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About Daniel2
- Birthday 01/01/1973
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Growing up, my favorite literary series was "The Chronicles of Narnia" by well-known Christian author, C.S. Lewis. The series strongly features Christian themes, including its leonine deity, Aslan, the literal Narnian incarnation of Jesus Christ. (I re-read the series seven times during my youth, and it remains one of my favorites to this day. I also loved both the BBC and more recent film versions, and I can't wait for the upcoming Netflix adaptation, as well!). Your statement above is reminiscent of a character named Puddleglum, a somewhat pessimistic Marshwiggle, who, when confronted by a nefarious non-believer in Aslan, uncharacteristically rose above his usual fatalistic tendencies by declaring: I always loved his response--it's tremendously hopeful and positive for he and his companions. It's a sentiment echoed elsewhere in Christian literature, including a character named Thomas Wingfold in a work by George MacDonald, mentor of both C.S. Lewis and another famed fantasy author, Lewis Carroll: While it may not work for everyone, I'm glad that choosing to believe works for you, ZealouslyStriving. I'm sorry for the loss of your wife--all the best to you and your family!
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Speaking for myself as a born-in-the-covenant, previously dyed-in-the-wool, true-blue-through-and-through devoted RM, temple-married, BYU-Provo graduate, now post-LDS man for ~21 years, residing in Salt Lake City, identifying as culturally-Mormon and religiously as a contentedly-agnostic Unitarian Universalist, and who's family and friends come from a variety of actively religious/non-religious/former religious backgrounds, I'm happy and supportive of any of my friends, family, and acquaintances that find a path leading to inner peace, fulfillment, and joy, regardless of whether that path mirrors or differs from my own. My husband and I celebrate our family and close friends' LDS activities, be it attending baptisms, Mission call letter-openings/farewells/returns, talks, ordinations, and temple sealing celebrations, and they in turn support my husband’s and my relationship as family and recognize, respect, and celebrate our place in the family as fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and the step-versions of all of the above. In my experience, anger and hostility may be and often are steps of grief on the path away from lifestyles and life identities that any of us ultimately may have found to be personally unhealthy/destructive (especially when said life styles or identities were particularly consuming/committed… whether they be in a religious Faith or out of one; or a life governed by addiction or in a life where alcohol can be employed in life-enhancing/non-destructive ways). However, given time and experience, anger and hostility fade and new awareness unfolds allowing us to see that what we may personally have found to be unhealthy can be a path of positivity and personal growth for others, and vice versa (pun very much intended... one individual's vice may exemplify another's virtue). Even Elsa vocalized this realization; “It's funny how some distance makes everything seem small, and the fears that once controlled me can't get to me at all”—a truth that applies regardless of which metaphorical ‘side of the coin’ we’re on. Kudos to those who discover renewed joy and meaning in returning to Mormonism who, after having left, found their life wanting. And thank goodness we all live in a country that allows agency, autonomy, and personal freedom in pursuit of happiness as we each see fit.
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How to reconcile mixed messages from The Church
Daniel2 replied to Maestrophil's topic in General Discussions
If anyone hears of any updates from Jacob Hansen as related to his original video featured in the OP, I'd be interested in hearing them. He raises some interesting points, though I'm not clear on exactly what next steps he's anticipating or hoping for after urging his listeners to "counsel with their leaders" regarding his/their 'concerns/confusion”—will his point of view ultimately be validated and exonerated or seen as an ark-steading? It seems to me that the Church has already tipped its hand with its new new global head of public affairs and media relations, but time will tell, after all: -
New Mormon church managing director of church communication
Daniel2 replied to Diamondhands69's topic in In The News
Thanks for the background, Stargazer. Clearly I haven’t been around in a while and am not up-to-date on board dynamics, myself! How sad to hear about Diamondhands’ circumstances. I hope he’s able to navigate his own personal path to be able to live a life congruent with his own feelings, beliefs, and values while making peace with his family and friends. It’s not an easy road to take, but in my experience, it’s worth it in the other side. Today, my husband and I are grateful for our LDS family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors, and find joy and value in their friendships, as they seem to do in ours, even if we may not agree on everything. -
New Mormon church managing director of church communication
Daniel2 replied to Diamondhands69's topic in In The News
I'm kinda surprised that no one mentioned the following: In a stunning move, LDS Church comes out for bill that recognizes same-sex marriage (sltrib.com) Mormon church comes out in support of same-sex marriage law (nbcnews.com) Mormon Church Backs Bill Supporting Same-Sex Marriage - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Uh, Diamondhands, your info seems to be out of date. Are you an active, devout LDS member....? The Church's position certainly has changed quite a bit since days-gone-by of Prop 8. As far as Mr. Sherinian's hire, from everything I've read, the Church most likely hired him because of his experiences supporting LGBT equality, not in spite of it... All the best, D -
How to reconcile mixed messages from The Church
Daniel2 replied to Maestrophil's topic in General Discussions
Others within Mormonism have continued to search, ponder, and pray to see if Mormon doctrine could include same-sex partners in the eternities, and in much more detailed and nuanced ways than my crude explanations. From a 2012 post in Mormon Matters: An Open Stories Podcast: Taylor Petry's thoughtful article from a faithful LDS standpoint is worth reading in full: The issue of homosexual relationships is among the most public struggles facing religious groups in America today.[1] The issue is not as simple as gay people versus religious groups, as rhetoric on either side often suggests; but it has become increasingly apparent that there is significant overlap of people who identify both as homosexual and religious. Mormon writing on homosexuality often has had a pastoral character, aimed either at easing the transition for those seeking to leave the Church or smoothing the way for those who desire to remain within it.[2] Those who have thought to advocate change with the LDS Church and culture have focused primarily on “attitudes” toward homosexuality encouraging “understanding and tolerance for homosexual people.”[3] Too often this discussion of homosexuality has focused on either its etiology, or its relationship to the will, though neither the appeal to nature nor nurture resolves the question of ethics and meaning.[4] Alan Michael Williams suggests that the question that Latter-day Saints must face is “how the Mormon ‘family’ can continue to make sense soteriologically when it does not represent the diversity of American families.”[5] Williams’s question is ultimately a social one—about a soteriology “making sense” in the context of an America where Mormon notions of family look increasingly anachronistic. For Latter-day Saints, the question is not simply a social one, but a theological problem of soteriological significance. The theological and theoretical work that may serve as a basis for reimagining the practices of the Church with respect to homosexual relationships has yet to begin with any seriousness. What follows is a thought experiment on the question of how Mormons might imagine different kinds of sealing relationships other than heterosexual marriage. Such an experiment neither constitutes Church doctrine nor intends to advocate itself as Church doctrine. Rather, this essay provides an occasion to think critically about the intellectual and theological problems posed by the reality of alternative relationships outside of heterosexual norms. This essay treats the theological resources that can account for and make legible particular kinds of homosexual relationships within Mormonism. I use the term “homosexual relationships” to describe the particular dilemma for Mormon thought. Though contemporary Mormon discourse distinguishes between homosexual desires and sexual practices, permitting the former but rejecting the latter, both desires and practices obscure relationships as a dimension of homosexual experiences. The opacity of the term “homosexuality” and its multiple and limiting meanings make it particularly unhelpful. The artificiality and historical contingency of our terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” to describe “species” of persons is problematic for thinking socially and theologically.