknowledged that influence. So there may be be some oblique association. Broadly, children should be created and raised by a man and a woman married to each other. So are people to violate the Law of Chastity in other ways. So are members who participate in polygamy. Well, you may be quite right about that. Thanks, -Smac

You can keep using the word "theory" but it doesn't apply to previous teachings by LDS leaders. It was not taught as "theory" back then. I think this is more semantics than substantive. I think it's accurate: "Over time, Church leaders and members advanced many theories to explain the priesthood and temple restrictions. None of these explanations is accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church." Do all LDS Church teachings and policies in the past, present, and future need to be written down as revelation from God and canonized? No, but that was not Edward Kimball's point about going "beyond the evidence." I think it's difficult to dispute that point. I don't know that "there is no formal revelation of her recorded in canon." That this has moved from speculation to inference to "doctrine" is interesting. Previous teachings that it was doctrine and a direct commandment of the Lord does not freeze the latter disavowal and referring to it as theory. It's just an admission that previous Latter-day Saints were led astray. Plowed ground. Right. It was referred to as being spectacularly wrong by Dallin H. Oaks in lesson 26 of Foundations of the Restoration Teacher Manual, Religion 225, 2015. Yes. I'm not sure that is correct. George Q. Cannon, of the First Presidency, labelled that (the quote from the thread The Indians are the Red Men) as gospel truth. I view it as error, which led people who believed it astray. So this discussion has become a different project? No, the LDS Church is not locked in. I happily stand corrected. Even your own definition of "lead people astray" does not support this: False teaching leads people in the wrong path, to worship a false God. What people were led down "the wrong bath, to worship a false God" by way of the justifications for the priesthood ban? I think it is the same person, with differing perspectives about Him. To suggest the Latter-day Saints worship a "Jesus Christ" numerically distinct from the one in the New Testament is, in my view, fundamentally unserious and indefensible. Critics can talk all day long about how our perspective on Him is wrong, but that's it. I'm not sure about that. A person can err in doctrine and still walk with Christ. Building upon your earlier logic, canonizing teachings would help prevent you from viewing all non-canonized teachings as theories. Not sure about that. Canonization tends to clarify and solidify, and I like that. I think the Proclamation would do all sorts of good in that way if it were canonized. Perhaps not, but I'd like to see it just the same. This sounds apt. There was only one Barack Obama, but all sorts of varied and mutually incompatible opinions about him. Thanks, -Smac

See my previous replies. It was a doctrine and direct commandment from God. It was characterized in that way, yes. Whether it actually was, however, is something we cannot state with clarity and confidence. Right. They believed the previous LDS leaders were leading the people astray when they claimed it was a doctrine and a direct commandment from God. I think we see "leading the people astray" differently. We've plowed that ground many times now. I don't think we can impute this ("they believed...") onto the leaders of the Church. That's just speculation. We have other sources. But nothing that is in any way definitive. Hence the utility and value of the Church's current posture. It is fair to say that the problematic historical justifications of the ban were false teachings: they asserted things about Black people, premortality, and divine disfavor that the Church now says are not true, and leaders taught them as if they were. I think it is less fair to use “false teachings” as a synonym for “the Church now admits its prophets were frauds,” which is how the phrase is often deployed. The precise wording that matches both the record and the current official position is: leaders taught explanations that were wrong; those explanations have been disavowed; they are not doctrine. I am not admitting that. At all. And we cannot definitively say which one is correct, hence the utility and value of the Church's current posture. That appears to have been Pres. McKay's experience, yes. I don't think that amounts to evidence that the Lord instituted the ban. Right. Because they now believe those previous LDS prophets were leading the people astray. But they don't want to phrase it that way. Again, you are imputing a point of speculation ("they now believe those previous LDS prophets were leading the people astray") onto the leaders of the Church. I don't think we can do that. Because I don't think the leaders of that religious organization are endowed with the same