Loving Family Relationships
As a young man, I had a unique experience that left me surprised and unable to understand my reaction. My response to the circumstance was so counter to expectation. I was home from a distant metropolitan area where I worked and sitting in our family’s front-porch swing, awaiting the arrival of my Aunt Hazel. Her visit would be wonderful, particularly so because it had been years since I had seen her. In that intervening period, I had matured from youth to young adult, and she had become elderly. I had grown up with a stepmother whom I loved, but Aunt Hazel was “my blood,” sister of my mother who had died when I was barely a year old. I must have felt a special kinship with her, a genuine bond to the mother who carried me close to her heart, gave me of our family’s genetic heritage, and with her soulful care, my start in life. Surely, I had spent some of my happiest childhood hours in Aunt Hazel’s home where our family had visited annually when I was young.
Ours was the last house on a block-long street, and our property butted up against the sharp rise of one of those beautifully forested West Virginia “hills.” After hours of waiting, the car finally drove past our house, and turned at the end of the blacktop, so it could park in front of our home. Not able to wait longer, I left the swing, ran down the porch stairs and to the car where Aunt Hazel was struggling to get out. I was so happy she had arrived. As she stood, I put my arms around her and held her close. But at this joyous moment, I found myself suddenly sobbing. Weak and overwhelmed, my tears flowed freely. Crying at a time of joy? So unexpected, I could hardly believe it was happening. Although I did not understand the incongruity, l learned later, as the picture below shows, it is quite natural to shed tears at moments of profound gratitude and joy.
Considering relationships and the satisfactions of close, personal bonds, I will never forget what I learned at a funeral. This scene of sad tears was to honor a young single man who had been killed in an auto accident. I never knew him; however, I worked with his mother. Her son had been a stellar student, captain of his football team, heart-throb of many hopeful girls, and an all-around standout. He was a great kid, and the church was full to overflowing with his many friends, young and old. As I sat peacefully pensive, I received a gentle but distinct impression -–the bonds of love that we weld in this life are eternal. The message carried no equivocation. I was assured that these affections of the heart that we forge with one another follow us beyond the grave.
I was led to other thoughts about these family ties that bless and bind us so securely together. I was a young child in the early forties, often outdoors, experiencing and enjoying the weather and change of seasons. It seems there has been a notable modification in the frequency and severity of weather-related storms and natural disasters. Almost daily, newscasts carry reports of homes and lives taken through floods, earthquakes, wildfires and tornados. It has been sad to witness families who have lost homes and so much or all of their life’s possessions. Interestingly, at these disastrous times, overflowing gratitude is often prominently acknowledged: “We are all alive. We’ve lost everything, but we have each other!”
It becomes easy to conclude that the emotional ties gained through family associations are likely the most treasured of all we glean and savor during mortality. With these attachments, both powerful and enduring, comes hope that they extend to the “great beyond!” Probably most desire that their family bonds would last forever.
Human Nature: Ties and Togetherness Through Time
Long ago, Plato and other philosophers developed a system of thought which considered outcomes apparent in nature that signaled purposefulness. For example, it is understood that an acorn is destined to become an oak tree. The blossoms of fruit trees in springtime are a promise of fruit containing within itself seeds to sustain the production of future generations. This cycle of renewal exists throughout nature in both plant and animal life. Considering life’s course for humans, infants are expected to grow, mature, and ultimately be fruitful and know the joy of experiencing their own posterity. With healthful nurture, male and female children grow and create families that link physically and spiritually with generations both before and after. The seeds in an apple can be numbered, but not the apples in a seed.
The poem “The Excesses of God,” by Robinson Jeffers, is shown below and speaks to God’s generosity, to fruitfulness and generativeness. God does not give us the moon, but he gives us an earth wherein its beauty and organization testify everywhere of his constant love and providence.
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.