[6] Given that Mormonism imagines ideal heterosexuality, not as desires or practices, but as eternal relationships, could this same framework help us to reimagine the permissibility of homosexual relationships within Mormonism? The LDS theological focus on marriage is not reducible to “sexuality” since there are many circumstances in which marriages may be entirely celibate, such as the case of physical incapacitation. Nor should we reduce homosexual relationships to “sexuality,” since such an equation also distorts not only the actual practice of such relationships but is inconsistent with our own understanding of the salvific character of relationships per se—not the details of sexual practices performed within those relationships. Any attempt to think creatively and theologically within Mormonism to reconcile the tension between the LDS Church and those who identify as homosexual must investigate the ideologies and theologies that inform the current tension. Some may feel that no reconciliation is possible, that LDS teachings cannot and should not accept homosexual relationships as intelligible. This position is certainly viable, though it requires defense rather than simply repetition and assertion. We are forced to diagnose either way what is problematic with homosexual relationships according to current LDS theology. As I understand it, much of the theological objection to homosexual relationships lies in current LDS understandings of the afterlife and the kinds of relationships that will exist there. First, these relationships are frequently understood to be reproductive relationships, at least among those who occupy the highest degree of the celestial kingdom.[7] Second, the ordinance of sealing binds these reproductive families together, sealing only those who can presumably reproduce either in this life or the next. Finally, the heterosexual pairs of men and women should possess the proper “gender,” which is eternal. Homosexual relationships cannot be eternal because they are not able to reproduce by means of natural biological methods and confuse the natural gender they should possess. I will address these claims in order to suggest how it may be possible to imagine sealed homosexual relationships as compatible with key doctrines of Mormonism. Celestial Reproduction The belief in divine reproduction constitutes a central tenet for many Mormons, in spite of its rather thin canonical support. Even defining what exactly is meant by this belief in divine reproduction can be particularly unclear. At issue is determining exactly what is meant by the belief that human beings are a “spirit son or daughter of Heavenly Parents.”[8] For instance, in a recent essay exploring “common ground” between womanist theology and LDS theology, professors of political science at Brigham Young University Valerie M. Hudson and Alma Don Sorenson asserted: “The primary work of God is to have children and nurture them into godhood.” In a clarifying footnote, the authors backed away from this bold statement with the significant caveat: “Actually, have is not the right word here. In LDS theology, God does not create intelligence; rather, God organizes intelligences to the point that they can be called God’s children, a process that is known as ‘spirit birth.’”[9] The ambivalence on this point is a persistent tension in Mormon thought. That is, the doctrine of spiritual birth stands at odds with the doctrine of eternal intelligences, and to this day Mormonism has not resolved this tension.[10] On the one hand, “spirit birth” is a divine reproduction that mirrors human reproduction, requiring a male and female partner; and on the other hand, “spirit birth” is a more metaphorical “organization” that bears little resemblance to reproduction as a result of sexual intercourse. The former model of spirit birth depends on a heterosexual pair (at least if divine bodies are biologically constrained without access to the kinds of technologies human bodies may benefit from) and is often used as the prototype for the heterosexual family, as the authors quoted above argue. The latter model of spirit birth, however, requires nothing in particular about the sexual or reproductive acts of God, whose organization of spirits likely has little to do with the reproductive organs he or she (or his or her partner) might have. This doctrine of spirit birth faces a few significant challenges. In Doctrine and Covenants 93—and repeated in many other of Joseph Smith’s speeches, translations, and revelations—individual human identity is thought of as eternal, perhaps in explicit disagreement with the doctrine of spirit birth as it was developing among some of his disciples in 1843–44.[11] The doctrine of spirit birth seeks to reconcile itself with this doctrine of eternal intelligences by positing a four-fold progressive anthropology: from intelligence, to spirit, to mortal body, and finally to a glorified body. In this view, Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother may not be the “parents” of intelligences, but are parents of spirits—in some sense having given “birth” to them. Advocates of “spirit birth” based on heterosexual reproduction generally insist that it is similar, if not identical, to the birth of mortal bodies. As it is frequently imagined, the process of male-female mutual divinization entails not only a sexual relationship, but also a reproductive one in order to populate future worlds. Such a notion may be tied to the promises of eternal increase, “a continuation of the seeds forever and ever” (D&C 132:19) in the revelation given on celestial marriage. In this view of the marital relationship, mixed-sex couples are eternally engaged in the reproduction of spirit children. While articulating the spirit birth process as providing the intelligence with a spirit in a way analogous to how mortal birth provides the spirit with a physical body, the analogy is strained to the point of breaking. If reproduction as we know it now offers a model for heavenly reproduction so as to exclude homosexual relationships by definition, then must we imagine that male gods deposit sperm in the bodies of female gods (who menstruate monthly when they are not pregnant), that the pregnant female god gestates spirit embryos for nine months and then gives birth to spirit bodies? While some LDS thinkers imagine an eternally pregnant Heavenly Mother, I see no reason why we must commit to this kind of literal pregnancy as the reason for divine female figures.[12] In mortal birth, parents with bodies provide lower-stage spirits with bodies in order to bring them to the same level. However, in this view of spirit birth, divinized parents provide intelligences with spirits, two levels below their own stage of progression. Mortal bodies give birth to equal mortal bodies, yet in this understanding of spirit birth, glorified bodies give birth to inferior spirit bodies. There is no equivalency between the two understandings of birth because they accomplish very different things in very different circumstances. What would it mean for homosexual relationships if we were to substitute the tentative doctrine of literal divine reproduction for other models of “birth”? For instance, the process of “birth” is not used to describe each of the series of progression from intelligence to spirit to mortal body to resurrection. Resurrected bodies need not be born from resurrected beings but are organized from matter. We need not consider that spirit bodies must be literally born but may be “organized” in an analogous way to the resurrection. Even the model of baptism, which marks a spiritual rebirth, may be thought of as a model for how spirit children are born to divinized parents. In such models, biological reproduction is not needed to explain celestial parentage. Such ideas are certainly not the logical consequence of the notion of divine embodiment. The issue of God’s embodiment is not as clear cut as it may initially appear. While we recognize continuity in appearance and even substance with the future exalted body, we also acknowledge that it is quite different. As Blake Ostler explains, “The sense in which the Father’s body is like a human body must be qualified.”[13] For instance, a divine body is not constrained by space and time in the ways that mortal bodies are. From scriptural accounts, divine bodies can appear, disappear, pass through walls, and resist entropy. While these scriptural accounts affirm that it is possible for divine bodies to perform functions such as eating and drinking, they also suggest that there is no necessary requirement that they do so in order to sustain life. Why then, do we imagine that sexual union as we know it in mortality is a necessary function for the production of life in divine bodies if these bodies are so dissimilar in every other way from mortal bodies? Could not sexual union be a possibility for divine bodies but not be a necessity for creation, just as alimentary functions may be possible but not necessary? In addition to the resurrection, the creation provides a better model for thinking about how this “spirit birth” might occur than the process of mortal parturition. In both the canonical and ritual accounts of creation, women are entirely absent.