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A shocking new speech has plunged Mormons into another furious battle over gay rights and the churchs future.
BY HALEY SWENSON
On Aug. 23, Jeffrey R. Holland, Brigham Young Universitys former president and a senior apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, gave an inflammatory speech to BYU faculty and staff. In it, he urged faculty to take up metaphorical muskets to defend the faith. He called on them to be both builders of knowledge and defenders of the institutionthe churchthat determines whether the university exists and the faculty get funding to do their jobs, a fact he reminded them of multiple times in the speech. His words were unmistakably a call to arms: Holland used the word fire 10 times, musket eight times, and made multiple references to friendly fire, wounds, and scarring. In particular, he called for more musket fire from BYUs faculty to defend Mormonisms official position on the inferiority and social dangers of same-sex relationships and marriages.
Though the speech was directed at the faculty of BYU, it has shocked Mormons and ex-Mormons far beyond the university in its aggressive tone toward the LGBT community. Just two years ago, the church received much public praise for rescinding a 2015 policy, controversial among Mormons at the time, that declared the minor children of gay people could not be baptized into or join the church as membersat least not until they were 18 years old, and only then if they would denounce their parents marriage and condemn their sexuality. Given how contentious the question of gay rights has been among Mormons since the church threw its whole weight behind Californias anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 in 2008, the post-2019 period has been one of welcome relative quiet from the church. That is, until Monday.
Ive spent my whole life dodging Mormon bullets aimed toward non-traditional families. I have Mormon pioneer blood in every one of my eight great grandparents lines on my family tree. I grew up in a mostly inactive but still technically Mormon family (my parents and I had all been blessed and baptized into the Mormon church as kids, but we attended services only sporadically). Now, after 15 years living out of state, Ive recently given Utah another chance. I came back in 2020, with my wife in tow, and weve settled here with the intention of someday having our own kids. I took the relatively positive, pro-LGBT developments of the past few years as encouraging signs we were making the right decision. In the 18 months since we moved here from Washington, D.C., Hollands speech was the first time I truly worried that my future kids might attend public school with peers who would be taught about the evils of being gay, week in and week out at church. Just like I did.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/09/mormon-lds-church-gay-rights-controversy-byu-speech.html
Joinfortmill
(14,247 posts)joetheman
(1,450 posts)multigraincracker
(32,532 posts)Never hear them preaching that one.