Would someone please explain to me how someone else's homosexual activities have any effect whatsoever on my heterosexual marriage? More specifically, explain how my marriage would be "undermined" or become any less sacred to me or my wife, if legal status were granted to committed life-partners of the same gender?
These tired assertions -- most recently regurgitated in the LDS Church's pronouncement of 19 October '04 -- are non sequiturs, assaults against rationality. No one has yet offered the necessary links, still missing from within that disconnected pseudo-logic; neither has anyone empirically demonstrated any reality behind such assertions. The 'slippery slope' rationale is not only historically unsubstantiated, it is also irrelevant: folks could marry farm tractors or lobsters for all I care, because the sanctity of my marriage is determined solely by what I & my wife do with it.
In a society in which more than half of all heterosexual marriages end in divorce, in which spousal and child abuse or neglect are rampant, in which any drunk couple on a whim in Las Vegas can obtain legal status for their 'marriage' on a lark… the pious are worried that committed, loving gay couples can damage the 'sanctity' of marriage? Please. Of the dozen or so gay/lesbian couples whom I have been blessed to know, every single one of them has a relationship that exceeds the median quality heterosexual marriage in love, dedication, discretion, decency, and longevity. None of them "threaten" my marriage.
Whether one is a fast-food burger-flipper, a trial lawyer, or the CEO of the nation's "fastest-growing" [sic] corporate Church, one cannot just blithely argue "if A, then B" and expect such an assertion to be blindly accepted without any evidence or rationale behind it. Without such explanations, those reasons against gay unions remain empty rhetoric. I suggest they are merely scare tactics, to justify perpetuating one's learned prejudices. Failing to provide that rationale, the homophobic will undoubtedly regroup behind their classical fallback position: Appeal to Authority. But whether citing Holy Scripture, or pretending some modern conduit to God's will, both of these appeals to authority are problematic. Let's take look at each of them in turn:
SCRIPTURE: If we resort to Biblical writ to condemn homosexuality as sin then we'd also have to legislate against the "abomination" of eating shellfish, forbid wearing clothing whose fabric is a wool/linen blend, repeal the 13th Amendment so we could again permit slavery, dispossess farmers who cultivate more than one kind of crop in the same field, execute children who verbally disrespect their parents, and forcibly shut up those pesky women who dare disobey the New Testament by speaking in Sacrament Meeting (probably unveiled too, the infidels!)
And while we're talking about the inconsistent application of scripture, what about the Levitical ban against polygamists marrying mother-daughter pairs, such as Joseph Smith marrying Patty Bartlett Sessions and her daughter Sylvia Sessions Lyon (with whom he conceived a child: Josephine Rosetta Lyon). Or even more basic, what about the prohibition against taking other men's wives for one's own? Of Joseph's 33+ wives, 11 were already currently married to someone else (see: 'In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith' by Mormon historian Todd Compton). No matter how you cut it, this latter practice is called "adultery" in anyone's Bible, even the one that Mr. Hinckley uses.
Both testaments of the Bible are too often distorted into a homophobic light by conservative Christians, who resort to selective proof-texting and naive misinterpretation in order to rationalize their anti-gay prejudices. Fair-minded Christians would do well to inform themselves objectively on what the Bible really says about homosexuality; a good place to start would include any of the following books: What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality by Daniel A. Helminiak; Openly Gay, Openly Christian: How the Bible Really Is Gay Friendly by Reverend Samuel Kader; Place at the Table by Bruce Bawer; Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by Bishop John Shelby Spong; and Gay Unions In the Light of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason by Gray Temple.
PROPHECY: Likewise, arguing that modern prophets have a unique insight into God's will on marriage poses other reliability problems, because the First Presidency of the Mormon Church has a highly questionable history when it comes to 'Proclamations on the Family'… The following are just a few such examples.
President Brigham Young proclaimed - and he frequently emphasized this is an eternal, unchanging truth - that interracial marriage is so evil that offenders must be executed, and have their blood shed literally upon the ground in order 'save' them. (It is well documented that a significant number of 'Blood Atonement' murders were committed by vigilante Elders, acting at President Young's behest.)
Curiously, for almost 50 years Mormon Prophets and Apostles performed thousands of sealings of men to men in temple ceremonies - occasionally even resulting in one partner taking the surname of the other. These 'priesthood-line adoptions' -- performed as early as January 1846 by Brigham Young in Nauvoo - involved men jockeying for Priesthood favor, seeking to be sealed vertically to an Apostle or other Church leadership royalty as a 'virtual' father. This temple ceremony was finally discontinued in 1894 when Wilford Woodruff became distressed that these sealings held negative implications for familial relationships by superceding the sealing to one's own biological father (see Michael Quinn's two volume history set Mormon Origins for more documentation).
Or how about traditional monogamy between one man and one woman? For many decades, President Young, his Counselors, and many Apostles taught that monogamy was the prime source of the evils existing in western civilization; President John Taylor proclaimed that monogamy "degenerates the human family." But today, the LDS church excommunicates those 'faithful' polygamists who take the early Mormon Prophets at their word when they had prophesied that the practice of polygamy would "never" be suspended by the Church.
Such inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and ad hoc changes in 'eternal' doctrines about the family don't inspire much confidence in Mormon leaders' ability to discern God's will. And with their most recent attempt to justify bigotry, the LDS First Presidency offered as their rationale those same bogus non sequiturs: that gay unions somehow "threaten" the marriages of heterosexuals like myself, or make them less sacred. That's the best they can do?? To twist a popular Mormon cliché, perhaps "the Brethren have spoken" but there is no evidence that any "thinking has been done."
If unskeptical Appeal to Authority is the only support that the blindly religious can muster for the bigotry contained in Amendment Three, then we would all do well to take Socrates' advice: Question Authority.
Scott Tippetts
Columbia, Maryland