[14] Creation of the earth, organization of the elements, and even the creation of the living bodies of Adam and Eve all occur without the presence of female figures. The creation as we know it is capable of being performed with an all-male cast. This has the effect of not only making women superfluous to creation and salvation, but also of putting a male-male relationship as the source of creativity, productivity, and the giving of life itself. The story of Adam and Eve in LDS scripture and ritual is often cited as the example of divinely authorized heterosexuality.[15] Yet the creation of both Adam and Eve does not in any way affirm heterosexual reproduction as the method of divine creation either spiritually or materially. Indeed, creation according to God’s “word” is attested in all scriptural accounts available to Latter-day Saints (Gen 1–2; Moses 2–3; Abr. 4–5). Adam’s body is formed “from the dust of the ground . . . but spiritually they were created and made according to my word” (Moses 3:7). Both spiritual and material formation takes place without any sexual union. Furthermore, males alone perform the creation of Adam’s body. Even Eve is “reproduced” from a male body with the help of other males. The Lord penetrates the body of Adam and creates Eve. The capacity for Adam’s body to reproduce by means of another male provides scriptural precedent in the foundational story of humanity to the variety of possibilities available for Latter-day Saints to conceive of reproduction independent of heterosexual union. Jesus’s birth from Mary may also provide a way of thinking about the process of giving birth that does not involve heterosexual union. While the male-male creation and male-female creation may be found in Mormon thought already, perhaps the model of the virgin birth—of female pregnancy without male penetration—could serve as an example of how female-female relationships might reproduce with only minimal assistance of a male participant, like the sperm donor for the modern female-female reproductive relationship. Though some early speculation in LDS thought suggested that God the Father did have sex with Mary, Mary’s virginity has been affirmed in official LDS doctrine.[16] Rather than seeing the conception of Jesus as a wholly exceptional event, James E. Talmage has suggested that this method of procreation was, “not in violation of natural law, but in accordance with a higher manifestation thereof.”[17] While with Adam we have seen that male bodies may reproduce on their own, or with the help of another male, with Mary we see that female bodies may also reproduce without sexual intercourse. Or perhaps even the model of Adam reproducing Eve parthenogenically might also be a capacity of divine female bodies. Both scriptural accounts offer models of divine creation and reproduction not based on heterosexual union. Though we have models of reproduction and creation that might suggest their possibility for same-sex partners, we Latter-day Saints face another theological question: Are creation and salvation male-only priesthood activities? The possibility of reproduction in the female-female relationship does not address the centrality of the male-only priesthood in LDS thought. A male-only priesthood represents a significant limitation for female-female relationships, linking the exclusion of women from exercising priesthood power and authority to the exclusion of women’s homosexual relationships. The fact that males can hold the priesthood allows the possibility for male-only creative relationships (like the male members of the Godhead) since priesthood may be held and exercised entirely independent of women in LDS practice. But if women do not have access to the priesthood—whatever we may mean by that term—, would they not be able to create without men? The autonomy afforded to males to create in Mormon tradition comes at the expense of females. Historical precedents of women healing and blessing notwithstanding, most of the functions of the priesthood have not been exercised by women.[18] Further, promises to women that they would be given the priesthood (or in some sense share it) were conditional on their relationship to their husband.[19] Feminist concerns about the ability of men to act independently in the Church, while women are subject to male partnership as a prerequisite for their actions, are magnified in the consideration for female-female relationships. We may need to rethink women’s dependent status with respect to the priesthood in tandem with rethinking the possibility of homosexual relationships. Thinking through what the priesthood means in an eternal context—which would presumably not include things like the authority to ordain officers, bless the sick, administer sacraments and other administrative or temporally bounded notions of priesthood authority—is an essential task for thinking about whether women might be excluded from the eternal priesthood activities of creating and saving. If divine creation and reproduction cannot be used to exclude the possibility of nonheterosexual relationships in LDS theology, what about mortal reproduction? How can the command to “multiply and replenish” the earth be fulfilled (Gen 1:27)?[20] In the context of the Church’s endorsement of ballot initiatives in several states to define marriage as between a man and a woman in the 2008 elections, the Church explained its interest in the issue in a document called “The Divine Institution of Marriage” that appeared in the online LDS Newsroom on August 13, 2008.[21] The issue of producing children is presented as a central reason for defining marriage as a heterosexual institution. Its authors reason, “Only a man and a woman together have the natural biological capacity to conceive children.” This argument is repeated later, stating that marriage is “legally protected because only a male and female together can create new life, and because the rearing of children requires a life-long commitment, which marriage is intended to provide.” Marriage should be restricted to mixed-sex couples because “marriage and family are vital instruments for rearing children and teaching them to become responsible adults.”[22] While from a public policy perspective the Church asserts the necessary link between marriage and procreation, in practice having children is neither a requirement for Latter-day Saint marriages after they have been sealed, nor is the ability to have children a prerequisite for sealing. Neither marriage nor sex is thought of in exclusively procreationist terms.[23] While LDS teaching may consider procreation a religious desideratum, it cannot and should not be a reason to exclude someone from receiving the blessings of sealing, especially if afterlife creation has nothing to do with mortal procreation. There is no requirement or expectation of natural fertility to qualify for marriages, even sealings, in Latter-day Saint practice.[24] There is no reason to exclude nonreproductive couples from the blessings of sealing on the basis of reproductive capacity alone. But this lack of capacity to reproduce in no way diminishes the responsibility to provide for and rear children. Indeed, the wording of this obligation to rear children is not connected to reproductive capacity at all, but rather to the obligations that able couples have to provide children, by means of adoption or other forms of reproduction technology available today, with the education and formation to become responsible adults. Further, it is certainly the case that it is, in fact, possible for nonheterosexual couples to take care of children, either their own from previous relationships, through medical assistance, or by means of adoption. The authoritative teaching that families should care for and rear children into responsible adults suffers no harm if we continue to teach that all families, heterosexual or not, take this as a religious responsibility. Sealings as Kinship The LDS rite of sealing is currently practiced as a means of authorizing relationships between heterosexual couples and their children.[25] Past and present practices of sealings also point to ways that we might reconceive of sealing as untethered from the heterosexual biological family. I suggest that the practice of sealing is about ritually producing kinship relations that are not reducible to reproductive couples and bloodlines. Kinship may be defined as the practices of ritually marking relationships of care, trust, and bonding that are greater than friendship or community. That is to say, there are not predetermined relationships that count as kinship, but rather kinship emerges as a special kind of relationship within society. Sexual and reproductive relationships are one way that human societies practice kinship, but by no means the only way. Indeed, the biological basis for kinship is neither universal in human society, nor is it the only way that Latter-day Saints think about kinship. Rather, kinship is a way of making the biological results of sexual reproduction meaningful. Judith Butler suggests, “Kinship is itself a kind of doing, a practice that enacts that assemblage of significations as it takes place. . . .[T]hat norm acquires its durability by being reinstated time and again.”[26] In this understanding, reproduction acquires the significance of kinship rather than being constitutive of it. Studies of kinship over the last century have emphasized its central role in human society.