It would be expected that our Creator would clearly define for mortals the crucial course, those pursuits most likely to bring the deepest joys and earthly fulfillment. It is apparent that He has done so from the outset. In the book of Genesis, it is noted that after fashioning the contours and capabilities of Adam and Eve’s miraculous bodies, his first commandment to them was clear and specific: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth…” (Genesis 1:28) He desired their happiness, —emotional linkage through having joy in their posterity. The only way this could happen would be through their coming together physically, employing the complementarity of their differently gendered male and female bodies.
Most men and women grow up and desire a companion with whom to share life’s journey. Typically, their coming together in marriage is a joyful occasion, for they have fallen in love and treasure time together. Through sharing themselves in all ways, most couples soon find themselves experiencing the challenging and often daunting responsibility of nurturing a new soul. Through sacrificing self, endlessly toiling, constantly feeling over-extended and under-rested, comes a new reality. Whereas before, it was believed that love had been known and understood, now comes a deeper sense of what these relationships entail and the even deeper feelings they can bring. Struggling to care for infants and young children develops new levels of understanding and brings happenings of the heart not previously imagined or even considered possible. Of their parental stretching, moms and dads have acknowledged: “It has brought depths of affection and care, happiness I had never before known.”
Same-sex Sexuality and the Law of the Harvest
Same-sex sexuality cannot bring blessings of continuation, of posterity and normal family life as it has existed in all cultures through millennia past. Through normal means, they cannot know this joy which comes from producing and facilitating the growth and development of their own offspring.
Homosexuality has been analyzed from academic and secular means, but it also needs to be considered from moral and spiritual viewpoints. We will now focus attention on same-gender erotic relations, the morality of men having sex with other men. It is important to distinguish between same-sex attraction (SSA) and same-sex sexuality. An admission of being same-sex attracted is generally taken to equate with “I’m gay.” Taking upon oneself such a label leaves too much unstated. Additionally, behavior is not self or state of being. Recognizing this distinction, some have written about same-sex sexuality and others about “gay soul.” It is critical that both same-sex behavior and its underlying etiology and sustaining motivations need to be clearly understood and responded to as being closely related, but totally different.
If not for human bonding or to procreate, where does the path of same-sex sexuality lead? It is indeed useful to have a sense of where actions lead or do not lead. Wise men have long counseled that it is best to begin with the end in mind. President Russell M. Nelson clarified that this concept is not only useful now, but that it is an eternal principle: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” We are encouraged to take the long view, because the trails we follow in this life determine where we can travel in the next. As one end of a stick is picked up, so then is the other. Power and comfort come with assurance of being on the right path and headed in the right direction, toward the most rewarding destination.
Celebrated transsexual author, Jan Morris, had been known before transitional surgery as James Humphry Morris. He had experienced the joys and satisfactions of having and rearing children, for he and his wife, Elizabeth, had five together before he began modification of his body. In his famous text, Conundrum: An Extraordinary Narrative of Transsexualism, he wrote of his concern for gay couples.
Believer as I could only be in omnisexuality, in the right and ability of humans of every kind to love one another carnally and spiritually, I always respected the emotions of homosexuals; but the truth and pathos of their condition seemed to me exemplified by their childlessness. Years ago I lived briefly in the same house as a devoted homosexual couple, one an eminent pianist, the other a businessman. Their life together was civilized without being in the least chi-chi. Their flat was full of handsome things, their conversation was kind and clever, and when the one was playing I would see the other listening with an expression of truest pride, pleasure, and affection. So real was their bond that when the pianist died the businessman killed himself —and they left behind them, apart from the musician’s records, only a void. A marriage as loyal as marriage could be had ended sterile and uncreative; and if the two of them had lived into old age their lives, I think, would have proved progressively more sterile still, the emptiness creeping in, the fullness retreating. …I could not have survived such a life, for my instinct to have children was profound.
