It highlights the insanity of letting ideology govern your life. Many of us do things that are just as nonsensical — we just can’t perceive it because we’ve given away our critical faculty to some outside source to do our thinking on that subject to us.

I would have thought that they would have been roughly as conservative on this issue as Mormons.

I would consider this inaccurate.

“Concern over gay men in the priesthood has simmered in the church for centuries, and has been heightened in recent years by claims from some Catholic scholars that 25 percent to 50 percent of priests in the United States are gay.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/nyregion/31gay.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

When the Catholic Church starts excommunicating regularly for adultery, I’ll consider them as conservative as the LDS Church.

#5,
I’m inclined to agree with the caveat that your statement would tend to be true among people who identify first or even as a core part of their identify as gay or lesbian.

Your note about the four factors of love is interesting, but I think what’s more telling is that the only data available to show “failed” marriages are those marriages that fail because one partner pulls away and defends their reasons for it. I would not be the least bit surprised that the vast majority of those relationships that failed, even after a decade the now-out gay person said, “romance just was never there even when I tried to fake it.” They are self-selecting and no doubt engaging in some self-editing their memories. (we all do it gay or straight)

To me its not much different than decrying the rise in divorce rates and yet nearly everyone you ask who is divorced is clearly and justifiably so. None of this is meant to minimize either of these groups, but I’m just thinking through how you can’t just “take someone’s word for it” when they are basing the direct result of their actions off of that word — clearly if I left my wife and told her I never/rarely have romantic feelings for her I’m going to stick to that line not because it’s “a line” but because that was the foundational basis for my new life.

Here’s the thing. I can’t know what you’re saying is true. Why should I put my faith or adjust the tenants of my faith, which I believe comes from God, based on what someone else says about their possibly-supposedly unchangable (I’m just not sure) personal feelings?

Or put it another way, if I told you I was extremely gay, wanted nothing to do with women and then found Jesus and now am happily married, and I know that feelings can change even though it’s hard, what can you say other than just slap some other label on me (bisexual)?

How can Solomon tell which woman is the mother in a relationship-based dispute? To me it boils down to, how can we know where to put our trust? In God, based on our own biased past experiences and spiritual testimony or in the self-selected, biased statements of others? The way is not so clear, but it’s not like one side owns the truth in the secular sense.

They are self-selecting and no doubt engaging in some self-editing their memories.

So, essentially, “I deny your reality and substitute my own reality instead”? If we aren’t going to take people (lots of them) at their word, then we can all just pretend that reality is whatever best fits our worldview, which is just dandy I guess. After all, that’s how I know that you’re a very bitter French/Mexican midget who has been forced to begin making your living as a mime since your burgeoning extreme-pogo career was derailed when an amorous mouse infected your left leg with syphilis which the doctors had misdiagnosed as ringworm until it was too late to save the limb. See how easy that is? But I know it’s true––I know it in my gut, Chris. When it comes down to deciding what’s really going on in your life, I can either trust you or trust my gut. I don’t know you. But I know my gut. My gut and I go way, way back. So you can hardly blame me if my gut wins. And it does, Chris. Gut wins every time.

Or put it another way, if I told you I was extremely gay, wanted nothing to do with women and then found Jesus and now am happily married, and I know that feelings can change even though it’s hard, what can you say other than just slap some other label on me (bisexual)?

Not at all. But you’d certainly be a statistical anomaly of the first water. I did, after all, (and in consultation with my gut) say in comment 5 that “No doubt there are outliers who don’t fit this pattern.” You would be just such an example.

However, it isn’t as if the Church’s track record on this subject has been particularly impressive. LDS leaders have on multiple occasions said, “Same-sex attraction is caused by [insert cause here] and can be resolved by [insert cure here].” Unfortunately, they’ve been wrong every time so far, but don’t let that stand in your way. (See here for a pretty good history of the subject.)

And let us know how the new career is working out. A mime is a terrible thing to waste.

Cheers!

If they’re really celibate–sure, at least in theory.

But when it comes to straight couples living together outside of marriage–the Church, institutionally, basically calls “BS” and won’t allow them to be baptized no matter how vigorously they protest their celibacy. And I suspect, in nine cases out of ten, the Church is correct in doing so.

MAC–OK, let’s pretend that is in accurate statistic. Would a gay man living celibately in church service be likely to counsel other gay men to live together? It seems unlikely.

TOTLN–in the realm of social conservativism, Catholic doctrine actually seems much MORE conservative than LDS (birth control, celibate clergy, etc). True that the practice of enforcement (through excommunication) is less vigorous. But if the doctrine is more conservative, and the practice less conservative, maybe we can call it even say that they are about as conservative as we are on this issue.

[Incidentally, I don't think people are exed for adultery alone very often anymore; just my impression.]

JimD–why would he make that up? He needn’t have said anything about it to me.