[27] Psychoanalytic, functionalist, and structuralist analyses of kinship suggested that it was the key to the development of subjectivity and to the very existence of civilization itself. The LDS teaching that “the family is the fundamental unit of society” owes its debt to this modern cultural assumption.[28] The hypothesis that kinship structures require a father and a mother is a feature of some twentieth-century theorists’ work on kinship.[29] This view, built on the Oedipal drama, assumes that the subject comes into being and culture by passing through this privileged social structure.[30] This argument is implicitly used to justify the insistence upon both a father and a mother in “The Divine Institution of Marriage.”[31] In this claim, the relations between the sexes gain significance only through reproduction, which marks reproduction as the foundational element in kinship.[32] The problem is not simply the insistence that heterosexual kinship guarantees the continued transmission of culture, but that the argument is more often that culture must guarantee the continued transmission of heterosexuality.[33] Recent anthropological work has challenged the assumption that broader models of kinship are identical structurally (father-mother-child) to the modern Western nuclear family. The topic specifically at issue here is whether nonheterosexual kinship may qualify as a recognizable form of kinship. Certainly, there are numerous forms of kinship that do not conform to the reproductive heterosexual family organized by legal marriage. This model for defining kinship does not coincide with the way that kinship relations are established in African American,[34] gay and lesbian,[35] and some rural Chinese cultures,[36] at the very least.[37] Such post-kinship studies denaturalize the biological family as the basis of kinship and complement alternative ways of ordering society.[38] LDS sealings for nonheterosexual relationships could offer a set of regularizing terms under which such existing social relationships are ritually legitimized.[39] For the Church to acknowledge nonheterosexual unions would be to acknowledge what already happens in practice—namely, that homosexual relationships of care and commitment, including the raising of children, exist. As it stands, the Church legitimizes heterosexual marriage as the only acknowledged way of marking kinship. To expand this definition is not to authorize any and all practices. Rather, same-sex marriage is really modeled on heterosexual practices of establishing legitimacy by means of long-term relationships of filiation. Homosexual activists have not universally accepted this project of privileging state-authorized marriage as the only way of establishing kinship.[40] Indeed, many see gay marriage as a profoundly conservative means of filiation.[41] For the Church to accept gay marriage would be to continue to privilege certain kinds of kinship over others, excluding certain sexual and relational possibilities. The relevant questions for sealing nonheterosexual couples are not the legal issues that link health care, hospital visitation, and tax benefits to marital status. For Latter-day Saints, the sense of purpose and divine partnership, as well as spiritual safeguards and consolation in life and death that sealings endow, are blessings that might apply to kinship relationships beyond the heterosexual, reproductive family. These broader understandings of kinship practices not only serve as a better anthropological model for the multiplicity of culture, including modern Western culture, but also better explain historical precedents of the LDS sealing ritual, which similarly created kinship in nonreproductive relationships.[42] Though discontinued by President Wilford Woodruff in 1894, many men and women (most often married couples) were sealed to prominent nineteenth-century Church leaders through the “law of adoption” regardless of blood or reproductive relationships.[43] Prior to the Woodruff reform, the adoption sealing was intentionally a means of establishing new kinds of kinships other than familial-reproductive, though utilizing the vocabulary of the family. As Samuel Brown explains, “The Mormon heaven was emphatically not the Victorian hearth of the increasingly popular domestic heaven. . . . Smith’s heaven consisted of one boundless family of eternal intelligences.”[44] The practice of “adoption,” in which men and their families were sealed to other men and their families points to alternative ways of establishing kinship.[45] Instead of sealing genealogical chains, this system of kinship connected new social units of nonbiological families with the ultimate goal of uniting all of humanity into one sacred network.[46] In Orson Hyde’s “Diagram of the Kingdom of God,” he envisions the universal family tree made up of different branches with prophets at the head of each branch. To each prophet is sealed large kingdoms. From each of these branches extend still smaller branches, with even smaller branchings from them. Hyde describes how, in this patriarchal order, “every man will be given a kingdom and dominion, according to his merit, powers, and abilities. . . . There are kingdoms of all sizes, an infinite variety to suit all grades of merit and ability.”[47] This sense of rulership is not meant to suggest that the prophets are the literal fathers of the greatest number of people, but rather that, because of righteousness (not fecundity), their kingdoms are the greatest. In Parley P. Pratt’s terms, the “royal family” is one singular family that consists of “friends and kindred.”[48] This bond is not forged by a genealogical link, but by the sealing itself. As Joseph Smith proclaimed in the King Follett Discourse, “Use a little Craftiness & seal all you can & when you get to heaven tell your father that what you seal on earth should be sealed in heaven.”[49] It wasn’t until after Woodruff’s temple reforms that proxy temple sealings were administered for deceased ancestors, including those who had rejected the faith in mortality. In 1894, the Utah Genealogical Society was formed as a response to this new interest in proxy temple work made possible by the new revelation and policy shift.[50] Woodruff explained the new practice which reversed the previous ban on sealing children to deceased parents: “The Lord has told me that it is right for children to be sealed to their parents, and they to their parents just as far back as we can possibly obtain the records, and then have the last obtainable member sealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith.”[51] This new practice centered on biological families, but also relied on the earlier notion of kingdoms, with Joseph Smith as the adoptive father of this dispensation. In time, the notion of dispensational kingdoms would recede ever more behind kingdoms based on individual lineage, thus paving the way for the contemporary emphasis on the nuclear family.[52] The new proxy sealings of married couples reduced the need for proxy adoption and also introduced greater flexibility in who could be sealed to whom, allowing for those who hadn’t been members of the Church in mortality to be sealed posthumously to living spouses or for ancestors to be sealed to one another. Less emphasis was placed on getting the earthly sealings absolutely correct, shifting the ultimate decisions about validity of a sealing from earthly ordinances to justice in the afterlife, noting that there “all will be made right.”[53] More important than making sure that one was sealed to a righteous person was performing the sealing itself. One need not return to this earlier notion of the sealing as kinship for examples of nonreproductive or biological relationships but may rather explore the misrecognition of how the ritual is practiced today to link nonreproductive or biological kin. The clearest example is the current understanding of the theology of LDS adoption after the reformation of the adoption practices in the late nineteenth century. The case of nineteenth-century adoptions as a practice of establishing kinship in ways that are not biologically based poses a challenge to the assumption that biology is the basis of kinship. Anthropologists have traditionally distinguished between “true” and “fictive” kinship, though this distinction rests on an assumption that privileges the biological relationship regardless of how families themselves treat such children. But the assumption that parents have a different relationship to biological than to “fictive” kin fails to account for how kinship may be extended at all.[54] It is, of course, often the case that families make no distinction between biological and adoptive children and, indeed, often reject the premises of the distinction. In LDS practice, nonbiological children are ritually incorporated into a new kinship structure by means of the sealing following legal adoption. Perhaps one might suggest in anthropological terms that the LDS sealings of legally adopted children do mark adoptive kin as separate from those “born in the covenant.” The ritual itself certainly marks the crossing of a boundary, but the point is that, after the ritual, there is no meaningful distinction between biological and adoptive kin. In fact, though incredibly rare, it is possible that even those who were “born in the covenant” may be sealed anew to adoptive parents.