April, good luck with that “as for me an my house” thing. As the parent of a gay, LDS son, I’ve learned not all things are under your control.

When I hear certainty like April’s, I feel happy for her and sad for everyone around her.

I admit it doesn’t sound like kindness or charity to me to encourage people to disobey God. Christ wants homosexuals to marry and our job is to have love and accept this? Am I missing something here, or do some people seem to think Christ’s love means keep on sinning, don’t repent? I think you’d better check with him before you start putting words in his mouth.

That’s just ridiculous. Quoting Signorile from 15 years ago represents the gay community today about as well as quoting McKonkie in the early 70s represents Mormonisms thinking on race today.

I know this community; I’m part of it. 99.9% of the people fighting to end discrimination in marriage laws are doing so because they’re sick of being subject to the kind of horrible problems in immigration, estate law, pensions, health insurance, etc that gay couples run into. It’s about fairness and equality, period. The notion that gays have any interest whatsoever in altering (or eliminating!) marriage for straight people is almost slanderous.

Glenn Greenwald was on Democracy Now! this morning, and at the end of the segment there was this:

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney, political and legal blogger at Salon.com.

OK, Glenn, so you’re here in New York, but you’re flying home to Brazil tonight, very relieved to be doing that. And you’ve written about your choice to live in Brazil with your partner. Talk about that choice and what the whole battle over gay rights looks like to you from Brazil.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. I mean, actually, it’s not—and people who are in my position—it’s not so much a choice as a forced situation. And the reason is, is because we have a law in this country that was enacted with the virtually unanimous support of the Senate, signed by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, called the Defense of Marriage Act, that not only allows states to refuse to recognize the same-sex marriage, even if it’s legal in other states, but, even worse, it explicitly bars the federal government from according any rights whatsoever to same-sex couples based upon a recognition of their relationship, which means that people who are in my situation, namely American citizens who end up with a partner who is a citizen of another country, are unable to live together in the United States.

They have two choices: they can either live in the country of their foreign spouse, if they’re able to do that, or they can be in the horrific position where they’re forced to live thousands of miles apart on a different continent, in different countries, from the person with whom they want to spend their entire lives. And so, gay couples in the United States don’t have any immigration rights whatsoever; heterosexual couples who are bi-national can be here. Whereas in Brazil, a country that has the largest Catholic population in the world and was a military dictatorship until 1985, they do recognize same-sex couples, like most of the civilized world, and I’m therefore able to live with my partner there.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, Glenn, and bon voyage for your trip tonight back to Brazil.

In 1990, Tom Stoddard, an executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York who died in 1997, said: “Enlarging the concept [of marriage] to embrace same-sex couples would necessarily transform it into something new….Extending the right to marry to gay people – that is, abolishing the traditional gender requirements of marriage – can be one of the means, perhaps the principal one, through which the institution divests itself of the sexist trappings of the past.” (Quoted in Roberta Achtenberg, et al, “Approaching 2000: Meeting the Challenges to San Francisco’s Families,” The Final Report of the Mayor’s Task Force on Family Policy, City and County of San Francisco, June 13, 1990, p.1.)

In 1994, Michelangelo Signorile, a prominent ‘gay rights’ activist who led the early charge for redefining marriage, wrote: “A middle ground might be to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution.” (“Bridal Wave,” OUT magazine, December/January 1994, p. 161.) A few years later he wrote, “It is also a chance to wholly transform the definition of family in American culture. It is the final tool with which to dismantle all sodomy statutes, get education about homosexuality and AIDS into public schools, and, in short, usher in a sea change in how society views and treats us.” (“I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do,” OUT magazine, May 1996, p. 30.)

You’ll notice these samples are all taken from the 90s. You can’t find quotes like these from such leaders anymore. This isn’t because that’s no longer their goal; it’s because they’ve come to realize that being honest about their goal is an impediment to achieving it.

Not everyone acted reprehensibly, of course, but enough did so so it was necessary for the Lord to come and try to straighten things out . He gave us (again) a commandment: to love one another. He meant it universally. Did it have much effect? Some maybe, but not enough.

Don’t ignore the history of heterosexuals over against those with SSA, April. It is a history of power and domination. It is not a history that shows the love and charity of heteros over against those with SSAs that Christ taught and that Paul said if you didn’t have, you had nothing. The love and charity that the modern apostles and prophets teach.

You are right April, we need most seriously to think about the ramifications of certain practices, like the lie in your hypothetical. It is not in the cards — and you know it is not as well as I do and everyone else does. Everyone would never choose to engage in homosexual marriage and then remain faithful to their homosexual spouse. That would never happen, just as it’s not in the cards for everyone to be right-handed. What will wipe out mankind, though, is that kind of reasoning, born of hatred. Not love, not wanting the stability and sanction of a committed partnership of love and devotion, a marriage. It is nothing at all like what the BoM says happened on this continent when the people turned to wickedness!

Being born a particular way is never a sin. Most people are born either left or right-handed. Just because the majority is right-handed doesn’t make left-handedness of the rest or the practice of them using their left hand predominately sinful. The sin in sexual conduct is in not living up to the responsibilities of such conduct, which the Lord teaches is true devotion, fidelity, and commitment and caring for your lover and your offspring. As for me, I choose to obey Jesus and love everyone. Teaching that people who have SSAs cannot be chaste in a marriage, just like heterosexuals can, is a sin because it is inimical to love and charity for them. And that is what Christ wants.