Homosexuals can fall in love as wholeheartedly and deeply as heterosexuals. They, too, hope their unions will be permanent. They may desire this, but historically, failure of most to fashion their dreams into reality has been legendary. Influential gay activists, Marshal Kirk and Hunter Madsen, characterized homosexual unions generally as fraught with difficulty, that the happily anticipated outcomes quickly faded into “disillusionment and unhappiness.” (After the Ball, p. 362-263 ) Beyond affection and commitment, most married gays confess to having allowances for extramarital liaisons. Although they may live with someone to whom they are emotionally committed, most remain strongly motivated to encounter other men erotically.
Life’s journey is long and arduous, and there are important objectives to be reached. Early on, Christ clarified: “It is not good that the man should be [travel] alone.” Men need and are fitted physically, emotionally, and spiritually for having a companion, a helpmate, and for extending their shared happiness, including building a family. Homosexuality cannot satisfy these relational opportunities and requirements.
Pioneering psychoanalyst and UCLA professor, Judd Marmor, framed a particularly important question which this paper only begins to consider. He asked, “Why [do] so many millions of men and women become motivated towards such behavior [homosexuality] despite the powerful cultural taboos against it?” And relatedly, acclaimed gay psychiatrist and theorist, Harry Stack Sullivan, wondered, “What stands in the way of him [the homosexual] making the conventional, and, therefore, comparatively simple, adjustment toward behavior which is regarded as normal?”
For a time, gay men were encouraged to marry in order to heal from their same-sex leanings. But the “try it, you’ll like it” belief of heterosexuals regarding marital intimacies when applied to gays was simplistic. What worked for straight men most often failed to dim the drives of hopeful gays. In the experiment, too many families were heartbroken and destroyed. Despite valuing their opposite gender mate and loving their children, even after a good and lengthy try, many men abandoned their families because of their incessant draw to others of their gender. For some reason, they remained impelled to pursue erotic intimacies with other men. The “why” question has remained largely unanswered.
Some gay couples have attempted to approximate heterosexual family life through adopting children or obtaining them through surrogacy. While desire for complementarity with a mate and having one’s own posterity is deep and abiding, neither the realities of human physical and psychological development nor millennia of social mores have supported this same-sex relational paradigm. Whatever factors undergird gay men’s same-sex attraction, enduring, exclusive relationships are generally not to be found through arrangements involving same-sex sexuality. Seen in its entire pattern, the great evil of homosexuality is that it stymies and blocks individual progression. And organizationally, through political activism and untoward media influence, it can severely weaken families and contribute substantively to the demise of a culture.
Homosexuality: Not Formost a Sexual Problem
With careful examination, it appears that rather than behavior, adult sexuality, it is underlying motivation, children’s legitimate, unmet affectional and relational gender-identity-affirming needs, that should be recognized as the issue of primarily concern. Same-gender attracted individuals have been wounded in early childhood and need to be nurtured properly, not abused or rejected. Rather than being seen as willful adult sinners, same-gender attracted individuals should be viewed as brothers and sisters suffering from the outgrowth of an originally naïve, misdirected adjustment to childhood trauma. Through seemingly innocuous choices made over time, beginning in earliest childhood, all have been subtly ensnared in incorrect convictions leading to cycles of compulsive behavior they did not originally or directly invite. Gradually, as they mature physically, they awaken to the intensity of their relentless unique interpersonal draw.
The interplay between children’s physical development and inadequate/inappropriate socialization can be analyzed. When done so, its contribution to the evolution of role-estrangement and gender dysphoria often becomes clearly discernible.
Same-sex attracted boys and men do not need sex with others of their gender. They are drawn to male virility, driven to experience intimacy with males possessing virtues of robust masculinity related to their gender role which they failed to adequately internalize socially during early childhood. Body dysphoria, dissatisfaction with physical characteristics, is often reported. Many feel bereft of particular sports skills and other competencies that are common avenues for same-gender sociality. The agonizing and ever-burdensome estrangement and sense of difference is said to be like being from another planet. Nevertheless, whatever the circumstance or need, evanescent phallic interchanges fail to benefit or satisfy. They prove to be only additionally alienating symbolic shortcuts to the quality rapport, gender identity, and sense of being desired.
