Church's Policy on Surrogacy - Looking for Input

[smac97]

9 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

It's not that complicated.

It's not true, either.

9 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

No one calls you a bigot because you say wait for sex until marriage. No one calls you a bigot because you say society is way too sexualized. No one calls you a bigot for your views on masturbation.

Okay.  So sexual ethics about these aspects of the human experience are based on reason, not bigotry.  Would you agree with that?

9 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Bigotry has a very narrow definition.

And you have not provided it.

Here's one:

Quote

bigotry

noun

 /ˈbɪɡətri/

 /ˈbɪɡətri/

1. the state of feeling, or the act of expressing, strong, unreasonable beliefs or opinions

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:

Quote

bigotry

noun [ U ]

  disapproving
/ˈbɪɡ.ə.tri/ us
/ˈbɪɡ.ə.tri/

 

the fact of having and expressing strong, unreasonable beliefs and disliking other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life:

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.

9 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

If I say "those two people shouldn't get married" and my reason is solely based on the racial attributes, national origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation (or some other near immutable characteristic) that is bigotry.

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?

9 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

It doesn't matter if the person stating it has all these intellectual reasons surrounding preserving "white culture", some divine curse on Cain, or anything else. It's still bigotry.

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.

9 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

You privilege yourself as a class (heterosexual)

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.

9 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

and would deny the same privileges to a different class of people (homosexual).

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.

9 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Our ancestors sought to do the same around interracial marriages. They could write "reasoned" paragraphs about it just like you I'm sure. They were still racist. Sorry.

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

Edited yesterday at 05:36 AM by smac97

[Analytics]

13 hours ago, smac97 said:

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.

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? 

 

[smac97]

9 hours ago, Analytics said:

Quote

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.

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

Edited yesterday at 04:05 PM by smac97

[SeekingUnderstanding]

13 hours ago, smac97 said:

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.

I don't think your views are informed by reason. They are informed by your faith first and foremost. Your faith teaches you what you believe on the topic and then you go looking for "reasons" to support that. It's identical to people's views on interracial marriages. People decided interracial marriages were bad and then went looking for reasons to support it. There is no fact or debate that can change your mind.

How about this. Let's do a thought experiment. If I could show you that children of gay parents performed better in every metric than their peers born to straight parents, would you change your mind? For the purpose of the thought experiment, the evidence is overwhelming and convincing that the children report greater happiness, better grades, better jobs, etc. Would this evidence change your view on the morality of gay marriage? Since children of such marriages are better off, would you seek to call straight marriages immoral and encourage people to enter same sex partnerships?

What if tomorrow, a cheap easy method is developed where gay people could create biological offspring, would that change your mind? Would gay marriage suddenly be moral, and good?

If the above wouldn't change your mind, then your reasons are just made up. The real reason gay sex is bad is because you believe your prophet has a revelation from God that says gay sex is bad. Debating any other issue is pointless. You dress your religious belief in reason, but it's just window dressing.

 

 

[california boy]

3 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

The real reason gay sex is bad is because you believe your prophet has a revelation from God that says gay sex is bad. Debating any other issue is pointless. You dress your religious belief in reason, but it's just window dressing.

Except that unlike the prejudicial priesthood ban against blacks, there has never been ANY claim of a revelation from God prohibiting gay marriage.  Like the priesthood ban, it is based on conservative religious prejudices that like the prejudices against blacks go back for centuries 

Edited yesterday at 08:33 PM by california boy

[bluebell]

17 minutes ago, california boy said:

Except that unlike the prejudicial priesthood ban against blacks, there has never been ANY claim of a revelation from God prohibiting gay marriage.  Like the priesthood ban, it is based on conservative religious prejudices that like the prejudices against blacks go back for centuries 

Was there a claimed revelation for the priesthood ban?  I think Young, from the beginning, referred to it as his personal views, and then eventually there were others who claimed false memories about Joseph Smith saying it was wrong, but I didn’t think any president of the church actually claimed revelation on it?

I think you are right though, in that the priesthood ban came from bias and prejudice, and that the prohibition against same-sex marriage could certainly be from a similar place.

