Regards,I'm an atheistic homosexual Jew. And my first encounter in my world with activities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was in 2008 when the Church dived into the Proposition 8 battle in California seeking successfully to overturn same-sex marriage, which has been the leading cause of my career, marriage equality for gay people like me.
What then unfolded over time was completely unexpected and truly remarkable in the context of today's culture wars. The church had a rethink, and in Utah, it went and got together with the Utah Equality Group, the LGBT rights group. Over a period of four or five years, it built trust and relationships with them,
and the result of this was the now famous Utah Compromise of 2015, which extended anti-discrimination protections to LGBT people, and added important religious exemptions for all churches, including Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This, people hoped, would become a template for other states, because instead of zero-sum culture wars, it's saying, let's expand the space
for both of these very different groups to go on about our way in a pluralistic culture. Peacemaking is not just something you preach or something you teach. It's something you do, and it's very, very hard. It took years of work to get that compromise, but the church wasn't done. Here's what astonishes me even more.
I won't get into the legislative history, but in 2022, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, among some other religious groups, Seventh-day Adventists were involved and some others, helped push through Congress successfully the Respect for Marriage Act, similar in many ways to the Utah Compromise.
It enshrined same-sex marriage in federal law in case the Supreme Court ever overturns it. So it's now written into statute, recognition of same-sex marriages. along with some very important provisions ensuring the federal government will never use its power to force same-sex marriage on churches, including this one. This was very hard fought,
but it passed with unanimous Democratic support and very significant Republican support It brought brickbats down upon the church from the culture wars crowd who said homosexual marriage is a sin. Why are you helping it? What's astonishing about it, and I say this as a gay American, this is not a church that is squishy about homosexuality.
This is a church that teaches that people like me who are in openly gay relationships are committing a sin. And you can be excommunicated from the church if you openly and proudly engage in that sin. Yet this church went to bat for my secular right in secular law to be married to my husband, Michael,
while also finding ways to expand the space for religious communities to go their separate ways. That's what peacemaking really is. It is so profoundly counter-cultural at this moment to take this difficult route of, as President Oaks of the church calls it, patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation.
It's so difficult to do that, yet President Nelson and the church have proven to me that they mean every word that they say. And they are acting, not only teaching, but acting according to the message of their God. And that is something that impresses me deeply.
I went out to Provo in January and gave a talk there and was fortunate that there were some members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, top leaders of the church, and I was able to tell them what I'll tell you. Very presumptuous. I mean, you know, atheistic homosexual Jew telling the church what to do.
But what I said, President Nelson's teaching about civic peacemaking, this is a witness not just for the church. This has to be a witness for the entire country. The church must bring this message across the land.
https://www.faithmatters.org/p/presiden ... ons-legacy
MG