Gay adults, inwardly needful children, do not warrant additional abuse. Without reflexive homophobia and homo-hatred ––long-established “sins of the fathers,”–– and misunderstanding on both sides of the issue, healing relationships could be navigated. Thereby these individuals could be rescued from being prisoners of childhood.
Directions to orderly paths of peace and security are clearly given. In the Christian faith, we learn that, when met, the two great commandments fulfill the whole law. We must first and foremost love God, our Eternal Heavenly Father, and Jesus Christ, His only begotten son. We are taught to love and obey them with all our heart, might, mind, and strength. The second commandment clarifies our responsibility to reflect and pass on the love and blessing gained through our relationship with God and Jesus Christ through care for others as ourselves. Our primary mortal concern is internalizing and expressing the attribute of love through learning and keeping the moral law and serving each other. This objective is multifaceted and requires sustained learning, obedience, sacrifice, and personal growth. It can remain in force throughout life, held in place by sacred covenants made with God.
Laws of Love and Father Abraham
Scriptures indicate that Abram was ninety-nine when he was visited by God and commanded to walk perfectly before him. Abram was told that henceforth he would be called Abraham. God said, “I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly.” Abraham was promised that he would become a “father of nations.” While Abraham and Sarah yearned for a child for years, their desires had not been realized. As they grew older, they must have gradually given up hope of ever being parents. But one day, in the latter years of their lives, they were surprised by the visit of three holy men. In the heat of the day, Abraham was concerned about the welfare of his unexpected guests and rushed to provide for their comfort. He instructed Sarah to quickly prepare bread. He had a young calf dressed, and soon a table of food was presented. Abraham was hospitable and nourished his guests, providing them both food and rest. During their visit, one of the men informed Abraham that Sarah would indeed have a son, that the time of life wherein women could bear children would be returned to her. Sarah was chided for doubting this assurance as Abraham was rhetorically asked: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Later, despite their advanced age, their miracle son, Isaac, was born and received with great joy.
We have learned of Abraham’s great challenge, how his faith was tested by God. Abraham was instructed by God to take Isaac, his longed for and beloved son, and offer him as a sacrifice, a burnt offering. We cannot know the agony Abraham endured, but he humbly prepared to follow this unbelievably difficult course as directed. Father and son journeyed to the location where this sacrifice was to occur. All was prepared. But at the last moment, when Abraham’s arm was raised and ready to strike, an angel of the Lord commanded him to refrain from harming his son. Abraham “lifted up his eyes and looked and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by its horns: and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.” (Genesis 22:13) Abraham had passed this most severe test and God was thus assured that Abraham would not withhold anything, that he trusted God completely.
When studying scriptures, vagueness is occasionally encountered. This may be purposefully introduced to avoid direct attention to particularly sacred principles, or to require of the reader greater effort to gain a higher plane of understanding. The story of Abraham’s difficult test has been taken to reference the supreme gift of God in sending his son to pay, even with the sacrifice of his own life, for the indebtedness of mortals’ transgressions. “For God so loved the world…” Many such parallels or “types and shadows” are found in scripture and convey valuable information for those who recognize inspiring relatedness.
It is interesting to note the juxtaposition of Abraham’s being assured of progeny, of his becoming a father of nations, and the story of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. When Abraham’s visitors recognized their host’s determination to live righteously, they immediately turned their attention to problems concerning Sodom and Gomorrah, cities brim with wickedness. These angels had been sent by the Lord to destroy all the inhabitants because sins committed there were “very grievous,” including men seeking sexuality with other men. In this Biblical narrative, the sinfulness of same-sex sexuality is contrasted with Abraham and Sarah’s being reassured of their forthcoming blessing. The course men pursued in Sodom and Gomorrah would lead to barrenness and death, while Abraham was to know overflowing joy through his progeny. God specified that he would multiply him “exceedingly.” (Genesis 17:2) “…Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.” (Gen. 15:5)
The Abrahamic Covenant is available to all.