priesthood authority and spiritual gifts as are given to the leaders of our Church. "Astray" from what? The LDS Church says the 1978 revelation came to President Spencer W. Kimball and was affirmed to other Church leaders in the Salt Lake Temple on June 1, 1978. But I've never seen this revelation. From OD-2: What are your thoughts about this? We do know that black skin was put upon the Lamanites based on the three BOM passages I provided before. I don't think we can say we know this. I do. What I am less sure of is a potentially eisegetical interpretation of the text. See my prior citations to Gardner. How do you know that? The 2015 Gospel Topics essay “Mother in Heaven,” reviewed by the First Presidency and Twelve, opens: “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that all human beings, male and female, are beloved spirit children of heavenly parents, a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother. … The doctrine of a Heavenly Mother is a cherished and distinctive belief among Latter-day Saints.” That is official language. They call it doctrine. Elder Oaks: “Our theology begins with heavenly parents.” The 1995 Family Proclamation, issued by the First Presidency and Twelve, says each person is “a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents.” A 1909 First Presidency statement said men and women are “in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother, and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity.” The hymn “O My Father” is in the hymnbook. In April 2022 Elder Renlund pointed members to that essay as the summary of what is known. Existence of heavenly parents is official Church teaching, repeatedly affirmed by the First Presidency and Twelve. In current institutional usage, that is doctrine. It is not canonized doctrine. No scripture names her. No published revelation describes her. Almost nothing about her has been revealed. Calling it doctrine is therefore a claim about who gets to define doctrine (living prophets), not a claim that the same evidentiary bar used for the Resurrection or the Book of Mormon has been met. If you reserve “doctrine” for what is in the standard works or in a revelation presented for a sustaining vote, then “Heavenly Mother” is a cherished authoritative inference, not doctrine. If you accept the Church’s present definition — united teaching of the Fifteen — then it is doctrine with an unusually thin revelatory file. The discomfort is, I think,, not confusion about the essay. It is that the Church uses one word for both. Right. Those LDS prophets were leading the people astray if the ban was not of God. Again, plowed ground. I think we'll just need to disagree about what "leading the people astray" means. The Pearl of Great Price refers to Adam's transgression as a sin. "Hence came the saying abroad among the people, that the Son of God hath atoned for original guilt, wherein the sins of the parents [Adam and Eve] cannot be answered upon the heads of the children [Abel, Cain, etc], for they are whole from the foundation of the world" (Moses 6:44). Here is that passage: A scripture referencing a "saying abroad among the people" does not, in my view, amount to calling that "saying" authoritative. Also, not quite sure what this has to do with my comments. Could you elaborate? Was this a restriction by commandment of men or of God? We currently do not have sufficient knowledge to say either way. The priesthood ban and the reason for it is not a moral hinge. Okay. That is surely the impression you have been giving. Whether past leaders "led people astray" and/or taught "false doctrine" and such are all predicated on their justifications for the ban. That prophets and apostles are not perfect, and that they can make mistakes, even some serious ones (such as by erroneously propagating speculation, devoid of any known revelatory provenance, as "doctrine") is not a "moral hinge" for me. I don't use this as a pivot point for listening or not listening to the leaders of the Church, for sustaining them or not sustaining them, and so on. The impression I have been getting from your comments is that you do use this (some form of inerrancy/infallibility) as a pivot point / hinge. What is a "moral hinge" is whether God exists, and whether Jesus Christ is His Son, and whether the Plan of Salvation is true, and whether the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, and whether the other foundational events involving Joseph Smith - particularly the restoration of the Priesthood and the organization of the Church - are true and confirmed by the Spirit. I agree. That some of Joseph's successors allowed and propagated substantial error in the Church (non-revelatory justifications for the priesthood ban) is not a hinge or a pivot point or a litmus test for the "legitimacy of the Restored Gospel." I'm not sure what this means. Maybe you believe the LDS Church needs a written revelation for everything it teaches or every policy it institutes. I do not. When Muslims speak of