[55] Rather than consider the biological child who has been born within a LDS kinship structure as already covered by the blessings of sealing a priori, it is possible for this child’s sealing to take place in the adoptive family. Here, the sealing ritually marks how the kinship structure takes precedence over and replaces the biological family.[56] The case of divorce and the cancellation of sealings further reinforces the principle that biology is less important than the sealing itself. President Ezra Taft Benson explained that the children of parents whose sealing was cancelled “are entitled to birthright blessings, and if they remain worthy, are assured the right and privilege of eternal parentage regardless of what happens to their natural parents or the parents to whom they were sealed.”[57] Benson’s view here represents a continuation of the reforms under Woodruff that emphasized the sealing itself as important, not necessarily to whom one is sealed. Further, it distinguishes biological kin from the blessings of kinship through sealing, promising kin on the basis of the sealing even if biological kin cannot fulfill that role. When kinship replaces reproduction in the logic of the sealing, we may consider how alternative relationships of care, modeled on, but not identical to parent-child and husband-wife, as well as those not yet regularized or named, offer a better model for understanding both the purpose and possibilities of the sealed relationship, whether those sealings entail a sexual relationship between partners or not. Mormon models of kinship, both past and present, displace and replace the biological and the sexual relationship as markers of kinship, suggesting alternative modes and models for establishing such relationships. The heteronormative notion of family neither corresponds to a universal ideal nor reflects the actual practice of kinship among Latter-day Saints. Understanding sealings as ritually marking and normalizing relationships as kinship offers a more accurate understanding of how sealings have been practiced and are practiced today, as well as how they may be practiced at some future time. Eternal Gender The concept of “gender” remains an important term in LDS discourse about homosexuality and is a necessary site of critical inquiry.[58] The question of homosexual relationships is intimately bound up in conceptualizations of gender differences. The semi-canonical 1995 document “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” (hereafter “Proclamation”) announces: “Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.”[59] The notion of an eternally persistent gender functions to regulate normative behavior that is believed to correspond to the attributes of an eternally “gendered” subject. “The Divine Institution of Marriage” suggests that same-sex marriage causes “gender confusion,” with the result that “the rising generation of children and youth will find it increasingly difficult to develop their natural identity as a man or a woman.”[60] It further asserts that there are “inherent differences between the genders.”[61] The appeal to a “natural” and “inherent” sexual identity that is at risk of being “confused” presumes a certain kind of sexual difference rooted in heterosexuality. LDS concepts of gender difference are as much about rejecting homosexuality as they are about ordering the relationship between men and women. It is necessary to address the ideas of incommensurable “genders” as the basis of heterosexual priority in the Church. What exactly is meant by the term “gender” in LDS discourse? Since second-wave feminism divided biological “sex,” meaning male and female bodies, from socially constructed “gender,” meaning culturally assigned social roles, the sex/gender distinction has had a great impact on how the term “gender” is understood in American society. Yet in my reading of LDS statements on the subject, this distinction is not operative, and significant attention to defining the term is absent. The term “gender” seems to be deployed without a single definition of what is meant, leaving the broadest possible semantic range. Gender as a category is variously applied to cover three separate aspects of human identity, though they are often conflated under this single term. As one example, an official LDS booklet A Parent’s Guide published in 1985 explains: “Gender identity involves an understanding and accepting of one’s own gender, with little reference to others; one’s gender roles usually focus upon the social interaction associated with being male or female.”[62] Parsing this definition reveals that first, gender refers to the morphological bodies of males and females—what is taken to be self-evidently “one’s own gender.” Second, gender refers to an “identity” that males and females are supposed to possess that corresponds with their bodies, including heterosexual desires. Third, gender refers to the differing “roles,” purposes, and responsibilities that some Church leaders understand to be assigned to males and females. These three definitions refer to quite different things, which makes it difficult to know how exactly the term is used in different contexts.[63] When one adds the idea of gender as an eternal characteristic, these three definitions become even more complicated. I will examine each of these three notions of “gender” as they might serve as an objection to homosexual relationships. First, “gender” is understood to refer exclusively to the morphological differences between bodies labeled “male” and “female.” In this sense, “gender” is a synonym for “sex,” the identifiable bodily characteristics of maleness and femaleness. If we restrict the understanding of “gender” to mean simply bodily difference, it is not clear that homosexual relationships would be impacted at all. Homosexual relationships do not interfere with this minimal definition of “gender,” since male and female bodies persist as such in these relationships. Nonheterosexual relationships, it would seem, do not require a changed belief in an eternal “gender” at all, as long as “gender” is understood to refer exclusively to bodily morphology. In the same way that the sex/gender distinction was deployed by second-wave feminists to argue for a fixed notion of different sexes, while suggesting that the way those differences were given meaning in culture were changeable, one could argue that homosexual relationships also affirm a fixed, eternal notion of sex, while seeing the particular configurations of relationships as variable. Yet we might be wary of conceding this point too quickly. The notion of a morphological binary system of “sex” rooted in “nature” serves as an attempt to naturalize a particular division. Monique Wittig has argued, “The categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ . . . are political categories and not natural givens.”[64] The notion that sexual difference is political, rather than natural, suggests that the emphasis on the mark of sexual difference as reproductive capacity is rooted in the social and political world, even while appealing to “nature” as an outside authority. In this way, a theory of sexual difference that claims to be rooted in “nature” is always already heterosexual, thus concealing its political import.[65] One must be aware that the binary division between male and female, taken to be on the order of not only nature, but also God’s will, has as its goal the sanctification of heterosexual sex.[66] There must be strict gendered correspondence between a spirit and a body, it is believed, because of God’s providence over creation. This view of the premortal gendered spirit is often put to use against transsexuality and intersexuality. The problem with this view arises in explaining not only the real experiences of transsexual persons, but also the existence of intersexed persons whose bodies resist categorization in the gender binary. Anne Fausto-Sterling has suggested that as many as five “sexes” occur in nature.[67] The idea of a natural or inherent binary sexual difference in LDS discourse makes a legible “sex” the prerequisite to personhood, rendering the differently sexed “accidents of nature” illegible as children of God and divine potentials.[68] The notion of an eternal gender, referring to physical differences alone, also faces significant theological problems. If gender is “an essential individual characteristic of premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose,” then presumably the premortal spirit of each individual necessarily corresponds in appearance to the body it inhabits as a kind of facsimile. The challenge with such a view is in saying what kinds of bodily characteristics correspond to one’s preexistent spirit. What is the relationship between one’s eternal identity and one’s contingent genetic makeup, including “sex”? What are the characteristics that make up a morphological sex? Is it just the genitals, or are premortal bodies also capable of reproduction? Do things like performed gender differences, relative height and weight, chemistry, hormones, and muscle build also factor into what makes the “genders” eternally different? Do premortal spirits have chromosomes? What defines physical “gender” that it can persist eternally? The whole question of the relationship of the premortal spirit to the mortal body is at stake in the claim that “gender” belongs to both equally. If any of the particularities of one’s genetic and environmental circumstances may be said to not preexist with a particular spirit in a deterministic way, why then is sexual difference the exception? To assert that “gender” is more fundamental to one’s identity than these other contingent features begs the question: Of the many different features of human identity, why does sexual difference—whatever that may refer to—occupy a privileged place in the account of the eternal nature of the human being?