God loves all his children, regardless of gender, skin tone, nationality, or sexual orientation. The Abrahamic covenant, with its attendant blessings, is available to all people, but it is contingent upon meeting the demands of the moral law. The covenant and promises God extended to Abraham are a two-way pledge based upon having faith in God and his son, Jesus Christ, abandoning sins and keeping his commandments. We learn that Christ’s atoning sacrifice can redeem from all transgressions when our efforts to repent are genuine and enduring. The blessing of salvation is contingent upon our remaining faithful to God and Christ the remainder of our lives. Through repentance and change of values and behavior, any who stray can become new creatures, “born of Christ.” He becomes our spiritual father. As described by the apostle Paul and modern prophets, through this sacrifice, faithful souls discover their better, more rewarding selves. As we depart from the wrong paths we had been pursuing, each is promised and discovers life more abundantly. We find joy beyond anticipation as we learn and live the commandments Christ defined. Each must follow the example given by Christ when he committed to God, his father: “Not my will, but thine be done.”
The Importance of Fathers
Along the avenue of fatherhood lie opportunities and responsibilities which can provide men their life’s richest blessings and greatest satisfactions. When they pick up the baton of power, they can establish a family domain of peace, an environment for exploration and growth, or a cell of insecurity. They can be companionate teachers or divisive despots who never gain love or respect for their office. They need to pick up the patriarch’s scepter wisely and with determined humility. Generally, fatherhood is inextricably tied to lasting joy. Sadly however, some men never learn the power of gentleness. It has been said that a man never stands so tall as when he stoops to help a little child. Jesus said, “I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me ….” By word and deed, he cared: “Suffer the little children to come unto me….” Men’s paternal opportunity can surely bring him to the fullness of his masculine potential.
Sigmund Freud wrote that homosexuality was “produced by a certain arrest of sexual development.” After studying sociology, Edward Sagarin, hailed as the father of the American gay revolution, changed his mind regarding homosexuality. He became convinced that it was a pathological adjustment which issued primarily from family problems encountered during early childhood. He explained:
What are these predisposing influences? In all my discussions with homosexuals –– including those who are attracted exclusively or predominantly to the same sex –– one observation has been almost universal, and that is the lack of a well-balanced home, where the mother and father displayed affection for each other and for the child. Broken homes, divorces, early deaths, frigid parents, unequal love –– one pattern or another can be found in almost every instance.
I know professionally from learning of the lives of many homosexual men, as well as my own, that homosexual inclinations evolve developmentally from early psychosocial and psychosexual experiences that are not the norm. While there are many routes to homosexuality, problematic father/son relationships of one sort or another have been regularly found in the lives of most who grew up gay. Homosexuality, and the failure of boys to become heterosexually oriented, is often closely tied to a developmental history of poor father-son relationships. Those who become homosexually oriented did not receive the required father love and affirmation and remain needful of it. Psychiatrist, Irving Bieber was assured of the importance of the father-son relationship from the information he had repeatedly discovered through his research. “We have come to the conclusion that a constructive, supportive, warmly related father precludes the possibility of a homosexual son.” (Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study, p. 322, emphasis original.)
The route to fatherhood follows paths of healthy boyhood. It is a course begun with male children becoming bonded and identified through secure love with their fathers. That shared male identity is additionally strengthened through succeeding periods of rewarding same-gender chumship. Play has been described as the “business of childhood,” and children should be prepared and assisted in meeting the relational challenges they face over succeeding periods of physical development. A boy is the only material from which a man can be fashioned, and the importance of their social and emotional engagements over time from infancy through early childhood and adolescence cannot be overstated.