Jesus, are you claiming that they are speaking of a numerically distinct Jesus wholly differentiated from the Jesus of the New Testament? No. I believe Muslims have different perspectives and opinions about the Jesus of the New Testament. Yes, that. I think I have accurately stated what Muslims believe. I respect their views, but I disagree with them insofar as they deny the divinity of Jesus Christ. Okay. I think we'll have to disagree about that. Some people believe that Barack Obama was a great president, others thought he was a terrible president. Differing perspectives on Mr. Obama, but not two separate Obamas. Person A's statement was most accurate decades ago – LDS leaders previously taught the ban and the reason for it were of God. Right. But that wasn't my question. I'm not sure this is accurate. Again, plowed ground. We'll just need to agree to disagree. I guess we'll disagree about this as well. I'm okay with that. Thank you for your comments. -Smac

Thank you for your post. As I noted previously, I asked Grok to summarize the the moral, legal and ethical arguments typically cited in relation to surrogacy, one of the responding results of which was: "Same-sex and single intended parenthood is sometimes opposed on those family-structure grounds." Note that I did not ask Grok about the Church's "moral, legal and ethical arguments," but rather the arguments that are presented in general. I had not drawn that connection, either as to single-mother households or same-sex marriage households. So we have here a family structure in which children will be intentionally deprived of either a mother or a father. When that happens by circumstance, we must cope as best we can. However, mothers are extremely important in relation to the welfare and rearing of children, and so are fathers. There may therefore be a derivative moral argument against surrogacy, since it can be the mechanism whereby the child is intentionally deprived in this way. Whether or not this issue specifically affected the development of the Church's past and/or current policies, I don't know.. I did not "bash" any category of persons. I noted sociological data, some of which support these family structures and some which oppose them in some way. And as to the latter, I specifically noted: "The jury still seems to be out, I guess." I don't think there were any "cheap shots" in my post. The fallacy of reliance on consensus—often called the appeal to common belief, bandwagon fallacy, or argumentum ad populum—occurs when an argument claims a statement or position is true simply because a lot of people believe it or agree on it. Again: "{O}verwhelming scholarly consensus" about a controversial sociopolitical issue doesn't really carry much cachet these days. I feel that much of the "soft sciences" in academia are ideologically captured and compromised. Their interests lie in advocacy of particularized sociopolitical topics and objectives, at the expense of genuine academic inquiry. Again: "As with most controversial sociopolitical and moral issues these days, I am concerned about the evaluation of data without one side or the other (or both) trying to put their proverbial thumb on the scales." I think discussion of controversial sociopolitical issues is being driven more by ideological commitments than by a straightforward pursuit of truth and coping with reality the best we can. It seems pretty clear that large-scale absence of fathers from the lives of their children has been hugely detrimental to society. I say so not because I like it or don't like it, but because that is what the data indicate. As for whether children raised in same-sex households fare better, worse or the same as their peers, again: "The jury still seems to be out." I was laying out generalized observations, most of which I reported as coming from Grok. If you think any of that stuff is wholly "irrelevant" to the topic, please lay out your reasoning. I would like to better understand your position. Given our past history, going back years, I understand why you might impute such a thing. But as with the endless accusations of "Bigot!", it's not really substantive. Ironically, your responses to me seem "reflexive at this point." I would rather we discuss the topic. Thanks, -Smac