[69] In the second understanding of “gender,” the term refers not only to particular bodies, but also to an “identity” that is supposed to match to those bodies. What is meant by “identity,” and on what grounds is it done correctly or incorrectly? Gender identity is the relationship between sex, gender, and desire; and it is done correctly when all three align according to heterosexual norms. Early twentieth-century discourse about homosexuality thought of it in terms of pathological gendered “inversion,” suggesting that men and women who engaged in homosexual activity mistook their proper sexual identity as a result of confused social roles.[70] Current LDS discourse uses the term “gender confusion” to speak about homosexuality.[71] Here, the stereotypical notion of male homosexuals as effeminate and female homosexuals as masculine functions to explain homosexuality. A correct gender identity can only be thought of in terms of heterosexuality. In this discourse, the transsexual and homosexual are indistinct since both have identified with a “sex” or “desire” that does not correspond correctly to their body. Such “identities” are rendered failures—or even impossible—in a framework that recognizes only some identities and is the impetus behind the pathologization of nonconforming gender identities. Church teachings assert two ideas about gender identity that are in significant tension: first, that gender is an eternal, immutable aspect of one’s existence; and second, that notions of gender identity and roles are so contingent that they must be constantly enforced and taught, especially to young children.[72] To say that one “is” a particular gender by virtue of that individual’s body and also that one’s disposition or identity is of that gender suggests that, in the latter case, gender is not a question of ontology but of achievement. “The Divine Institution of Marriage” manifests this tension by appealing to an “inherent . . . natural identity” with respect to gender, but also positing that nature is so unstable as to require heterosexual marriage to make sure that it can “develop.”[73] In this understanding, male and female “identity” is not secured by the possession of a male or female body alone but must be enforced and made legible as “male” or “female” through practices like heterosexuality.[74] As Douglas A. Abbot and A. Dean Byrd put it, heterosexuality must be “encouraged” in children in order for it to take.[75] But gender “identity” cannot be both inherent and taught. The contingency of “gender identity” here reveals that it is not, in fact, “natural” at all but rather must be maintained and enforced juridically. Gender is constantly at risk of failing to correspond to the sexed body. As Judith Butler explains, “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”[76] The idea that gender is performed, not possessed, reveals just how unstable it is as a category for defining people.[77] Such a view—that gender is something that develops, or is achieved—suggests that there is no true or false gender, nor one that coheres with a precultural “nature.” The use of the category of “gender” to describe one’s desires and sexual practices has been heavily discredited over the last several decades.[78] Rather, given the vast variability of gender “identities” of culturally recognized “masculine” or “feminine” traits among those who identify as either heterosexual or homosexual, the assumption that any given gender performance corresponds to a particular object of desire is entirely contingent. The old binary categories of hetero and homosexuals—with the caveat of bisexuals—does little to capture the wide variety of gender performance and sexual preference. The experiences of transexuals, transgender, drag, intersexuality, and the variety of gender performances in gay, lesbian, and straight cultures are not adequately understood through the category of gender as a system that matches “masculine” and “feminine” sexual desires to “male” and “female” bodies. The history of this categorization of sexual preferences in connection with gender relies on the same heterosexual matrix that it attempts to explain. Gender simply fails as a category for thinking about sexuality, and LDS discourse should move beyond such an infelicitous conflation. The third understanding of “gender” in LDS discourse sees it as more than bodies and identity, but also as comprising roles—or as the “Proclamation” puts it, “eternal identity and purpose.” Gendered “purposes” or roles are laid out in the document: “By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.”[79] Earlier teachings of Church leaders suggested an even more expansive notion of gender roles that included prescribed ways of dressing and acting so as to appear properly male or female.[80] Like gender identity, gender roles must also be taught to children in order for them to be carried on.[81] This notion of “gender” as roles operates as a critique of homosexual relationships because at least one “confused” partner fails to conform to his or her “proper” gendered identity as masculine or feminine. Such a view of gendered roles may not include any assumed correspondence to capacity, but rather to responsibilities which each gender is meant to assume.[82] This view may be used to object to homosexual relationships because such relationships may include one or both same-sex parents as subverting the role assigned to their “gender.” In this sense, “gender confusion” is the result, not of the presence of both “masculine” and “feminine” parents, but the failure of these traits to be possessed by men and women respectively. The notion that women are more innately caring and nurturing reinforces the instruction for women to reproduce and be the primary care-givers of their children. In recent LDS discourse, the title “mother” does not refer to a period in a woman’s life, one particular aspect of how a woman’s identity may be performed, or a particular category of women who have children. This view was expressed in its most extreme form by Sheri Dew, speaking as second counselor in the Relief Society general presidency, when she asserted that a “woman” is defined wholly as a “mother” since “motherhood is the essence of who we are as women.”[83] In spite of the emphasis that parents must act as both masculine and feminine (ideally by males and females, respectively), LDS discourse has increasingly emphasized “equality” in the marital relationship. The “Proclamation” teaches both that “fathers are to preside over their families” and that “fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.” The tension between these two positions—fathers presiding but both parents as “equal partners”—remains largely unresolved. Indeed, what it means to preside and what it means to be equal are left entirely unexplained. When differences are minimized between the sexes, Elder L. Tom Perry can say, “There is not a president and vice-president in a family. We have co-presidents working together eternally for the good of their family. . . . [T]hey lead, guide, and direct their family unit. They are on equal footing.”[84] Yet while the rhetoric of equal partnership could and would apply to parents of the same sex, when it comes to the issue of “gender confusion” in homosexual relationships, the question of who presides is much more important than the fact that there is an equal partnership. The retention of earlier language about “presiding” alongside more modern emphasis on “equal partnership” reveals the necessity of hierarchical views of males and females in marriage as a necessary aspect of marking same-sex relationships as illegitimate. The problem with an interpretation in which “gender” refers to roles is that it cannot explain what these roles might be in premortal and postmortal life. The current Relief Society general president, Julie B. Beck, asserts: “Female roles did not begin on earth, and they do not end here. A woman who treasures motherhood on earth will treasure motherhood in the world to come.”[85] Here, a woman’s eternal role is defined as “treasuring motherhood.” Motherhood is connected explicitly to mortal and postmortal realms, perhaps referencing the belief that divinized women will perform the same reproductive functions of “motherhood” as defined by mortal bodies. However, she avoids exploring how motherhood is understood as a “role” for premortal spirits, or even beyond birthing, the roles a Heavenly Mother might expect to perform in postmortality. These predefined roles apply to men as well. President Gordon B. Hinckley stated that women do not “resent the strong leadership of a man in the home” and that the man “becomes the provider, the defender, the counselor, the breadwinner and lends support and gives support when needed.”