I think one of the issues that can’t be ignored when trying to compare the two is that from the beginning Brigham Young taught that someday, eventually, Black members would get the priesthood.  There’s no equivalent to same-sex marriage in our theological history.  That doesn’t mean anything in and of itself, but in a comparison, I think it’s relevant.

[bluebell]

On 9/19/2026 at 4:06 PM, smac97 said:

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 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.

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

There’s a difference between discussing doctrine and practices, and discussing whether a specific person is sinning, how they are sinning, and how God feels about their choices.

I brought up Charlie’s activity in his ward because it was providing factual information.  It was never meant to open up a discussion about his personal standing before God. 

[SeekingUnderstanding]

3 hours ago, bluebell said:

Was there a claimed revelation for the priesthood ban?  I think Young, from the beginning, referred to it as his personal views, and then eventually there were others who claimed false memories about Joseph Smith saying it was wrong, but I didn’t think any president of the church actually claimed revelation on it?

I think you are right though, in that the priesthood ban came from bias and prejudice, and that the prohibition against same-sex marriage could certainly be from a similar place.

I think one of the issues that can’t be ignored when trying to compare the two is that from the beginning Brigham Young taught that someday, eventually, Black members would get the priesthood.  There’s no equivalent to same-sex marriage in our theological history.  That doesn’t mean anything in and of itself, but in a comparison, I think it’s relevant.

I'm happy to follow wherever the research goes on this. Similar to same sex marriage, there is no recorded, voted upon, thus saith the Lord revelation on the priesthood / temple ban. I am unaware of Young ever referring to the matter as just his personal views, and if that is the case, I'd like to see it. I am aware of this quote (here cited at ByuStudies):
 

Quote

The first known direct statement by a Church President that blacks were denied the priesthood came from Brigham Young in February 1849 when he said of “the Africans”: “The curse remained upon them because Cain cut off the lives of Abel. . . . The Lord had cursed Cain’s seed with blackness and prohibited them the Priesthood.”¹⁴ In 1852, Wilford Woodruff reported that Brigham Young, speaking to the Utah territorial legislature, took personal responsibility for articulating the restriction: “Any man having one drop of the seed of Cane [sic] in him Cannot hold the priesthood & if no other Prophet ever spake it Before I will say it now in the name of Jesus Christ. I know it is true & they know it.”¹⁵

https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/spencer-w-kimball-and-the-revelation-on-priesthood

That sure seems like Brigham Young thinks the ban is divinely mandated.

As for scriptural basis, the ban had a number of scriptures often cited to support it (now disavowed), just like prohibitions on same sex behavior. Those scriptures cited prohibiting same sex behavior are few and far between.  We pretty much ignore the entirety of Paul's sexual ethic, as well as the entire sexual ethic of the old testament (where marriage is a contract transferring the sexual availability and procreative capacity of a woman from her father to her husband). This certainly seems to leave a lot of wiggle room for accepting loving same sex couples should the church's leaders ever choose to do so.

Edited 22 hours ago by SeekingUnderstanding

[smac97]

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

I don't think your views are informed by reason.

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.

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

They are informed by your faith first and foremost.

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.

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Your faith teaches you what you believe on the topic and then you go looking for "reasons" to support that.

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:

Quote

The proper methodology for determining which rights should be protected under substantive due process has been hotly contested. In 1961, Justice Harlan wrote an influential dissent in Poe v. Ullman, maintaining that the project of discerning such rights “has not been reduced to any formula,” but must be left to case-by-case adjudication. In 1997, the Court suggested an alternative methodology that was more restrictive: such rights would need to be “carefully descri[bed]” and, under that description, “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Washington v. Glucksberg (1997). However, in recognizing a right to same-sex marriage in 2015, the Court not only limited that methodology, but also positively cited the Poe dissent. Obergefell v. Hodges. Most recently, the Court focused on the original understanding of the clause to overrule Roe v. Wade and hold that the clause does not protect a right to abortion.The Court’s approach in future cases remains unclear.

