The real question facing the Church with regards to homosexuality is whether there is a genetic element to sexual preference. Many of the issues to be dealt with are similar to those I faced as a young man knowing that colored men could not hold the priesthood yet being told by my parents that Negroes were every bit as intelligent and able as whites. They tried to impress on me that “nigger” was an offensive term, something they had learned in Los Angeles when my father was an engineer at Lockheed. But that was a hard lesson for a young man to learn growing up in the U.S. in the 1950s. From friends, I learned all the offensive words together: nigger and queer, coon and fag, darky and fairy. My father had learned to work with and respect Negroes, but he and my mother rarely discussed homosexuals. No one mentioned that my father’s cousin might be queer, a fag, a fairy. No one taught me any restraint in referring to gay men. In fact, for years I nursed a grudge that queers had co-opted a perfectly good word in an attempt to gentrify their image.

The Church finally faced the question of blacks and priesthood head-on in 1978. I was working for the Church’s historical department at the time and well recall the wave of relief and joy that greeted the announcement that all worthy males could now hold the priesthood. We have yet to face the question of gays and marriage in the same way.

I find what we Mormons are now saying and doing with regards to homosexuals to be the same kind of knee-jerk reaction as our former claims about blacks having been fence-sitters during the war in heaven, born with dark skins as a mark of their equivocation and disloyalty. At present we ask gays to transcend their emotions, to resist the desire to act on any feelings of same-sex attraction. Ostensibly, we ask them to act as we ask heterosexuals to act, allowing themselves sexual activity only within the bounds of marriage. But here is the rub: we don’t recognize any form of permissible marriage for gays, so how can they ever enjoy sexual fulfillment?

Even while growing up in the 1950s, I was never taught that sexual activity was bad. It was precious. We were to reserve it for marriage, for procreation, but it was not evil. As I grew up, more and more General Authorities spoke of it as a sacred bond between couples, not reserved for reproduction only. The Church did not change its teaching that sex outside of marriage is improper, but I heard statements like this much less often than I used to: “We have seven children and we made love only eight times. The eighth time was a mistake.” The importance of sex to a marriage extends beyond conception, we have learned.

But if we were to take our current position regarding gays to its logical extreme, we would be creating a class of Mormon monks and nuns, welcome in the church, welcome in service to the world, welcome in the mission field but not welcome to express their deepest emotional yearning for permanent connection to one they love. We ask them to remain celibate, forever celibate, and single. Especially for young men, this is a lot to ask in a culture that still regards them as queer.

During the fuss over Proposition 8, Church spokesmen suggested that civil unions are acceptable for gay couples, just not marriages. That stance raises the question of how the Church would respond to a gay couple who had a legal civil union and were sexually active within that union, but not outside it. Would they then be able to participate in Church in full faith and fellowship? Would gay men be able to hold positions of priesthood leadership? Could they affirmatively answer the question: Do you live the law of chastity? Could they serve as proxies in the temple? For any single gay person at present, the answer to those questions is yes as long as they are not sexually active; this is the same test applied to a single straight person. But, unlike the single straight person, single gay persons cannot, at present, hope for any sexual expression that would not effectively estrange them from the Church and the gospel. And this brings us back to a connection with the question of blacks and the priesthood: if there is a genetic component to sexual preference, wouldn’t this represent gospel discrimination based on a characteristic as innate as skin color?

That point raises another hard question for us straight Mormons. If the Church were to recognize some form of civil union for gays, could we transcend our contempt, our hatred, our fear of our gay brothers and sisters?

Dennis Clark

Orem, Utah