[86] Yet in LDS discourse, Heavenly Father takes on the role of a single parent nurturing His children, while Heavenly Mother does little that could be called mothering from the perspective of mortal persons. If we accept a definition of “gender” that suggests that men’s role is being a “breadwinner” and women’s role is caring for children, cooking, cleaning, and other hallmarks of the twentieth-century American family division of labor, this understanding of gender is meaningless in an eternal realm.[87] Further, the problem with dehistoricizing modern American divisions of labor is that such divisions fail to describe “gender” historically and cross-culturally. Anthropologists and theorists have shown the variability of “sex roles,” showing not only the cultural, but also the historical, contingency of what is considered to be masculine and feminine, which is what precipitated the theoretical division between sex and gender in the first place.[88] Even if one restricts gender roles to reproductive function, stripping away the divisions of household labor or access to public power as contigent features of mortal life, it is not clear that such roles could be construed as applying equally to the three phases of one’s eternal—premortal, mortal, and postmortal—life. The main problems for any theology that begins with a fixed notion of roles, gender binarism, or innate characteristics of what constitute masculine and feminine characteristics is that it rooted in a fantasmatic idealization of such differences rather than any universal instantiation. Finally, I would like to address the frequent charge that homosexual relationships constitute gender “separatism.”[89] Valerie Hudson has gone so far as to call same-sex relationships “gender apartheid.”[90] The assertion faces a number of problems. In this understanding of same-sex relationships, the only meaningful and politically valuable mixed-sex interactions happen in marriages and procreation. But this assumption that nonheterosexuals cannot or will not engage in meaningful interactions with members of the opposite sex, including parents, siblings, children, co-workers, neighbors, and friends has no basis. The kinds of “separatist” feminist and gay and lesbian movements from earlier eras were more of a response to the injustice of patriarchal, heterosexual culture than a desire to cease all interaction with members of the opposite sex. If learning to interact with members of the opposite sex (or gender) really does hold a privileged position as a means to salvation over learning to master other kinds of relationships—such as those of different social, economic, racial, linguistic, national, or even religious backgrounds—there is no reason to suppose that same-sex companions cannot or would not develop those relationships. But the question of why mixed-sex relationships should be privileged above others must be seriously asked and explored. Conclusion At the turn of the twentieth century, as the Church began to embrace the new post-polygamy conception of families and formally ended the “law of adoption” as it had been practiced between adults, Wilford Woodruff prophetically suggested that there were more changes to come: “I have not felt satisfied, neither did President Taylor, neither has any man since the Prophet Joseph who has attended to the ordinance of adoption in the temples of our God. . . . [W]e still have more changes to make, in order to satisfy our Heavenly Father, satisfy our dead and ourselves. . . . [W]e have got to have more revelation concerning sealing under the law of adoption.”[91] The possibility of creating theological space within Mormonism for homosexual relationships rests not on the abandonment of any central doctrine of the Church, but rather on the revival of past concepts, the recovery of embedded theological resources, and the rearticulation of existing ideas in more expansive terms in order to rethink the possibilities of celestial relationships. At the heart of this recovery is a displacement of biological reproduction as the sole way of imagining kinship as well as the model for celestial (pro)creation. In both cases, reproduction fails to offer a universal foundation for meaningful kinship relationships as well as being a doctrinally suspect account of divine relationships. Such a recovery project has the benefit not only of including homosexual relationships, but also of laying a more solid ground for nonreproductive heterosexual relationships and other forms of kinship. The numerous critiques of the category of gender in recent years cannot be ignored, even if Latter-day Saints opt for a continued emphasis on binary sexual difference. Whether from the critique of gender roles, gender essentialist notions of innate characteristics, or even the notion of biological difference itself, LDS theology faces serious credibility issues by continuing to hold to precritical assumptions about sexual difference. At the same time, however, there is nothing preventing Latter-day Saints from moving past these assumptions in order to more clearly focus on Mormonism’s distinctive teachings about kinship and salvation, which does not require an appeal to the suspect category of gender at all. The unimportance of gender as a category for salvation is significantly affirmed in both ancient and modern scripture: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28) and “he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God” (2 Ne. 26:33). Or perhaps by appealing to the social basis of gender, rather than a supposed eternal standard, we may better make sense of its place and significance in our theological thinking. To admit the social basis of gender does not entail the elimination of gender, nor does it require a leveling of difference toward some androgynous ideal. Quite the opposite. Instead, we may see more of a proliferation of “genders,” released from the constraints of fantasies about a neat gender binary. Just as we do not imagine that only one (or two) races, body types, and hair colors are represented in the resurrection, we may also see a variety of “genders,” understood as either different kinds of bodies, different kinds of identities, and even different roles. We need not abandon the idea of “eternal gender,” but rather we can embrace the possibilities that it opens for us once freed from its artificial constraints. As one LDS manual puts it, backing away from its earlier claims about the fixed nature of gender: “There is nearly as much variation within each gender as there is between the genders. Each human being is unique. There is no one model except the Redeemer of all mankind. Development of a person’s gifts or interests is one of life’s most enjoyable experiences. No one should be denied such growth.”[92] Perhaps LDS ritual and rhetoric may embrace this variation, including homosexual relationships in the blessings of growth offered by sealing. -
How to reconcile mixed messages from The Church
Daniel2 replied to Maestrophil's topic in General Discussions
Despite a couple follow up posts on the subject, I haven't really had time to answer this question more in full, as work has kept me busy and I'm still traveling outside the U.S. That said, I continue to be aware that there is much to say still on how Mormonism could adapt to include Celestial exaltation of same-sex couples, and do so without changing so drastically as to break the whole. My first post on the subject refuted the once commonly-taught (by early post-restoration Mormon leaders) concept that procreation must, by it's very nature, consist of a sexually-intimate act uniting a sperm and an egg. This early, but since abandoned, teaching promoted the idea that Jesus was conceived "in the same way" that all other humans are conceived, including the idea that Elohim had intimate relations with Mary, since "that's the only way that humans are created." As discussed in that earlier post, more contemporary LDS leaders have abandoned the concept that Elohim and Mary had to have had sexual relations for Mary to conceive. They have since reaffirmed that Mary was a virgin before and after giving birth to Jesus, and implied that we simply don't know how the actual process of Mary's conception occurred. Backing away from the concept that 'sexual intimacy was the only way to conceive Jesus Christ's mortal body' opens the door to the possibility that an exalted, and even omnipotent, being is not constrained by mortal procreative processes, not to mention Isaiah's teaching that God's "thoughts are not [our] thoughts, nor are [our] ways [His] ways,” declares the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than t he earth, so are My ways higher than your ways." Broadening the scope of that concept that the Lord's ways are not our ways, while LDS scriptures make reference to God "organizing" pre-existent "intelligences," the same scriptures are entirely silent on the actual process by which such occurs, within LDS doctrine or theology. It certainly is true that since the LDS Faith's inception, generations of Latter-day Saints, immersed in a puritanical U.S.