And here:

Quote

Though U.S. Supreme Court briefs are rarely noted for prosody or style (who confuses Macbeth with McCollum or Lycidas with Lemon?), occasionally a phrase or section achieves popular renown. The most recent example is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's immortalized words in Casey: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Though sounding more like a discourse on Spinozean metaphysics than on constitutional jurisprudence, this sentence has reached the level of notoriety among judicial and political conservatives that "separate but equal" once did among civil libertarians, or "material substratum" did among post-Enlightenment idealists.

No U.S. Supreme Court dictum in decades has faced such vilification as has poor Justice Kennedy's 28 words. Robert Bork called the phrase indicative of "New Age jurisprudence"; William Bennett derided it as an "open-ended validation of subjectivism" that paves the way for drug abuse, assisted suicide, prostitution, and "virtually anything else": George Will said it was "gaseously" written; Michael Uhlman labeled it a "thing of almost infinite plasticity"; the editors of First Things called it the "notorious mystery passage"; and on and on.

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.

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

It's identical to people's views on interracial marriages.

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.

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

People decided interracial marriages were bad and then went looking for reasons to support it. There is no fact or debate that can change your mind.

Motive psychoanalysis / genetic fallacy.

My mind can be changed, or modified/adjusted.  That happens all the time.  

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

How about this. Let's do a thought experiment. If I could show you that children of gay parents performed better in every metric than their peers born to straight parents, would you change your mind?

Perhaps.

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

For the purpose of the thought experiment, the evidence is overwhelming and convincing that the children report greater happiness, better grades, better jobs, etc. Would this evidence change your view on the morality of gay marriage?

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.

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Since children of such marriages are better off, would you seek to call straight marriages immoral and encourage people to enter same sex partnerships?

I think the hypothetical is too absurd and unrealistic to take seriously.  

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

What if tomorrow, a cheap easy method is developed where gay people could create biological offspring, would that change your mind?

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.

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Would gay marriage suddenly be moral, and good?

No.  This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good."  It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God.    

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

If the above wouldn't change your mind, then your reasons are just made up.

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.

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

The real reason gay sex is bad is because you believe your prophet has a revelation from God that says gay sex is bad.

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.

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Debating any other issue is pointless.

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.

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

You dress your religious belief in reason, but it's just window dressing.

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

[smac97]

2 hours ago, bluebell said:

There’s a difference between discussing doctrine and practices, and discussing whether a specific person is sinning, how they are sinning, and how God feels about their choices.

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?

2 hours ago, bluebell said:

I brought up Charlie’s activity in his ward because it was providing factual information.  It was never meant to open up a discussion about his personal standing before God. 

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

[SeekingUnderstanding]

6 minutes ago, smac97 said:

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Would gay marriage suddenly be moral, and good?

No.  This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good."  It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God.    

Ding ding ding. The rest is just window dressing. 

 

7 minutes ago, smac97 said:

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

The real reason gay sex is bad is because you believe your prophet has a revelation from God that says gay sex is bad.

I have plenty of additional reasons as well.  Plenty of reasoning over and above religious sentiments.  Biological.  Sociological.  Legal.

And you aren't addressing any of it.

Reasons that would be irrelevant to address. Because see above. It's bad because God said so. Why would I waste time discussing made up reasons that don't impact or shape your world view at all? It all boils down to God says its bad. 

 

9 minutes ago, smac97 said:

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

If the above wouldn't change your mind, then your reasons are just made up.

So are yours.  We each of us "make up" our reasoning and analysis. 

Yes and no. As a sexual ethic, I value informed consent. I am upfront about this. If you show me evidence that some sexual practice is in line with this, then that will persuade me one way or the other. I'm not trying to slip additional reasoning in. You on the other hand value your perception of your church leader's interpretation of god's will. But then you dress it up in additional non-religious reasoning. Addressing the non-religions reasoning doesn't change your view. It's pointless to engage with you on it. Because it's not where your view ultimately came from.

9 minutes ago, smac97 said:

It happens, though, that my reasoning is fairly substantive, and you are not addressing it.  At all.

