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Does the August 2020 Ensign Advance the Mormon - LGBTQ Dialogue?

Tyler Perry

The short answer to the question in the title is: no.

However, I think that there are some things that are worth looking at and discussing.  Overall, this is some of the most sex positive writings I have seen from the church, but there is still a lot of work to be done in rooting out the harms of purity culture and the lack of queer affirmation.

Before getting into that, I want to reference a scripture that is often at the front of my mind when discussing sex and sexuality with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  This is a scripture that defined much of my negative attitudes toward sex, masturbation, and my own gay identity for many years.

In Alma 39, the prophet Alma, having just given counsel to his two faithful sons, has a longer conversation with his more rebellious son, Corianton.  Corianton had, during his time as a missionary, gone a little too “missionary” on a woman described as “the harlot, Isabel”.  Isabel was apparently a bit of a seductress, but her implied charisma and beauty were not to be justification for Corianton’s game of hide the iron rod.  Alma imparts some harsh words of criticism for his son, saying,

“5 Know ye not, my son, that these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord; yea, most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost?

6 For behold, if ye deny the Holy Ghost when it once has had place in you, and ye know that ye deny it, behold, this is a sin which is unpardonable; yea, and whosoever murdereth against the light and knowledge of God, it is not easy for him to obtain forgiveness; yea, I say unto you, my son, that it is not easy for him to obtain a forgiveness.”

This scripture is often interpreted to mean that the only sin greater than sexual sin is literal murder and the denying of the Holy Ghost.  This means that two consenting adults who have extramarital sex (be it premarital, adulterous, swinging, or polyamorous) are committing a crime against the laws of God that is more severe than theft, child abuse, spousal abuse, assault, being an absolute racist, or committing fraud.  No, really, there is a Gospel topics essay on it and everything [1].

As a side note, and not to lose track of the main point, but this same essay says that a homosexual relationship “distorts loving relationships and prevents people from receiving the blessings that can be found in family life and the saving ordinances of the gospel” [1], which is the sort of homophobic bigotry that inspired me to start this blog in the first place.

My point in mentioning this scripture is that this attitude, though I did not find it explicitly expressed in the August 2020 Ensign, is ever present in the culture, beliefs, and ideologies of church members.  Elder Renlund, in his article “The Divine Purposes of Sexual Intimacy”, notes that “[the law of chastity] remains in force and is as applicable today as it was in earlier times in history” [2].  This is important for understanding that when I commend this issue of the Ensign for potentially good advice, it has the specter of a damaging and dangerous view on sexuality looming over it.

Sorta like eating ice cream at the BYU Creamery.  Yeah, it’s delicious, but how much homophobia went into making that ice cream?

Maybe that analogy got away from me.

The point is that when Dr. Laura M. Padilla-Walker and Meg O. Jankovich give the advice that “healthy parent-child conversations about sexuality… promote a culture of openness” [3], you have to remember that this is prudent counsel given with the idea that if your child does have sex outside of marriage, they are only slightly less terrible than Ted Bundy.  With that said, most of the advice is Padilla-Walker and Jankovich’s “How, When, and Why: Talking to Your Children about Sexuality” is good advice.  They recommend starting early and using correct names for body parts, not shaming your children as they explore or ask questions, teaching children about sexual predators and how to avoid them, and “not reacting with disgust or anger” when your teenage son or daughter engages in the totally normal activity of masturbation.  It also specifically calls out the “chewed gum” metaphor for people who have engaged in sexual activity, and I must give major props there.  It makes me sad that that is how high the bar is for something to be considered “progressive” on the topic of sexuality in the church, but that analogy, and others like it, have destroyed lives.

To combat the competing ideas of “the world”, however, Elder Renlund cites the philosophies, and, frankly, straw man arguments of Nehor and Korihor in the book of Alma.  For a refresher, Nehor has this idea of universal salvation, an idea that had a great amount of prominence in the Christian world during Joseph Smith’s time that has some popularity today.  Essentially, Nehor argues that because God loves everyone, He will save everyone.  Apart from the fact that, in a manner of speaking, Nehor would be considered correct by church doctrine (all will be saved from physical death and receive a kingdom of glory), it has little to do with the actual arguments that people use to object to purity culture and the philosophy of the law of chastity as understood by Mormons.

