Jeffrey R. Holland
There is no room in the gentleness of Love for a Rameumptom, for ARE we not ALL sinners and all fall short of the Glory of God? In the end, it is the Love of God that will welcome each one of us home, and it is our bearing of His gentle Love that helps others along the way. We become one another’s angels.
You cannot build walls and fortresses to keep them out, for they are already a part of us, already a part of the sealed network of Saints. But you can use musket fire to drive them out from among you, from their spiritual home and from their families, through exclusionary positions and rejecting behavior.
We’ve seen it before. Events occur, but the arc of the history of this painful intersection between the LDS church and their LGBTQ members is bending towards eventual fellowship and perhaps even equity.
We care about you, and we understand the pressure cooker of the LGBTQ/Latter-day Saint intersection because we stand there and have stood there. We know the true power of your story and receive it in the spirit in which you delivered it. Not as a weapon or a currency, but as a celebration of the power of the queer soul.
You can claim change when any privileges available to heterosexual people are available to homosexual people and any privileges available to cisgender people are available to transgender and gender non-binary people. Until then, we all have work to do for our marginalized population of LGBTQ students.
While applauding the increase in transparency and clarity the new handbook provides, Affirmation remains concerned that Church policy diminishes the lived experience of LGBTQ individuals.
After all, it’s His name that’s on everything from the temples to the stationary, but having personally experienced both Gethsemane and His own crucifixion, He knows all too well that some things here on earth are best learned by sad experience and not just by a revelation to avoid it.