It is not. It has been addressed at length. Every person that debates you (on your side of faith and mine) comes away feeling like you don't hear their arguments. You don't address their arguments. Ask any woman on here that has talked to you about women's issues. Ask anyone on my side of the faith line that has talked to you about basically anything. You don't listen. You split up posts until they loose all meaning. 

At the end of the day the only reasoning that matters for you is the one you admit here:

6 minutes ago, smac97 said:

8 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Would gay marriage suddenly be moral, and good?

No.  This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good."  It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God.    

 

So whatever would be the point to engage on anything else? God says it's bad. What else is there to talk about?

 

[smac97]

4 hours ago, california boy said:

Quote

The real reason gay sex is bad is because you believe your prophet has a revelation from God that says gay sex is bad. Debating any other issue is pointless. You dress your religious belief in reason, but it's just window dressing.

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?

4 hours ago, california boy said:

Like the priesthood ban, it is based on conservative religious prejudices that like the prejudices against blacks go back for centuries 

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

Quote

Oft-made comparisons between the plight of homosexuals seeking the right to “marry” and the horrors faced by blacks during the Civil Rights struggle are baseless and offensive, according to a new legal brief filed on behalf of more than 100 black pastors and prominent pro-life and pro-family leaders from across Michigan and Ohio.

 

The Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor filed the amicus brief to support the Michigan Marriage Amendment (MMA), passed in 2004 with the support of 59 percent of state voters.

Reagan-appointed U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman struck down the amendment in March, comparing it to laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

But this week Christian Minister Stacy Swimp of Flint called that allusion “intellectually empty, dishonest, and manufactured.” “When has anyone from the LGBT demographic ever been publicly lynched, specifically excluded from moving into neighborhoods, prohibited from sitting on a jury and denied the right to sue others because of their sexual preferences?” he said.

Pastor James Crowder, president of the Westside Minister Alliance in Detroit, said that Judge Friedman has allowed homosexual activists to “pretend that redefining traditional marriage is as valid as blacks fighting against the carnage of chattel slavery and the humiliation of Jim Crow. Never have I been so insulted. The curtain must be pulled down on this play of disinformation.”

The TMLC's legal brief, drafted by Erin Mersino and two Lansing attorneys, explains why its scores of black signatories believe this Judge Friedman's analogy is a bad one.

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

[smac97]

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Ding ding ding. The rest is just window dressing. 

It is not.  Biology is not window dressing.  Distinctions in the law are not window dressing.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Quote

I have plenty of additional reasons as well.  Plenty of reasoning over and above religious sentiments.  Biological.  Sociological.  Legal.

And you aren't addressing any of it.

Reasons that would be irrelevant to address. Because see above.

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.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

It's bad because God said so.

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.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Why would I waste time discussing made up reasons that don't impact or shape your world view at all? It all boils down to God says its bad. 

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.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Quote

So are yours.  We each of us "make up" our reasoning and analysis. 

Yes and no. As a sexual ethic, I value informed consent. I am upfront about this.

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:

Quote

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.

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.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

If you show me evidence that some sexual practice is in line with this, then that will persuade me one way or the other.

"This" being what?

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

I'm not trying to slip additional reasoning in.

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.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

You on the other hand value your perception of your church leader's interpretation of god's will.

I do.  And the scriptures.  And my own reasoning.  And my assessment of biology, sociology, the law, and so on.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

But then you dress it up in additional non-religious reasoning.

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.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Addressing the non-religions reasoning doesn't change your view.  It's pointless to engage with you on it. Because it's not where your view ultimately came from.

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.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Quote

It happens, though, that my reasoning is fairly substantive, and you are not addressing it.  At all.

It is not.

It is.  It's right there, in this thread.  Along with your various posts not engaging any of it.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

It has been addressed at length. Every person that debates you (on your side of faith and mine) comes away feeling like you don't hear their arguments. You don't address their arguments. Ask any woman on here that has talked to you about women's issues. Ask anyone on my side of the faith line that has talked to you about basically anything. You don't listen. You split up posts until they loose all meaning.

