![]() My first thought was “Why would being bisexual preclude belief in the church?”–and it doesn’t always. I was talking to my son years ago about a friend of his who is bisexual and therefore doesn’t believe in the church. All homosexuality was seen as unnatural sin, and those feelings were temptations from Satan, not innate characteristics. The branch president was supportive of him, but there was simply not a place for a practicing homosexual in our theology. I also baptized a gay young man who didn’t come out to us until after his baptism, and he did not stay active in the church because he got back together with his boyfriend (he got baptized after their breakup). On my mission, I taught a transsexual person very briefly (in 1990), but it was a non-starter for baptism which was too bad because he was a very humble person who wanted to be accepted for who he was. There were people who were intersex or transsexual, but the odds of knowing one were remote, at least in rural Pennsylvania. We gossiped about the girls in our school that we knew were lesbians (the basketball team, natch), and the gay social studies teacher who shopped at the grocery store with his partner, and the gym teachers (probably all gay we thought). “Gay” was still mostly a slur, and there were just two acknowledged alternatives: gay or straight. ![]() There was a even gay bar in the nearby city of Lancaster. I came of age in the 80s when we were beginning, slowly, to accept that gay people were born that way and that they shouldn’t marry straight people and couldn’t change their orientation. I include myself in this characterization of thinking too simplistically, but to a lesser degree than generations before me. Just as we have heard that “the future is female,” all of human sexuality is less simplistic than we’ve believed. The social issues that have plagued Monson’s presidency and will continue to be issues in the coming years relate to rights of LGBT people and the role of women. LDS theology is particularly intertwined with gender binaries and procreative sexuality-these things lie at the heart of Mormon understandings of divinity-making the church’s navigation of the last decade’s rapid cultural and legal shifts especially challenging and painful. Monson’s passing, David Holland (scholar and Jeffrey Holland’s son) made an interesting observation about LDS theology regarding gender and marriage: In an interview with Harvard Divinity School about Pres.
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