The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints added arguments for the losing side in another seismic civil-rights case. The U.S. Supreme Court recently confirmed that federal law prohibits employment discrimination due to sexual orientation or gender identity.
The church’s engagement in anti-LGBTQ legal battles extends back to support for criminalization of all gay sex, to decades of fighting marriage equality, plus briefs for other big cases, like one trying to keep trans youth from using their public-school restrooms.
Kirton McConkie lawyers surely have billing meters whirling again to tithe payers as they parse the new ruling into plans for next battles to ensure “religious freedom” to fire or otherwise exclude those who a former church president called “perverts” who practice the “repugnant” sin of homosexuality—an “abominable and detestable crime against nature.”
Might this juncture invite reflection on past errors? Church leaders were wrong to allow electroshock torture of gay men at Brigham Young University to cure a “malady” that never existed. The church then pivoted to decades more of conversion therapy, beguiled by a fallacy that childhood developmental problems cause homosexuality. Top leaders further assuredly promised that LGBTQ people can change their unwanted attractions through bruising, bloody-knuckles religious practice. The result for untold numbers proved crushing indeed.
Jesus’ church ought to be first at fair treatment of historically misunderstood minorities, not last. Power to continue clobbering us with “religious freedom” is no excuse to do so. No ministerial exemption exists from the Great Commandment to love others as ourselves, nor from the Golden Rule. Religion is not for harming others. Hurtful discrimination is not for Zion, a place of unity, amidst diversity.
Talking with orthodox believers about sexuality can be like talking with my parents about politics. Expanding views of truth get blocked because people think in herds. Many assume modern, conservative politics is indistinguishable from religious truth — an example of cultural elements posing as genuine articles of faith — and people commonly default to an intuitive process of discernment that they take as following the Holy Spirit, but in many instances is mere comfort of groupthink and its backstop: confirmation bias.
In religion, as in politics, a gut feeling may signal a need for catharsis. Other touchstones of truth exist besides a natural dislike of “others” and differing perspectives. Learning, even by faith, involves studying issues out in our minds using critical reason. The Holy Spirit is more likely to confirm truth after we work through touchstones that might include learning from those with specialized experience or knowledge.
Religious leaders since Moses are products of their cultures and sometimes make mistakes. If Abrahamic religions can surpass edicts ascribed to Moses to stone to death a person for picking up sticks on a Sunday, then it’s a choice to insist on a verse taken to mean that all gay sex is sin. Apostle Paul’s heterosexism is as dismissible as his sexism, despite his attributes. Better answers now exist.
Rectification will never be found by digging more pitfalls for LGBTQ neighbors. Jesus showed a better way. LGBTQ souls are no harder to love than anyone else. To love us, at very least, means not firing us because we’re gay or trans.
Believers sustain church fathers as seers. So see us — past caricatures scratched out of us. See the evil fruits of homophobia, so plain to those who look. See us as we are: the least of Jesus’ kin. See that what you did to us, you did to him. Hearing him involves also hearing us. Hearing — not hearings formed against us—will bring healing.
Sam Wolfe
Samuel Wolfe is a writer, currently based in Cairo, working toward publication of a book about his quest to harmonize faith and homosexuality.