From Grok: Traditional (genetic) surrogacy: The woman who carries the pregnancy is also the genetic mother. Her egg is fertilized — usually with the intended father’s sperm, sometimes donor sperm — by IUI or IVF. The child is biologically hers. At birth she is the legal mother in most places until she relinquishes or a court reassigns parentage. That is why these contracts are the legally harder ones: you are asking a mother to give up her own child. Gestational surrogacy: The carrier has no genetic tie. An embryo is made by IVF from the intended mother’s (or a donor’s) egg and the intended father’s (or a donor’s) sperm, then transferred to her uterus. She is a gestational host only. Intended parents are usually named on the birth process through a pre-birth order where the statute allows it. This is now the dominant commercial model in the U.S. Is this a correct summary? I can see reasons why the Church would discourage both forms. The Church's current policy (38.6.22) is short on purpose: the pattern is a husband and wife providing the bodies of their children; therefore the Church discourages surrogate motherhood; the couple may still decide; a child born to a surrogate is not born in the covenant and can be sealed only with First Presidency approval. Same grammar as the sperm/egg and IVF entries: divine pattern, discourage departure, leave it with a married man and woman. Gestational surrogacy also breaks that pattern. A third woman’s uterus is doing part of what, on this view, belongs inside the marriage. The child is still “born to” someone who is not the sealed mother. The sealing rule follows the birth, not the egg. So the administrative problem — BIC, whose child is this for temple purposes — is the same whether the carrier also contributed the egg. Traditional surrogacy adds a second problem (she is the genetic mother). The Church does not need that extra problem to discourage the practice. So perhaps one heading covers the shared feature: pregnancy and birth are hired out or given away. A few other reasons the distinction never made it into the book: Handbook style. These sections were shortened, not turned into a clinic manual. They also do not catalog every IVF variant. “Discouraged / husband and wife / First Presidency for sealing” is the whole toolkit. The couple in view is a married man and woman. Same-sex or single intended parenthood is already outside 38.6.9 and 38.6.22. Splitting traditional vs gestational would mostly matter for those arrangements, which the text is not trying to regulate in detail. Gestation is not a morally empty container in this theology. “Providing bodies” is not only gametes. Carrying and bearing are part of motherhood. Gestational surrogacy was invented in part so law could say “she is not the mother.” The Church’s sealing rule still treats the woman who gave birth as the fact that has to be cleaned up by First Presidency approval. History. Older handbooks said “strongly discourages” when traditional surrogacy was the usual form. The 2020 rewrite kept one noun — surrogate motherhood — and added the sealing sentence. They updated the adjacent fertility section and still did not create two surrogacy boxes. So the non-distinction is, I think, consistent. If the objection is “a child should be conceived, carried, and reared by the same married mother and father,” both kinds ostensibly have challenges. A good point. I wonder if this is part of why the Handbook went from "strongly discourages" to "discourages." I wonder there are a variety of factors that have played a part. Which of the ones Grok itemized do you think might have been in play? Thanks, -Smac

I am looking for input on the Church's policy on surrogacy: I have never given this matter much thought. As I am curious about the Church's policy of "discouraged, but allowed," I asked Grok to summarize the the moral, legal and ethical arguments typically cited in relation to surrogacy. The results: I struggle with this. No child consents to anything, not to being born, not to being adopted, (in younger years) not to which parent gets custody, and so on. While I think the child has a "right to life," talking about an in utero baby's "consent" seems odd to me. The law already treats children as the subject of other people’s decisions. The distinctive wrong, then, appears to be pre-conception contracting for delivery of a child to paying strangers. Commercial surrogacy makes a child’s coming-into-being and first placement the performance of a contract between adults, rather than the consequence of a pregnancy that is not for sale. Adoption and custody respond to a child who is already among us. Surrogacy orders a child into existence so that someone else can take delivery. Lack of consent is shared with all births. Being the specified object of a paid transfer is not. I think these points are stronger. Yep. I think these are valid points. I need to think about this one. Single motherhood after a breakup or a death is a loss the child suffers inside a story that was not written to exclude a parent. Planned single parenthood, or a same-sex couple using a donor and a surrogate, is a decision that by design means that a child will likely never have a mother or a father as a parent. The adults chose the gap before the child existed. Regarding father absence / single-mother households, the literature is large, long-running, and not subtle. Children raised without their father, on average, do worse on schooling, mental health, and later family formation. Better studies try to get past raw correlation; the pattern survives a lot of that work. Early absence is worse than later. As with most controversial sociopolitical and moral issues these days, I am concerned about the evaluation of data