First of all: to those who had concerns or disagreements with the ideas expressed in the article and who articulated their critiques in a civil way, thank you! That’s not easy to do, but that’s the kind of discourse we need.

Second of all: to the many people who disagreed with the content of this article who resorted to personal attacks, shaming, and cyber-bullying, both in the comments here but primarily on the Facebook groups where this article was shared, please examine your own discursive behavior. To respond in such a mean-spirited way is hypocritical and inhumane and I am disappointed in vitriolic reactions I saw. Not only were many people not careful enough to even try to understand what my mother was getting at, many didn’t even read closely enough to get her name right. In a movement that is concerned with protecting the right to self-identify and elevating and celebrating those identities, to treat someone’s humanity so lightly as to not even look at her name when it’s written on a page is an act of erasure that is inconsistent with our values. If I am too harsh in this assessment, please forgive me. I can’t not be emotional when I see my mother victimized by a compassionless onslaught of online commentary, especially when the one critical element of her piece was not at all framed as an attack. I know that discussions of any issue connected to the LGBTQ Mormon topic will be fraught with emotion, and I understand why passages of this piece elicited strong internal responses for some readers. That response, however, does not justify the kind of abusive treatment that my mother received in the wake of this article. There’s more I would say about that treatment, but that’s not my story to tell.

Third: let me actually talk about my mother. Her style of advocacy may be quieter, but she does it as effectively as anyone I know and from the moment of my coming out, she has supported me impeccably. I’ll elaborate on her parental support: even before I came out (after she had figured out I was gay but before I told her) and every day since, she has made my health and empowerment a priority. She has prioritized my own self-determination and agency by constantly assuring me of her unconditional love and by giving me the emotional space to make life decisions free from pressure. She never once told me what kinds of relationships I should or shouldn’t pursue–she simply made it clear that she would always love me and that what she desired for me was health and happiness, however that looked. During those intense few months following my coming out as I transitioned from still trying to date women, to giving up on that and despairing in the prospect of a life alone, to finally opening myself up to the possibility of dating men, she constantly reaffirmed that. Her voice was a strong counterpoint to the internal voices of self-loathing and confusion that I struggled with at that time. As I came out publicly, she supported me. When members of my home ward questioned her, she defended me. She has hosted many LGBTQ events at our house (even before I came out, she hosted a presentation on the Family Acceptance Project). In her classes she has talked about LGBT issues and in so doing, ministered to her queer students (and she’s had a few). She is quite well-known in the greater LA Mormon community and has never for a second expressed any concern about how my being out and vocal might affect her reputation. She has used her reputation in our area to change hearts and open up conversations and dialogues–this is effective grass-roots work that has made a difference in our ward and stake and empowered other straight members to be more open about their support for LGBT people. She has spent money and time to attend events with me. She has invested emotional, temporal, and material resources to making sure that I got the mental health care I needed when I was most vulnerable. She has acted as a sounding board for me as I make decisions but never once imposed upon me any choice. When I have at times critiqued aspects of her allyship, she listens and adjusts without getting defensive. She has never made any kind of insistence about my involvement with the church. She has at times invited me to participate in church activities, but never pressured or manipulated me into it and on the occasions when I declined those invitations, she respected that without question. On another occasion, when I was particularly angry with “the church,” she made sure I knew that I could take a break from or leave the church with her blessing, if that’s what I wanted. She is a believing Mormon and lives her life as such, but her active and apparent love for me has never been predicated on my participation in the church. In fact, her parenting actually prepared me to navigate changes in faith and to view Mormonism with openness. While my siblings and I were growing up, she taught us about the good and the bad of church history. She taught us about other non-Mormon and non-Christian religions. She and my dad filled our home with books and art and countless issues of “Dialogue.” Their role as hosts of a monthly Mormon intellectual lecture series exposed me to a variety of views within and approaches to Mormonism and quickly took me past a point of simplistic, Sunday School orthodoxy. I say all this because my mom, while she loves the church, is certainly not trying to defend the church at the expense of queer people and would never dream of attempting to coerce or persuade anyone to stay in or return to a toxic environment (which she recognizes the church to be for many LGBT people). Her relationships with the many LGBT people she knows (those inside the church and outside, single people and people in a variety of relationships) have never been established on anything other than love.

This comment is far too long. I doubt anyone will read it. To conclude I wish to reiterate what I said before. If you take issue with the actual ideas in my mom’s piece, that’s fine. Join the conversation! Talk about the ideas civilly. If you perceived my mother’s piece as a personal or collective attack on your allyship or parenthood, I’m really sorry you felt that way and I’d invite you to reread the piece more closely and to try a bit more to understand what my mom meant. If you have called my mother’s allyship into question or attacked her as a person or parent, then you simply do not know her. She’s neither perfect nor beyond reproach, but she is good and her heart and actions are on point.

I admire your loyalty to your faith, goodness and your level of support of gays. Reading your response makes me think that when you are in the church you are free to follow you own conscience until you bump into the wall, that wall being what the current prophet says. At that point, you are to disregard what your heart and conscience say and follow the will of the prophet and his boundaries even if they do not sit well with you. I no longer believe in Joseph Smith so it’s all crumbled and now only I dictate how I follow my conscience and to what degree.

I hear you. And I am certainly familiar with the notion that, in a church led by effectively infallible men, the status quo is necessarily the divine order, by definition. I also recognize that it’s blasphemy to percieve that the church is or ever has been moved by grassroots voices.

Rest easy, you and the other youth instructors have not failed to make that clear.

I have worked with LDS youth for most of my life. Some of my gay students have confided in me. I have sought to bind their wounds and also teach the rest of my students to value the goodness they find in a broad variety of human beings. But I can’t be so naive to believe my gay LDS students will find salvation and exaltation in overly permissive and humanist world views of those who take very real efforts to subvert the work of the church and its leaders.

Yes. Loud and quiet voices can compliment each other. It’s productive to have both a military and a diplomatic corp.

I was also at Affirmation and I was thinking about this comment.

The main speakers were:
Tyler Glenn, Randal Thacker, Sara Jade Woodhouse, Sam Woolfe, Kate Kendall, Laura Dulin, Michael McLean, Tyrell, and Fiona Givens.

I would sincerely ask how it could be humanly possible to get a greater variety than THIS??