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.

33 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

At the end of the day the only reasoning that matters for you is the one you admit here:

 

So whatever would be the point to engage on anything else? God says it's bad. What else is there to talk about?

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

Edited 20 hours ago by smac97

[SeekingUnderstanding]

2 minutes ago, smac97 said:

How you think this comes across as persuasive eludes me.

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

[bluebell]

2 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

I'm happy to follow wherever the research goes on this. Similar to same sex marriage, there is no recorded, voted upon, thus saith the Lord revelation on the priesthood / temple ban. I am unaware of Young ever referring to the matter as just his personal views, and if that is the case, I'd like to see it. I am aware of this quote (here cited at ByuStudies):
 

https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/spencer-w-kimball-and-the-revelation-on-priesthood

That sure seems like Brigham Young thinks the ban is divinely mandated.

As for scriptural basis, the ban had a number of scriptures often cited to support it (now disavowed), just like prohibitions on same sex behavior. Those scriptures cited prohibiting same sex behavior are few and far between.  We pretty much ignore the entirety of Paul's sexual ethic, as well as the entire sexual ethic of the old testament (where marriage is a contract transferring the sexual availability and procreative capacity of a woman from her father to her husband). This certainly seems to leave a lot of wiggle room for accepting loving same sex couples should the church's leaders ever choose to do so.

In the notes for the 1852 meeting, he also says (in the back and forth between him and Orson Pratt, who adamantly disagreed with him), “I may vary in my views from others, and they may think that I’m foolish in the things that I have spoken and they might think that they know more than I do but I know more than they do.”

He clearly believed he was right, but he never invokes the idea of any revelation from God as the source of his rightness.  Pratt brought up many times in his arguments that they could not deprive blacks from the rights to the priesthood based on color because God had not directed them to do so, and BY never contradicts him on that.  In true BY style he just says "I'm right". 

I agree that scripturally the arguments against SSM are not well supported.

 

[bluebell]

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

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

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

Edited 18 hours ago by bluebell

[smac97]

2 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

You aren’t persuadable.

More mindreading and imputed motives.

I have told you I am willing to listed to what you have to say.

2 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

You admitted as much.

I have not.  I can be persuaded on some things, not so much on others.

2 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

It’s disingenuous  to pretend otherwise. Why would I try and persuade you when the answer is “No.  This is like asking if fornication can "suddenly, and good."  It is inherently incompatible with the commandments of God.    ”

Regardless of whether you could persuade me, I'd still like to hear what you have to say.

Thanks,

-Smac

[smac97]

1 hour ago, bluebell said:

Those people all publicly criticized the church and publicly put forth their views as correct, seeking to convert others to their perspective. 

Joseph Bishop did not do that.  Nor Rob Porter.  Nor Scott Adams.  Nor Paul Adams.  

Tom Kimball was an former member.

1 hour ago, bluebell said:

Charlie has shared his life publicly but never set himself up as a standard for truth on the subject.  The comparison between discussing the morality of his personal choices and the morality of the arguments others have made against the gospel and the church falls apart real fast in my opinion. 

Okay.  You may have a point.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Calm]

58 minutes ago, smac97 said:

Joseph Bishop did not do that.  Nor Rob Porter.  Nor Scott Adams.  Nor Paul Adams.  

Tom Kimball was a former member.

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

[california boy]

13 hours ago, smac97 said:

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

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

[manol]

On 9/21/2026 at 5:02 PM, Calm said:

I don’t think we are being screwed over if we are preexistent and under the care of God the Father and Christ....

Agreed.

If all things “give us [valuable] experience, and work together for our good”, then we're never being screwed over. Imo this is an idea for which there are many, many witnesses, some within the canon of the LDS Church, but most from outside the LDS Church. Ime near-death experiencers offer depths of insight in this area which are not articulated in our few applicable verses of scripture.  Hence my posting of links to relevant YouTube videos, in case it's a topic of interest to anyone.   

 

On 9/21/2026 at 5:02 PM, Calm said:

I also think it’s a good idea to dump the idea we chose everything in our life as justification for...