-centric culture that presumed heterosexual couplings were the only moral types of parings, have culturally assumed a shared religious paradigm in which exalted men and women would continue to have sexual relations by which they would be 'organizing' spirit bodies for pre-existing intelligences. But these shared paradigms are the result of assumptions made according to the philosophies of men during the last several generations. Such paradigms, which began in the early-to-mid 1800's, didn't contemplate even human advances in reproductive health and technologies that are already well on the way of outstripping the bounds of what was reproductively possible back then. It's not clear that prophets of that day and age foresaw advances such as invitro fertilization, surrogacy, or certainly not in-vitro gametogenesis. This latest medical techology on the reproductive frontier uses stem cells to create gametes for previously-believed-to-be-infertile couples, such as those who were biologically incapable of producing sperm or eggs, had undergone medical treatments that limited such (i.e. chemotherapy), or same-sex couples now able to produce both an egg and a sperm: If modern technologies allow same-sex couples to procreate life together, overcoming previously-thought limits of biology, and if God, as an exalted, all-knowing being, is omniscient and omnipotent, then surely mortal doctors and same-sex couples shouldn't be able to create life using processes that omniscient God himself is 'incapable'? Especially since LDS leaders have already made space in their theology for God to have begotten His own son without being constrained by the same procreative limits that humans were bound by ~9 months B.C. So in this sense, medical advances themselves indicate that the creation of life is possible beyond traditionally-held limits, upon which are based many of the presumed, commonly-held LDS paradigms about their own theology, but which are not based on scripture. More to come. -
By LDS standards and as far as being a gay Mormon, Charlie Bird has built a fairly significant public persona and brand, including: publishing his first book on the subject with LDS-owned Deseret Book, Without the Mask: Coming Out and Coming Into God's Light, a soon-to-be-released new book called Expanding the Borders of Zion, guest appearances in pro-LDS podcasts (here and here, still available via Deseret Book), self-identifying himself on social media (per his Facebook account) as: "Former Cosmo Couger, LGBTQ Advocate, Member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" (including a backdrop photo of him being featured on a Utah-based news program), co-headlining his own online podcast series, Questions From the Closet (as recently as 14 February, 2024) As such, I imagine he has experienced and continues to expect to experience some degree of attention/notoriety/fame/infamy. I support he and his husband's activism in all its forms, whether public or in their own personal circumstances, especially since it comes from a place of quasi-celebrity privilege, and therefore a certain degree of protection from consequences that other, less-known members routinely face. That said, I find Equality Utah/Wyoming/Arizona's pearl clutching over 'invasions of his privacy' by some taking Mr. Bird at his word and choosing to attend Charlie's ward (in a private space where the buildings literally say "public welcome") to witness for themselves if/how he's "expanding the borders of Zion" to be a bit over the top--he's literally built a brand on doing so. He's continued to be public about partnering with The Church to some degree (it's not entirely clear how that dynamic works to me, though he's still apparently in enough good grace to remain not only an active, calling-carrying member, but somewhat promoted via Deseret Book), so it's easy to see that some are curious about how that's going for his ward, his leaders, and himself--again, in a public place (if any were stalking them in their home or other personal spaces, that would be an entirely different matter, IMO). I see the actions of some in this thread as taking opportunities to celebrate divergent 'factions' of the LGBT movement be critical of one another--but don't believe anyone (however mildly) gloating of such necessarily share the goals of Mormon Stories, Equality Utah, and Mr. Bird, himself, all of which promote more inclusive and safe spaces for LGBT individuals within Mormonism, it's Faith, beliefs, and culture, as well as equal civil liberties and protections.
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How to reconcile mixed messages from The Church
Daniel2 replied to Maestrophil's topic in General Discussions
My apologies for the delay; as mentioned, I've been travelling and am still recuperating 30+ hours of international travel--I'll try and answer these as I can, while catching up on work and home obligations. As I see it, mfbukowski, from much of what you wrote in the post above and others in this thread reflect what you refer to as LDS "paradigms", or common beliefs, from what I suggest are actually vestigial; remnants from former church leaders' teachings that are no longer in step with today's LDS teachings and official beliefs, some of which contradict previous prophetic pronouncements. For example, you state that, Yes, for decades, several past leaders may have "said" as much, including 'Mormon apostle Bruce McConkie, in perhaps the most explicit denial of the virgin birth, wrote, “Christ was begotten by an immortal Father in the same way that mortal men are begotten by mortal fathers.” (Mormon Doctrine, 1966, p. 547).' However, any idea or suggestion that God the Father must have had physical relations with Mary for Jesus to be considered the only begotten of the Father do not reflect modern LDS doctrine. In FAIR's articles titled The Conception of Jesus Christ and Do Latter-day Saints believe that Mary was still a virgin when Jesus was born?, we read the following: They go so far as to explicitly call out the fact that "Jesus shared God's genetic inheritance without necessarily requiring a sexual act to combine that inheritance with Mary's mortal contribution," stating: Benson's emphasis is on both the literalness of Jesus' divine birth, and the fact that Mary's virginal status persisted even immediately after conceiving and bearing Jesus. The article goes on to suggest that early Mormon leaders weren't commenting on the need for "a sexual act to combine that God's genetic inheritance with Mary's mortal contribution" for Jesus to "share God's genetic inheritance" by giving context that they were actually intending to counteract other false evangelical teachings of the time, such that God was a non-physical, wholly corporate spirit. The article concludes with the following: The first article concludes by saying the following: Harold B. Lee was emphatic that only one person can speak for the Church: This was recently reiterated by the First Presidency (who now approves all statements published on the Church's official website): In response to a letter "received at the office of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" in 1912, Charles W. Penrose of the First Presidency wrote: So, for my first counterpoint to what you asserted above: No where in LDS Scripture, Cannon, or Official Church doctrine does it explain the means by which spirit children are created. In Official Church teachings, the only instance I'm aware of that actually DOES discuss physical procreation and the process by which God, as an exalted, divine being, shared his genetic inheritance indicates that not only is it entirely possible without the employment of a sexual act, but the Church actually backed away from such teachings and disavowed the authority of them as official doctrine. More to come as I have time. -
How to reconcile mixed messages from The Church
Daniel2 replied to Maestrophil's topic in General Discussions
According to LDS theology, scripture, and temple ordinances, two male deities, God the Father, Elohim, and His son, Jehovah, were responsible for creating the heavens and earth and all its inhabitants. I’m unaware of a female deity being involved according to LDS scripture or official doctrine. Are you? -
How to reconcile mixed messages from The Church
Daniel2 replied to Maestrophil's topic in General Discussions
I don’t find much comfort in, “OK, yes, both types of couples have been prohibited from getting sealed for time and all eternity, but at least interracial couples didn’t get excommunicated”…. Even then, my understanding is the church has backed away from mandated excommunication for married same-sex couples, as well—is that not the case? -
How to reconcile mixed messages from The Church
Daniel2 replied to Maestrophil's topic in General Discussions
This is EXACTLY my point. There haven’t been any, as of yet. I’ve been traveling the last 30 hours and don’t have a full keyboard to type, so I will respond to this and your other posts with more substance when I’m back in front of a full-sizes keyboard and not just on my phone. I have quite a few thoughts to share on how such a paradigm fits in with natural law and LDS theology, and would like to take time and effort to adequately answer your great questions. More to come in the days to come. -
How to reconcile mixed messages from The Church
Daniel2 replied to Maestrophil's topic in General Discussions
Marriage between black and white couples was, to use your phraseology, “an act of disobedience,” just as marriage between same-gender couples is “an act of disobedience.” -
How to reconcile mixed messages from The Church
Daniel2 replied to Maestrophil's topic in General Discussions
Same answer as my post just above this one—you’ve worked out several philosophies about this so-called “paradigm” of yours that make sense to you and perhaps many other members, but I see no canonical citations. Can you share where LDS scripture supports any of the above?