In his general conference address given on 3 October 2010, President Boyd K Packer discussed other subjects than same-sex preferences or same-sex marriage. However, most of his address got completely lost in all the controversy over those brief paragraphs. I culled from two Utah newspaper articles the juiciest details of the story. My quotations do take up space, but they deserve attention to the details, for I elaborate on them in this editorial:
I will print the article quotations in Courier font.
From
Joe Pyrah - Daily Herald Daily Herald | Posted: Monday, October 4, 2010 12:00 am
Peggy Fletcher Stack The Salt Lake Tribune October 3, 2010 11:18PM
Same-sex attraction can be overcome and any type of union other than marriage between a man and a woman is morally wrong, an LDS apostle told millions of Mormons on Sunday.
“There are those today who not only tolerate but advocate voting to change laws that would legalize immorality, as if a vote would somehow alter the designs of God’s laws and nature,” Boyd K. Packer, president of the church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles, said in a strongly worded sermon about the dangers of pornography and same-sex marriage. “A law against nature would be impossible to enforce. Do you think a vote to repeal the law of gravity would do any good?”
Packer, speaking from his seat because of his frail health, addressed more than 20,000 members gathered in the LDS Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City and millions more watching the faith’s 180th Semiannual General Conference via satellite.
The senior apostle drew on the church’s 1995 declaration, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” to support his view that the power to create offspring “is not an incidental part of the plan of happiness. It is the key — the very key.”
Some argue that “they were pre-set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural,” he said. “Not so! Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember he is our father.”
Alluding to the Utah-based church’s support of laws such as California’s Proposition 8 that would define marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman, Packer said, “Regardless of the opposition, we are determined to stay on course.”
“We cannot change; we will not change,” the senior apostle declared. “We quickly lose our way when we disobey the laws of God. If we do not protect and foster the family, civilization and our liberties must needs perish.”
An LDS Church leader said Sunday that homosexuality is not "inborn."
"Why would our heavenly father do that to anyone?" asked Elder Boyd K. Packer. "Remember, he is our father."
Packer, a member of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, spoke forcefully during the church's general conference about having the ability to choose one's way.
"We can foolishly, blindly give it away, but it cannot be forcefully taken from us," he said of free choice.
He reiterated the church's 1995 The Family: A Proclamation to the World that outlined the belief that marriage is only between a man and woman and that anything else is contrary to the will of God.
Man-made laws, he said, cannot change that.
"A law against nature would be impossible to enforce," he said. "Do you think a vote to repeal the law of gravity would do any good?"
The church strongly backed California's Proposition 8 in 2008 that defined marriage as between a man and woman, as well as Utah's own constitutional amendment in 2004 that says the same. California's Prop 8 has been in court almost since it passed.
Laura Compton, who directs Mormons4Marriage, a group of Latter-day Saints who opposed Proposition 8 and support marriage equality in California and elsewhere, was troubled by Packer’s sermon.
“So many Mormons have worked hard to increase understanding of what homosexuality is and what it means to be faithful,” Compton said in a phone interview from her California home. “Now we have this [anti-gay] message coming from the pulpit in General Conference by the president of the Quorum of the Twelve. It seems like hitting a brick wall. Hopefully, this won’t make people stop and say, ‘It wasn’t worth it.’“
Then, as members repeat and digest Packer’s comments in coming months, Compton worries about its impact on the faithful.
“When we are sitting next to the mom of a gay son or daughter whose best friend just came out, or by the bishop who knows 10 people in the ward affected by homosexuality, how will we reach out and help them?” she wonders. “How are we going to make them feel the love of Christ?”
To some, Packer’s comments seemed like a throwback to earlier LDS statements about same-sex attraction, similar to those made last summer by LDS general authority Bruce Hafen. Hafen, who became an emeritus member of the First Quorum of Seventy on Saturday, was speaking at a conference sponsored by Evergreen International, a nonprofit group that helps Mormons overcome gay behavior and diminish same-sex attraction, according to its website, evergreeninternational.org.
Hafen promised attendees at the Evergreen conference, “If you are faithful, on resurrection morning — and maybe even before then — you will rise with normal attractions for the opposite sex.”
Whenever the devil, whom Hafen referred to as “the adversary,” tries to “convince you that you are hopelessly ‘that way,’ so that acting out your feelings is inevitable, he is lying,” Hafen said. “He is the father of lies.”
RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
Of course, Elder Hafen prefers heterosexuality and got his, so why should he really care, in the long view, what those who prefer homosexuality get?
If a future prophet announced that God declared The World had too many human idiots and changed the commandment to do not multiply, do not have heterosexual-style sex, how many straight men would take comfort from a statement like “If you are faithful, on resurrection morning — and maybe even before then — you will rise with normal attractions for the same sex” ?
Not many, I bet.
Elder Hafen’s comment assumes male-female-hormonal driven sexual activity continues in the afterlife. If gender does exist before earth life and after, I suspect it manifests itself in different ways than it does in Earth life. What exalted omniscient all-powerful beings would be foolish enough to base its reproduction on hormonal-based copulation? State bluntly, all of us, no matter what our sexual preference, may get completely rewired in the next plain of existence.
My question in the previous paragraph is probably no more dopey than President Packer’s question about what God would or would not do to his children. A more interesting question is – what will Satan do or not do for his ex-brothers and sisters?