Agreed.

When permitted to do so, the intellect is very adept at coming up with self-serving justifications for unloving attitudes and behaviors. Imo this is a mistake; imo the intellect should be the servant of the soul, and not the master.

Instead of letting the ego and/or intellect steer the bus, what if we choose to show up as love incarnate to the best of our ability in the moment, regardless of how we showed up in the preceding moment?

Edited 5 hours ago by manol

[SeekingUnderstanding]

12 hours ago, bluebell said:

In the notes for the 1852 meeting, he also says (in the back and forth between him and Orson Pratt, who adamantly disagreed with him), “I may vary in my views from others, and they may think that I’m foolish in the things that I have spoken and they might think that they know more than I do but I know more than they do.”

<snip>

Pratt brought up many times in his arguments that they could not deprive blacks from the rights to the priesthood based on color because God had not directed them to do so, and BY never contradicts him on that.  In true BY style he just says "I'm right". 

 

Where can I read more about this?

12 hours ago, bluebell said:

He clearly believed he was right, but he never invokes the idea of any revelation from God as the source of his rightness. 

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

[SeekingUnderstanding]

11 hours ago, smac97 said:

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

 

Quote

It's also "bad" because it is biologically incoherent.

This is just patently stupid. Same sex relationships exist throughout nature. They fulfill many biological imperatives, like companionship, and love. Which brings us to your next fake objection:

Quote

Same-sex marriage and behavior are also "bad" insofar as it categorically lacks procreative capacity.

We've already determined that even if we gave Same sex couples the ability to produce biological offspring, that wouldn't change your view on anything. So this too is a fake objection. The vast vast vast majority of sex lacks any procreative capacity. Birth rates alone show that the vast majority of couples engage in birth control. People continue to have sex after menopause, tubal ligation, and vasectomies. Sex's primary purpose for humans then is connection and companionship. It performs this primary role equally well regardless of what parts a couple brings to the picture. In a tiny tiny fraction of instances it also produces offspring. But again this can't be your objection because even if we gave same sex couples the ability to produce biological offspring, that wouldn't change your view on anything.

Quote

It's also "bad" because the legal basis for creating a constitutional "right" to same-sex marriage was quite poor.

Who cares? There are many things in the constitution that are good and right. Many that were wrong. Slavery for instance. 

Quote

[The child] will necessarily and by design be deprived of a mother or a father.

Another bad faith argument. You've conceded that even if the children of same sex couples were better off in every category it wouldn't change your view of the matter. 

 

Quote

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.

This is the same thing. God says it's bad. There is no refutation of this "reason"

Quote

These are also "bad" because they sever the institution and concept of marriage from its procreative aspect.

This is kind of hilarious in a thread about surrogacy and how you think gay people shouldn't be allowed to have families. Again the vast majority of sex (like 99.9% for a couple that has two kids and has sex once a week for 40 years) is not procreative. There is no question or quiz for people getting married about whether they can or are able or are willing to procreate. Marriage as an institution and concept is severed from its procreative aspect already. And again all of this is a fake objection because you've admitted that even if gay couples were able to produce biological offspring that wouldn't change anything for you.

And none the above matters. It's been hashed and rehashed on this forum ad infinitum. 

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54 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Where can I read more about this?

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

I strongly recommend this whole series on Race and Priesthood because it covers everything, has access to primary sources (including from the church vault) that many historians didn't have before, and though faithful to the church is good at not whitewashing the history and keeping biases to a minimum.  It covers the sources and the context, which is essential in any study of historical issues.

But here is the specific episode that deals with this point in history.  The podcast isn't very long if you do podcasts but there is also a transcript if you want to read it.

https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/podcast-episode/1852-and-the-beginnings-of-the-priesthood-temple-ban-in-the-church/

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On 9/22/2026 at 8:49 AM, smac97 said:

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.

Here is my point. You defend your interpretation of marriage and the law of chastity by appealing to children’s welfare in terms of growing up in an optimal home, their right to both biological parents, the need to perpetuate the species, and how all of this benefits society. This all comes across as ad hoc rationalizations that contradict much of what’s in your scriptures and what they imply God values.

