Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

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_Equality
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Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

Post by _Equality »

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Mormon gay man Josh Weed's very public heterosexual marriage is coming to an end.

Read the very long blog post, in which Josh apologizes profusely for the way his story has been used over the last five years or so to bash Mormon gays who rejected the church's advice to remain in heterosexual marriages:

http://www.joshweed.com/2018/01/turning ... iage/.html
"The Church is authoritarian, tribal, provincial, and founded on a loosely biblical racist frontier sex cult."--Juggler Vain
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_Jesse Pinkman
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Re: Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

Post by _Jesse Pinkman »

My ex is gay. Ending our marriage was the best thing for both of us. We are both much happier with our current life partners.

ETA—The Church would have preferred we stay together. That’s probably why we stayed together for as long as we did.
So you're chasing around a fly and in your world, I'm the idiot?

"Friends don't let friends be Mormon." Sock Puppet, MDB.

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"And that is precisely why none of us apologize for holding it to the celestial standard it pretends that it possesses." Kerry, MDB
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_Shulem
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Re: Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

Post by _Shulem »

Jesse Pinkman wrote:My ex is gay. Ending our marriage was the best thing for both of us. We are both much happier with our current life partners.

ETA—The Church would have preferred we stay together. That’s probably why we stayed together for as long as we did.


I stuck it out for 20 years until my exwife finally realized that she needed to let me go. It was the best thing to ever happen. We both, soon thereafter, left the church and entered new relationships that more suited our tastes. We left the church in the dust and saved a lot of money too! That's the silver lining. It pays to not pay tithing! I love robbing Mormon god. He will never see a red cent from me ever again. I'm so much more blessed because of it!

:lol:
_Sanctorian
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Re: Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

Post by _Sanctorian »

We have some things we want to apologize for.

We’re sorry for some of the things we said in our original coming out post in 2012. There are several ideas in that post that, though well meaning, we now realize stemmed from internalized homophobia. We’re sorry, so incredibly sorry, for the ways our post has been used to bully others.

We’re sorry to any gay Mormon who even had a moment’s pause as they tried to make the breathtakingly difficult decision that I am now making—to love myself fully for exactly what God made me—because of our post. We’re sorry for any degree that our existence, and the publicity of our supposedly successful marriage made you feel “less than” as you made your own terribly difficult choices. And we’re sorry if our story made it easier for people in your life to reject you and your difficult path as being wrong. If this is you, we want you to know: you were right. You did the correct, brave thing. You are ahead of me in the sense that you have progressed through things I have yet to progress through. You listened to your gut and to God and did a brave, brave thing. Now I’m following your example.

We’re sorry to any gay Mormon who received criticism, backlash, or hatred as a result of our story. It wasn’t long after our post that we began to get messages from the LGBTQIA community, letting us know that their loved ones were using our blog post to pressure them to get married to a person of the opposite gender—sometimes even disowning them, saying things like, “if these two can do it, so can you.” Our hearts broke as we learned of the ways our story was used a battering ram by fearful, uninformed parents and loved ones, desperate to get their children to act in the ways they thought were best. One person wrote—and I’ll never get the horror of this out of my head for the rest of my life—saying that he went to see his family for Thanksgiving during his second year of college, where he was an out gay man who openly had a boyfriend. When he got home, his father pulled up our story on the computer and then physically assaulted him, beating him as he had often done during his childhood, saying “if this guy could avoid being a faggot, so could you!”

Think of that. If we heard about our story being used in that way, I cannot even imagine the stories, all along the spectrum of manipulative horror, that we have never heard.

We’re sorry to anybody who felt a measure of false peace because of our story. There are many people who have good hearts, who were grappling with the issue of homosexuality before we came out, and who were having difficulty reconciling the church they loved with the things they knew about their gay loved ones. Our coming out post gave a false hope: “See? I just knew there had to be a way for gay people to stay true to their faith by denying themselves and live a happy, healthy life!” We’re sorry to perhaps send you back to the state of confusion you were in before you saw our story—but at the same time, that state of confusion is necessary. Something is wrong. It really doesn’t add up. As I have said in thousands of prayers over the last half-decade as I have come to know more and more LGBTQIA individuals and the ways they have been hurt, as well as have realized the impossibility of a God that would set up a “plan” that is totally impossible for a huge segment of His children to participate in, all within a church whose policies and positions assert that that is exactly what God has done: something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong with how things are currently set up. I don’t know yet what is right. But, Father, something is so incredibly wrong.