The outcry against President Packer’s talk developed rather like some sort of ancient Japanese ritual. We knew practically from the start what people – both for and against – would have to say, how and what positions they would take, and at what points in the debate they would move into position. The Church’s position assumes from the start that people will persecute it no matter what it says on the subject, so it took positions of varying degrees of no win.
I sometimes contemplate what might have happened if the LDS Church had in 1939 opened the priesthood to all worthy males, decided to attempt among southern blacks a major missionary program starting in 1944, and decided to take the lead in the Civil Rights movement starting in 1947. Churches, after all, did take leading roles in that movement then. Southern Conservatives and Southern racial bigots would have condemned the LDS church as acting in a highly unChristian way encouraging the culuredz to get uppity. It might have become the darling of northern liberalism.
When the Church decries dishonesty and stealing, do organizations of thieves descend on church headquarters with petitions talking about the creation of a hurtful environment?
BLAME GOD AGAIN
Someone either in the First Presidency office or in public communications went about cleaning up President Packer’s text to make it less . . . certain? . . . . offensive? . . . less something.
Someone cut President Packer’s question “Why would heavenly father do that?” Apparently we should not contemplate what The All Mighty will or will not do for us and to us.
Why would Heavenly Father give people schizophrenia or defective hearts? The compare-contrast is not quite on the same level, but it is a good question anyway. It helps illustrate that we do not know if disease and mental illness come through genetic influence set by Heavenly Father, or if Satan can set genetic influences, or if someone else entirely set these genetic influences way back in time.
How many mental health activists would insist society should encourage people born with schizophrenia to stay schizophrenic and take it to the limit? How many would encourage children born with heart malformations or brain malformations or kidney malformations or bowel malformations to live with the conditions and encourage them? Some in Deaf Culture, interestingly enough, find cochlear implants offensive, demeaning and controversial to people who do not know any better than to prefer not hearing. This general conference address controversy illustrates the power of sex in human lives: people with same gender attraction cling to it strongly even when it means a living a life surrounded by bigotry, hatefulness, and childlessness.
ELEPHANTS IN THE LIVING ROOM
Elephants sit about in this particular rhetorical living room and most will not acknowledge them or deal with them. Let me scatter caution to the breeze and at least acknowledge them.
Nowadays, people, even Orthodox people, select only parts of the Old Testament to quote and believe.
The Old Testament punishes man-man sexual activity by death. However, the Old Testament also punishes by death unmarried sex between unmarried men and women as well. The Old Testament uses death to punish all sorts of non-sexual activity. The Old Testament did not punish sex between masters and slaves.
Heterosexuals ruined marriage, not homosexuals. Heterosexuals developed polygamy, mistresses, la casa grande and la casa bonita, treating women like possessions, institutionalizing violence in marriage.
Although it has not lead the way, the heterosexual LDS Church played its part in the decline of heterosexual marriage.
The LDS Church introduced polygamy to the United States. It still practices polygamy to the extent that Temple sealers will seal a mortal man to a mortal second wife after his first wife has died, thus creating a polygamist situation among them in the spirit world afterlife. It also played an historic role in the liberalization of divorce. Of the first six LDS Church presidents, all practiced polygamy, and no fewer than 4 obtained divorces from some of their plural wives. Today, if an adulterous man’s leaders think he is fully repentant, that man can now obtain a sealing to a woman with whom he committed an adulterous relationship.
Thinking of ourselves as heterosexual or homosexual is inaccurate and counterproductive for us to do. Sexual activity preferences do not somehow predict everything about one’s personality and activity. Sex is only one – sometimes boring – aspect of life in a life full of aspects. A person should state preference in a factual way: I prefer sexual activity with women or I prefer sexual activity with men or I like both in bed.
In the 21st century and beyond, people not only can change, people will change.
With advances in genetic repairs, genetic engineering, and hormonal therapy, medical science will be able to change homosexuals into heterosexuals.
That said, the reverse is also true. This is an important point to consider in a place like China where men out number women.
With advances in genetic repairs, genetic engineering, and hormonal therapy, medical science will be able to change heterosexuals into homosexuals.
From the 21st century onward, sexual preference will be just another piece of the human puzzle that medical science will tinker for political purposes.
It is true that the LDS Church in theory condemns and punishes unmarried male-female sexual transgression the same it punishes unmarried same-gender sex activity. However, when typical LDS leaders punish guys involved in unmarried sexual involvement with women, their attitudes typically tend toward “boys will be boys.” Furthermore, many fathers dismiss their sons’ sexual exploits because too many of them live vicariously through their sons to spice up their boring lives.
It is true that the LDS Church treats unmarried people who prefer opposite sex attraction and those unmarried who prefer same sex attraction the same. The Church insists they must be celibate.
This position is impossible: celibacy is not LDS doctrine or culture. It is not human cultural norms, either. If anything, Catholicism showws the world the limits and problems of celibacy in a hormonal based human population. Furthermore, heterosexual singles have the possibility of an acceptable sanctioned married sexual life. Others do not.
So in practical reality what does this mean?
I hate to end an essay with a question. At this stage in this discussion, I think it is best to do so and leave the discussion here for us to contemplate.
drs
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