Korihor is a strange straw man of atheistic argumentation.  His story ends with him confessing that he knew all along that god was real, but an angel of the devil had deceived him.  This is a mischaracterization of atheist and agnostic thought, and its use in this article almost serves as an implied ad hominin attack on “worldly” thinkers who might say, “masturbation is a part of normal human sexual experience” [4].

Of particular note to me, a completely heteronormative man who just admires the physiques of other men and finds the female form to be off-putting, is this idea that God’s laws are always fair.  Renlund frames this with the usual platitudes of “not everyone gets to marry in this life” and “all will be set right in the eternities”.  It comes with that implied promise that reads as, “Hey faithful gays, you get to be straight in heaven!  You’ll have an opposite sex spouse and all of the spirit children you can handle.  Isn’t that wonderful?”

Which sounds like hell to me if I am being perfectly honest.

So, apart from some steps forward in the advice on communicating with children in a healthy and open manner about sex and sexuality, and the continued advancement of purity culture that Renlund touts, what does the August 2020 Ensign actually say about LGBT issues?

Well, for the T portion of the acronym, as usual, not much.  Trans issues continue to be woefully underrepresented in the discussion surrounding sex and sexuality.  My guess is that the church does not want to confront that issue head-on.  Any attempt to do so would push them into murky waters when it comes to Priesthood roles, people who are intersex, and the fact that they cannot deny, even in the General Handbook, that some people with transgender identities are not making it up (for the record, I believe people when they say that they are trans, but the church seems to have this attitude of cis until proven trans).

Most of the articles on sex and sexuality are in the Young Adults section, which is a whole other conversation we could have about the way the church frames the issue of sex.  Essentially, let’s direct our conversations about sex to the people who aren’t supposed to be having it.

It is in this Young Adults section that we find the article “My Experience Living the Law of Chastity with Same-Sex Attraction” by Jacob R [5].  This is one of those articles that comes across as they typical “gay tokenism”, but with a pretty interesting twist.

You see, Jacob is English.

Also, he was raised a Hasidic Jew.

I found this a curious point to bring up.  It does make his story more interesting, since it is not the standard pioneer-stock Utah Mormon story that some lesser gay Mormons have (that certainly does not describe me; I only have one polygamist ancestor).  It does not seem to impart any additional wisdom, though.

I genuinely found Charlie Bird’s Without the Mask to be more progressive and forward thinking than this article, which, apart from the Hasidic Jew thing, was pretty much exactly what I anticipated.  It even has a whole section dedicated to this idea “not enduring to the end but enjoying to the end”.

Is there any conversation about the impact of the November policy?  No.  Any discussion of the elevated suicide rate of LGBTQ youth in the church?  Not even a little.  Is there an implied hope by the author that maybe he could be made straight or enter a successful mixed-orientation marriage?  Oh boy, is there!

As with other LGBTQ Mormon articles that I have read, I genuinely and sincerely hope that Jacob finds happiness.  If it turns out that he is a 5 on the Kinsey scale [6], and he can find himself a beautiful daughter of Zion to make him happy, good for him.  If he is a 6, though, I hope that he finds a man who will love him and cherish him.

The last article that I want to discuss from this issue of the Ensign is “The World’s Way vs. the Lord’s Way: What the Media Gets Wrong about Sexual Intimacy” by Isabel Toa [7].  Toa has what I would describe as a woefully flawed view of the general conception of sexuality.  In the first paragraph, she describes “the world’s” view of sexuality as “casual, callous, and selfish”.  This is not someone who appears to cognizant of the recent dialogue surrounding consent, sexual liberation of women, or the MeToo Movement, all of which seem to favor a view of sexuality that is compassionate, exciting, and concerned with the interests of all parties involved.