without one side or the other (or both) trying to put their proverbial thumb on the scales. For example, an article published by Cornell University, What does the scholarly research say about the well-being of children with gay or lesbian parents?, sounds fairly persuasive: "{O}verwhelming scholarly consensus" about a controversial sociopolitical issue doesn't really carry much cachet these days. Apparently last assembled around 2015 (!), the articles criteria are wide: small convenience samples with no control group still “count.” Seventy-five papers are filed as “no worse.” Four (cited as Regnerus, Sullins, Allen, Sarantakos) are characterized as tainted because, the site says, they sampled kids from break-ups. That move is the thumb. If a same-sex household often begins after a heterosexual union ends, then “we only count stable planned two-mom homes” deletes most of the real population and most of the instability that family-structure research treats as part of the treatment, not a nuisance. Vote-counting also cannot answer the question I think we should actually care about. “Does this paper’s abstract say the kids are fine?” is not “does planned father-absence cost the same as a dad who died?” Seventy-five abstracts can be true in their own samples (selected, parent-reported, age 8, high SES lesbian moms) and still fail as a test of designed absence of a father or a mother. Here is a Grok-generated summary of several studies I have looked at in the past: The jury still seems to be out, I guess. The legal complexities are a real difficulty. Anyway, looking for thoughts/input on the Church's policy. Thanks, -Smac

I think "activism" these days is often quite susceptible to the March of Dimes Syndrome / Mission Creep phenomenon. This includes activism in the Church. Back to the Tierney article: I wonder if activist calls for an apology from the Church are borne of this "March of Dimes Syndrome" mindset. Any progress/success the Church has made/had relative to condemning racism, fostering goodwill, etc. is a threat. In the minds of some activists, they can never declare "mission accomplished." Mission Creep happens. "So activists have moved the goalposts once again." Yep. If the Church were to issue a formal institutional apology, would self-appointed "activists" accept it and move on? Or would they deem it insufficient, move the goalposts, and demand more? Yeah, the SPLC has really had a lot of mission creep. I can't help but wonder if some of the activists calling for the Church to issue an apology see Mission Creep not as a bug, but as a feature. That is, these folks want the Church to issue an apology so that they can, in true "Mission Creep" style and form, deem the apology insufficient, move the goalposts, and demand more. And the "more" would, in my view, almost certainly - and perhaps almost immediately - take us to demands that the Church "apologize" for the Law of Chastity, for its prohibitions against same-sex behavior, for its past opposition to same-sex marriage, for its current non-recognition (in an ecclesiastical sense) of same-sex marriages, and so on. And I think the calls would not stop at just an apology, but for alteration of the Church's doctrines, so as to ratify same-sex marriages, to allow temple sealings between persons of the same sex, to allow same-sex behavior, etc. Additionally or alternatively, I wonder if this is a pretext for calling for women to be ordained to the priesthood. And perhaps disavowals of claims to prophetic/priesthood authority, the Book of Mormon, and so on. The Tierney article goes on to explain a third label for this phenomenon (in addition to "March of Dimes Syndrome," mentioned in the article, and "Mission Creep," commented on by me) : "'The more things improve, the louder become the exclamations about their badness.'" Might this be said about the Church since 1978? "First is the negativity effect, or the brain’s innate bias to pay more attention to the negative than the positive." Might this be in play relative to how some folks treat the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? "As the world gets better—as people become richer, better educated, and longer-lived—we find new things to worry about and have more disposable income and free time to spend curing humanity’s woes, real or imagined." Again, are black people in the Church better off now than they were in 1978? If so, why is it that folks of an "activist" bent seem fixated on characterizing the Church in the worst possible ways? Further to the foregoing evaluation of the "March of Dimes Syndrome" and "Mission Creep" and the seeming paradox in play ("As the world gets better—as people become richer, better educated, and longer-lived—we find new things to worry about and have more disposable income and free time to spend curing humanity’s woes, real or imagined"), I just recently came across another term: The Tocqueville Effect From Wikipedia: I would like to hear any thoughts you all have about this stuff. Thanks, -Smac