We’re sorry to any LGBTQIA person who was given false hope by our story, or who used our story as part of the basis for their life-decisions. We honor your decisions, whatever they are, and we’re sorry for any way in which our current trajectory might be unsettling or alarming.

I, Josh, am sorry to the many LGBTQIA people over the years that I subconsciously saw myself as different than. I am no different than you, and any degree to which I held on to the idea that I could be gay without being gay was, I see now, a manifestation of lingering internalized homophobia born of decades of being told this part of me was evil. It was an effort to belong to the “in-group” (heterosexual members of the Mormon Church) that I was actually not a part of.

I have had to eat a lot of crow in these last four months. I have had to look at things Lolly and I deeply thought and believed for decades and realize that we were misguided in our thinking—that there were deeper truths about me and others that we weren’t allowing ourselves to look at. I have had to look over things we’ve said or thought or done over the last five years (and before) and accept that we were very wrong on some key ideas—and that I was hiding things from myself that many others could see. Some of these things I said or did were on camera in front of millions of people. There is no taking that kind of thing back. I take comfort in the fact that those uncomfortable doses of denial can now be refuted and put to bed. That footage, those blog posts, were genuine—they were written and said in good faith, and though I now realize I was wrong, I was never dishonest or disingenuous. I hope people will have a stance of generosity with me (as I will try to do with them), recognizing that humans are dynamic, always learning, and capable of both profound goodness and profound error.

That is how I view the LDS Church (along with other religious denominations), in fact. Institutions that are dynamic, learning and growing, and capable of both profound goodness and profound error.
I'm a Ziontologist. I self identify as such.
_Craig Paxton
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Re: Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

Post by _Craig Paxton »

Equality wrote:To the surprise of absolutely no one, Mormon gay man Josh Weed's very public heterosexual marriage is coming to an end.

Read the very long blog post, in which Josh apologizes profusely for the way his story has been used over the last five years or so to bash Mormon gays who rejected the church's advice to remain in heterosexual marriages:

http://www.joshweed.com/2018/01/turning ... iage/.html

What the F***???? A gay, sexually unfulfilled Man is divorcing his hetro, equally sexually frustrated, Wife? NO Freaking way. This was a Mormon marriage w*t dream made in heaven.
"...The official doctrine of the LDS Church is a Global Flood" - BCSpace

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_Sanctorian
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Re: Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

Post by _Sanctorian »

You know, most of us on the outside knew this wouldn’t work and it didn’t. However, it takes a lot of courage to try and right such a public wrong. I wish them both new found deeper connections.
I'm a Ziontologist. I self identify as such.
_Jesse Pinkman
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Re: Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

Post by _Jesse Pinkman »

Sanctorian wrote:You know, most of us on the outside knew this wouldn’t work and it didn’t. However, it takes a lot of courage to try and right such a public wrong. I wish them both new found deeper connections.

So do I. And I hope that they know it can happen.
So you're chasing around a fly and in your world, I'm the idiot?

"Friends don't let friends be Mormon." Sock Puppet, MDB.

Music is my drug of choice.

"And that is precisely why none of us apologize for holding it to the celestial standard it pretends that it possesses." Kerry, MDB
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_SteelHead
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Re: Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

Post by _SteelHead »

I know about 1/2 dozen gay Mormon men who married women, tried to follow "the plan" and in the end divorced and came out of the closet. Living life un authentically is painful. You can see the pain in Josh & Lolly's post. Unfortunately it seems he will continue in the church (if I am reading things correctly) so he is likely going to cause himself more pain as he tries to be a gay man, possibly in a gay relationship, and continue in a church that calls him evil.
It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener at war.

Some of us, on the other hand, actually prefer a religion that includes some type of correlation with reality.
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_DoubtingThomas
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Re: Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

Post by _DoubtingThomas »

_Res Ipsa
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Re: Josh and Lolly Weed getting divorced

Post by _Res Ipsa »

That's pretty heart wrenching to read. I wish them well.
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
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