Toa talks about feeling uncomfortable seeing portrayals of sex and sexuality in movies and on television.  I do not want to engage in a whataboutism, but what about the portrayals of violence in popular media?  Why is sex this bogeyman, but violence is generally considered acceptable or even comical?  Look at how the Marvel movies, which I thoroughly enjoy, use violence for comedic effect.  Or how the Star Wars franchise features violence and dismemberment, but often scores a PG or soft PG-13 rating, making it acceptable viewing for most Mormon families.

The entire article puts sex on a pedestal, which most Mormon and fundamentalist Christian views tend to do anyway.  It makes sex into this grand experience that is transcendent and beyond normal human comprehension.

However, that is not a healthy view of sex.  Sex is a wonderful and pleasurable thing for consenting adults to do together in the privacy of their own spaces, but it is not the end all, be all of human experience.  This idea that when you have sex you leave a part of yourself with your sexual partner makes sex a much bigger deal than it actually is.  Sex is a biological function like eating or pooping.  There are ways and places where eating and pooping are considered acceptable and are recommended.  There are places and means where those things might be unacceptable.  Pooping in a toilet behind a locked door with the exhaust fan on is good, but eating puppies is generally frowned upon in the United States.

In similar manner, sex is just a normal, healthy thing for consenting adults to do, so long as they take proper precautions and engage in the act in an area that is appropriate for sexual behavior.

I understand that this runs afoul of Alma’s understanding of sexual sin.  I frankly believe that Alma’s declaration that sexual sin is more egregious than any other sin save murder and denying the Holy Ghost is just wrong.  It serves as a justification for purity culture, which objectifies women and sexualizes children [8] [9] [10].  It is this attitude toward sex that caused many BYU students who were victims of sexual assault to not come forward for fear that they would face discipline from the Honor Office [11].

Toa notes the awkwardness that she encountered on her wedding night.  This is progress.  I remember being taught that sex with my wife on our wedding night would be the most amazing experience of my life to that point.  There are a couple of reasons why that would have been a false statement.  Imagine if I had gotten married in the temple, gotten to the hotel with my wife to begin our honeymoon, and realized then and there that I am a 6 on the Kinsey scale.

Or imagine the very real situation that happens to some people who arrive in that situation and come to find out that they are somewhere on the spectrum of asexual.  Imagine the confusion they must feel, how broken they must feel.  Or imagine the struggle that many women feel when they engage in sex for the first time on their wedding night and feel a rush of shame and guilt because of the decades of conditioning about sexual pleasure being something to avoid [12].

Overall, I think the August 2020 Ensign is a step in the right direction for the church in terms of its conversation around sex and sexuality, a sideways step on the issue of LGBT inclusion in the church, and standing around in the same place when it comes to the actual culture about sex in the church.  Sexual sin is still as bad of a sin as most people are going to commit in their lives, according to church doctrine, but it is a sin that, when exercised with consent and respect, harms no one.

I have to wonder why that is a sin at all.

 

References

[1] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/chastity?lang=eng (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[2] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2020/08/the-divine-purposes-of-sexual-intimacy?lang=eng (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[3] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2020/08/how-when-and-why-talking-to-your-children-about-sexuality?lang=eng (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[4] https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/gradeschool/puberty/Pages/Masturbation.aspx (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[5] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2020/08/young-adults/my-experience-living-the-law-of-chastity-with-same-sex-attraction?lang=eng (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[7] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2020/08/young-adults/the-worlds-way-vs-the-lords-way-what-the-media-gets-wrong-about-sexual-intimacy?lang=eng (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[8] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288183997_Exploring_the_role_of_culture_in_sexual_objectification_A_seven_nations_study (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[9] https://www.sierralawrence.com/post/the-damaging-impacts-of-evangelical-purity-culture (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[10] https://medium.com/safe-and-sound/how-purity-culture-reinforces-rape-culture-through-victim-blaming-33acc3f295bb (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[11] https://www.deseret.com/2017/4/6/20609889/reports-of-sex-assault-rise-at-byu-but-officials-say-that-s-good-news (retrieved 10 August 2020).

[12] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mormon-sex-religion_n_6669892 (retrieved 10 August 2020).

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