Start with concubinage. There were two institutions for owning women and having a license to have sex with them: marriage and concubinage. The Bible distinguishes them (2 Samuel 5:13; Genesis 25:5–6). 

The Hebrew bible defines adultery differently than you do. You think adultery is having sex outside of your own marriage. In contrast, in biblical Hebrew law, adultery means having sex with another man’s wife or betrothed partner. Sex with a woman who is neither married nor betrothed is not classified as adultery, even if the man himself is married. See Leviticus 20:10. Deuteronomy 22:23–24 explains why the punishment is so harsh; it isn't because you betrayed your own wife by having sex with somebody else, it is because "he hath humbled his neighbour’s wife." The decisive marital status is hers, not his. There was no expectation of sexual fidelity on the part of the husband, and having sex with others didn't harm his wives and concubines.

In contrast, Exodus 22:16–17 treats having sex with an unbetrothed virgin differently than having sex with somebody else’s wife: the man must pay the bride-price and marry her, unless her father refuses the marriage, in which case the payment remains due because her economic value to her father was still damaged. These rules make it clear that first and foremost, the law of chastity was about harming property that belong to other men (either the woman’s husband or father), and not about being sexually faithful to your own partner. A married man having sex with a woman who didn’t belong to somebody else was a no-harm-no-foul situation.

And D&C 132 closes off the explanation that God merely tolerated these arrangements because of the surrounding culture. Verses 34–35 say he commanded Abraham’s union with Hagar. Verses 37–39 endorse the patriarchs’ concubines and say God gave David his wives and concubines. According to the D&C, these arrangements received explicit divine approval.

Look at what the revelation promises Joseph: a throne (verse 49), rulership (verse 53), and a hundredfold increase in “houses and lands, wives and children” (verse 55). Wives and children are rewards bestowed on the man, along with houses and land. Emma, meanwhile, is threatened with destruction if she refuses the prescribed arrangement (verses 52–54). The man’s authority and promised glory are spelled out. So are the consequences for a wife who objects. The effect that all this has on the welfare of the children is not a consideration.

Verses 61–63 authorize ten virgins under the prescribed conditions, explaining that the man does not commit adultery because “they belong to him.” But, of course, adding wives and children does not multiply the father’s time or income. Why would God command such things when they can be expected to harm children?

The costs could be severe. In Sherilyn Farnes’s study published by BYU, Apostle Amasa Lyman’s household suffered persistent problems with financial support. He had eight wives and nearly forty children. In 1853, Eliza Partridge Lyman wrote: “I have lived without bread when some of the family [i.e. other wives and other children] had bread to throw to the pigs.” This was during his apostleship, years before his departure from the Church. Farnes also notes that high church office could bring pressure to take plural wives even when a man was not a good provider. Polygamy under Brigham Young wasn’t about an optimal family relationship that benefits children and society.

Calling these sacrifices necessary for exaltation would concede my point: other religious objectives took priority over those children’s welfare. Why would God command arrangements that expose children to those costs? How does the father’s promised glory answer the child’s need for food and attention? If a man desires wives and concubines he can have them because he desires them and having them will give him glory. Their welfare isn’t part of the calculus. 

Then there is Paul, whose preference produces no children at all. In 1 Corinthians 7, he merely permits marital sex and tells spouses not to deprive each other (verses 3–5). But he prefers celibacy and recommends marriage for those unable to exercise self-control (verses 7–9). His reasoning concerns the present distress, the shortness of time, and undivided devotion to God (verses 26–35). Perpetuating the species is conspicuously absent from that argument and not something he valued.

You seem to suggest that this is all just descriptive and that earlier prophets and apostles may have mistakenly attributed their cultural assumptions about marriage and sex to God. That is certainly conceivable. But assuming that the true law of chastity doesn't change with the times, why do you believe God’s pattern of revelation has now dramatically changed? Why is only God now telling prophets and apostles the truth about the laws of chastity when he didn’t do so before?