LDS Church's Stance on Conversion Therapy: what it might mean long-term
by JIM BENNETT
The recent announcement by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that they will not oppose a bill banning conversion therapy for LGBT+ children is a step toward a logically tenable position with regard to homosexual and transgender rights. I find that encouraging, even though tenability in and of itself isn’t necessarily a good thing.
For example, in my pre-curmudgeon era lo these many eons ago, the Church’s teachings on homosexuality were encapsulated by Spencer W. Kimball’s book “The Miracle of Forgiveness,” a book that, among its other problems, advances the theory that Cain is Bigfoot. (I’m not joking. Look it up.) Then-Elder Kimball had a great deal to say about gay “perverts” - his word, not mine - who regarded homosexuality as an “ugly sin, repugnant to those who find no temptation in it” and concluded that “the glorious thing to remember is that it is curable.” Since there was very little actual evidence to suggest that was the case, Elder Kimball offered the following counsel:“Therefore to those who say that this practice or any other evil is incurable, I respond: ‘How can you say the door cannot be opened until your knuckles are bloody, till your head is bruised, till your muscles are sore? It can be done.’”
These words have haunted me in the decades since I first read them. Time and again, I’ve imagined thousands upon thousands of vulnerable, terrified LGBT+ teenagers who have pounded against the door until their hands, head, and muscles were bruised and bloodied beyond recognition, only to have the door remain firmly shut.
Yet despite the over awfulness of this advice, it is a position that maintains a certain logical consistency. After all, if gay people are just voluntarily wicked perverts intent on sinning who just haven’t prayed hard enough, then isn’t the Church entirely justified in slamming the door on them?
Thankfully, “The Miracle of Forgiveness” has quietly gone out of print and is (hopefully) fading into oblivion, and the principles outlined above are no longer what we teach. We now recognize that people do not voluntarily choose which gender they will find attractive, and we also accept the reality that trying to change one’s sexuality will not open doors but produce bruises and blood instead.
This is certainly preferable to our previous position, but it’s also far less consistent and entirely untenable. It’s a logical mess to tell people that there is no way to change profound sexual desires that they can never righteously fulfill. It’s as if we’re trying to pick up one end of the stick without picking up the other. We’ve stopped some of the bleeding, but we still refuse to open the door.
I believe that to be a temporary condition, because logically untenable positions have a way of resolving themselves one way or the other, even in the Church.
We’re seeing that now with the change in mission rules allowing missionaries to call home every week. In the early days of the Church, missionaries didn’t call home because telephones didn’t exist. By the time they did, missionaries didn’t call home because it was difficult and wildly expensive. Cost was likely the inspiration for initial rules discouraging such calls, yet those rules, like almost all rules in any large organization, were allowed to endure well beyond their practical use.
By the time I got out into the mission field in the late 1980s, I didn’t call home for some obviously righteous reason that I just didn’t understand. (I wasn’t even allowed to call on Christmas or Mother’s Day. Feel sorry for me.) And, granted, there was still some vestigial value in the idea that weekly calls from Scotland to Salt Lake weren’t cheap and probably couldn’t fit into many missionary budgets. But now that the Internet has made real-time face-to-face video calling entirely free, it becomes harder to pretend that there’s a good purpose for artificially keeping children from communicating with the families that the Church teaches are the most important things on Earth. The end result is a rule change that, while long overdue, finally puts the Church’s position on this issue on tenable ground.
Granted, sexuality is far more complicated than phone calls, but the same principle applies. As members continue to tie themselves into logical pretzels to explain why being gay is great as long as you don’t do anything at all to actually be gay in practice, it becomes harder and harder to pretend that there’s a good reason to keep the door closed. Some respond to this by trying to lurch backward to the “Miracle of Forgiveness” position, which, while wrong, was at least consistent. I am hopeful that we will eventually figure out how to be both consistent and right. Then we can devote our efforts to more uplifting activities, like hunting down Bigfoot once and for all.