I would pretty much call BS on this situation even existing. It could theoretically but gimme a break. Human nature is what it is.

Its interesting to compare Catholics with LDS on these matters. I think the Catholic doctrine is more strict but the practice is softer and vice versa for us. We got TR’s, lay ministry, and church courts. They pretty much don’t. Pretty much what ESO said in #14. Catholic theology is currently much harsher then LDS theology on SSA.

Huh, apparently HTML doesn’t recognize that symbol. The “?” in #17 should be “=/=”.

ESO @ 14,

The actual statistics are not important, it is the attempt to analogize a Catholic situation to an LDS situation that is off. The realities are so disparate that it must be either intentionally misleading or an incurious attempt to promote a mistaken worldview.

anon If I was single and couldn’t marry, I’d love to have a best friend to live with. Before I was married, I certainly shared my income with my best friend sometimes. I imagine if I had years of singlehood with a best friend I would share a lot of things.

That is the old “bare is brotherless back” from the norse scriptures. The partnership of friends who are like brothers (or sisters). There has been a lot of that through history. We don’t see as much of it now since we are much further away from the edge of survival.

MAC–that’s a good point.

i think it must be very hard for anyone to feel a strong desire to live the commandments the best they knew how and still have a sexual identity problem that nobody really understands. the first person in my family to get baptised was my gay uncle. he introduced us to the church. he lived alone and i can’t reallly speak much about his romantic desires and expressions. i think he wanted to be “normal” because he always spoke about marrying some white woman; which is pretty hard if you are black and past a certain age. i guess that was his way of telling us he’ll never get married. being gay is almost like having diabete or some other chronic condition. you live with that condition for the rest of your life. it’s hard to image the challenges gay people must face. he never had a ‘boyfriend’ that we knew of and he never openly announced that he was gay. we all suspected he was different. it was confirmed at his funeral because there were all these stylish gay brothers who were just too endearing. i’m with Annegb on this one: “God bless them.”

I’m well aware it’s not the same thing, but it is similar enough for my purposes.

The fact that you can say that suggests that we are just talking past each other––that is, the problem is not lexical, it’s conceptual.

So your explanation for the spectacularly high failure rate of mixed-orientation marriages is that “people have been watching too many chick-flicks”? They’re just shallow? Because, really, that’s laughable. After all, what kind of people would even attempt a mixed-orientation marriage? Usually the motivation is a deep grounding in faith and a powerful sense of commitment––characteristics that put regular marriages in a much better position to stand the test of time. Why, even with all those attributes that make other couples far less likely to divorce, do m.o. couples end up dissolving their marriage in the vast majority of cases? “Chick-flicks”? Really?

I find this real interesting and quite dumbfounding as well. Having been a menber of the LDS faith my whole life I must admit I am not an expert on this gay lesbian thinking. But I do know a little about the Word of God. I do know God created Man And Women. And I know that unless (until latetly with medical advances) a man and a women ( Knew) each other in the biblical sence, you would never have offspring. I don’t believe God ever gave us commandments we couldn’t obey either. So following that logic I would ask myself this. What was the very 1st commandment God gave to man when he expelled them from the Garden of Eden ?? “Go forth multiply and replinish the earth”. I wish someone could explain how that would have been possible in a gay or lesbian relationship? The price would have been extentsion. So many people are caught up in thinking it’s my life, I can do what I want, how I want, when I want. And you can. But you can’t change God’s Laws and Commandments in the process. They weren’t the 10 suggestions. Even Christ himself had to face the fact “Never the less not My will but Thine be done.” It does not mattter if it’s gay of lesbian, keeping the Sabbath Day Holy, Loving our neighbor, paying tithing,or whatever commandment we are having trouble keeping. It boils down to what exuse are we willing to throw out their to rationlize our behavior ??? We need to actually ” Come follow Me ” as He told us to do. I believe that means it really don’t matter what any of us feel of think. If God say’s this is the way it is then we like the Savior had better conform to “Never the less not My will but Thy will be done” If not we will be depressed, sad, unhappy, have confusion, guilt, and all the other things that go with knowing God’s will and not doing it. So like all things it’s a choice. Do we obey of suffer.?? I really don’t want to hear that it’s different with this. BS. My problems and choices are as real to me as what they face. Nobody is exempt from Satan trying us at our weak spot. This life is a test. And as far as I know class is in session. We just all need to ” Choose ye this day whom we will serve” Now I want to make it clear I still Love these people. It’s not me to judge them. But I don’t have to condone the choice or behavior. Nor do I expect anyone to condone the bad choices I make. But I would hope the would still love me and never give up on me as I know the Savior never gives up on any of us. This may seem corney to some but to me it matches what I know the Word of God say’s. The rest to me matters not for it’s your opinion unless scripturally you can show another line of thinking.

Brave post, Stan.