A Mom's Take On Mormons and LGBT

In light of the LDS Press Conference on protecting religious freedoms, I decided to share an "essay" I started writing a couple of months ago. Today the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints said,

• "We claim for everyone the God-given and Constitutional right to live their faith according to the dictates of their own conscience, without harming the health or safety of others.
• We acknowledge that the same freedom of conscience must apply to men and women everywhere to follow the religious faith of their choice, or none at all if they so choose.
• We believe laws ought to be framed to achieve a balance in protecting the freedoms of all people while respecting those with differing values.
• We reject persecution and retaliation of any kind, including persecution based on race, ethnicity, religious belief, economic circumstances or differences in gender or sexual orientation.”

I would love to hear your thoughts, rebuttals, comments, opinions of my article. Please feel free to share openly because, like the opinions of most of you, mine is also ever evolving and growing with personal experience and education.

Being a Mother in 2015; trying to navigate religion, politics, culture and my family

I don’t call myself a blogger. I am more of a writer, who dabbles in blogging. I tend to blog when I have free time on my hands or during major life transitions, like when I move. But today a thought came to me, in a very odd place. And it’s one that I want to write down, mostly because it may benefit others. 

For several years I have been trying to understand myself better. Not necessarily find myself. I know who I am, but sometimes that doesn’t always fit into the cookie-cutter categories life gives you.

I have a lot of titles these days: Journalist, Ballet Teacher, Youth Counselor, Mormon, Wife, Friend, Mother. The latter has become increasingly important as I just doubled my crew using the big M word (translation: I have two kids now). Maybe this is why I am coming to some important conclusions about how I want to present myself.

Religion and Culture

Religion and culture always seem to clash.

This concept is an odd one for me, since religion and culture should be one in the same. Maybe they clash because people have religious and cultural differences, and that frightens us.

That said, for the past several years, the Mormon and LGBT communities have been in an interesting place. In fact, when the congregation I attend sent a letter to members who have not been attending for the past couple months, and mentioned that we were inviting a gay Mormon to speak, we made a splash in a couple of media sources. Probably because mixing the words "Gay" and "Mormon" is taboo.

Finding Understanding

That’s where my search for “understanding” comes in. I have been Mormon since birth, well, logistically since I turned eight years old and I decided to be baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am not gay, but I have had gay family, friends, neighbors, co-workers for as long as I can remember. As a child and teen, I never sat around thinking, “I wonder how I should feel about my friend who is gay.” And I never thought they were sitting around thinking, “I wonder how I should feel about my friend who is Mormon.” We just lived, worked, acted, played, danced in sync, like there wasn’t a difference between us.

Then all of a sudden I started worrying, I started wondering about the differences between myself and the people around me. It may have started because the country went up in arms about propositions to legalize all marriages. It may have started because members of my church and my extended family began feeling uncomfortable with the choices other people were making. It may have started because I work in an industry (news) that dramatizes every fight and protest that happens on every corner.

I’m not saying any of these things should or should not have happened. The country will vote, people will protest, and everyone will find differences with those around them, despite how much we try and convince ourselves we are unbiased.

Fielding Tough Questions

With these ideas and thoughts swirling, I started having to explain myself to everyone. Some would ask,

“How are you Mormon, while one of your best friends is recently engaged to her girlfriend?”

“How do you go to work every day and interact openly with people who are legally married to their same-sex spouses?”

“How are you a member of a religion that claims a homosexual lifestyle is a sin?”

“How could you believe that a family raised by parents of the same sex is wrong, when there are millions of families with a mother and father who beat or starve or ignore their children?”

These are heavy questions. Most of them are based on assumptions of how I feel or what I believe. I realized I needed a simple answer to not only share with my friends and family, but to share with my children.

I Choose to Love One Another

I choose to believe that I am a daughter of God. I believe there is a higher plan for me and for my family. I chose to make promises based on these beliefs. One of those promises is that I will have a family with my husband and raise my children with a love of God and a love for one another.

I realize other people haven't made the same choices, the same promises, or the same commitments that I have made. That's okay. That's part of this higher plan, that's one of the most important parts of life. We all have the opportunity to make our own choices. And God would be the first to say He wouldn't want anyone to take that ability to choose away from us. So I choose to live my life a certain way AND I choose to love everyone no matter how they live theirs.

So the next time someone asks me one of those heavy questions, this is how I will respond:

I believe God gave us all the ability to choose. I chose to make commitments to God to have and raise my family in a certain way. Other people haven't. But I can still choose to love everyone, no matter what choice they make. We are all children of God.