There is much which suggests that homosexual inclinations have their origin in early childhood trauma. Many students of child development believe this relational insecurity is seated somewhere in children’s first five years of life, the same period during which one’s native language is being indelibly imprinted. While there may or may not be parental culpability, something happens which discourages these children from feeling secure and engaging comfortably with primary caregivers, especially their mothers or fathers.
Sir John Bowlby, esteemed psychiatrist, student of child development, and framer of attachment theory, wrote of the immense importance of affectional bonds in infants’ early psychological development: “There are few blows to the human spirit so great as the loss of someone near and dear.” Children’s development was critically impacted by “either an absence of opportunity to make affectional bonds or else long and perhaps repeated disruptions of bonds once made.” Most parents become acquainted with their young child’s intense dependency, displayed and known as “stranger anxiety.” Various forms of bond disruption in children’s early lives can cause them to conclude deeply in their psyche that particular relationships are not safe. Or, they may draw various erroneous conclusions that negatively impact their lives.
Regarding early childhood, Jan Morris recalled: “It is true that my mother had wished me to be a daughter,” [and that] “gushing visitors sometimes assembled me into their fox furs and lavender sachets to murmur that, with curly hair like mine, I should have been born a girl.” He noted also that he was in a home “soon to be fatherless.” The first lines of Morris’ fascinating autobiography began with an amazing, psychologically significant introduction:
I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life. … What triggered so bizarre a thought I have long forgotten, but the conviction was unfaltering from the start. …I cherished it as a secret, shared for twenty years with not a single soul.
Many gays report having valued their opposite-sex parent greatly, while devaluing their same-sex parent. Whatever causes a male's early emotional wounding, its effects settle and become particularly focused and defined in the relationship he experiences with his father, the primary representative of his gender role. Estrangement developed with the same-sex parent can later be extended to others of the child’s gender. For these emotionally wounded children, social interactions are often stressful, experienced as an approach-avoidance conflict. They are impelled to seek relational intimacies with others of their own gender while, at the same time, they are wary and avoid such encounters. Most tend to remain stuck in this bind.
Male youth who have not had their masculine identity affirmed by their fathers and same-sex peers have led stressful lives. They feel incomplete. Many have existential concerns and often search for spiritual solutions, thereby hopeful of resolving their conflicts. Many strugglers report having earnestly petitioned God to change them, to take away their unwanted erotic draws to others of their own sex and make them heterosexual. When they discover themselves unable to “pray the gay away,” or change through bargaining with God and trying to be good, they lose faith in a “higher power.” They feel failed by both their earthly and Heavenly Father. Largely adrift from spiritual moorings and longing for intimacies they feel unable to negotiate socially, many become tempted to break same-gender sexual taboos and act out erotically to resolve stress. This break can then support turning a blind eye to other cultural values. Some entirely discard faith in God and religious doctrine and abandon their faith communities.
Growth: Grappling With Adversity
Much progress in life is realized in the face of opposition and strife. Bad things do happen to good people, and many are required to simply hang on or fashion steppingstones from stumbling blocks. We learn that mortality is a brief, vastly important period in which we are to “prepare to meet God.” Personal challenges such as troubled childhoods are to be faced, and lives improved as best as possible. The stakes are high, for eternal opportunities or their loss hang in the balance. Energies are to be used struggling to get and stay on right paths. It is Satan’s design to make men feel discouraged and shameful. Nothing could please him more than to make male children and youth feel bad about themselves, fail to thrive, and never experience the satisfactions of mature masculinity and joy through fatherhood. Surely there must be better responses to salving the pain of unmet identity and relational needs than through the distraction of transient erotic engagements. They keep trying to get to maleness, but their sensual approach fails to deliver.
Same-sex attracted boys and men have been misunderstood and abused for centuries. It must be time for the needed love to replace hatred, rejection, and all forms abuse which punishments have been thought to dissuade untoward behavior and encourage actions more in line with cultural expectations. Forces and counter forces underlying the behavior have not been understood.
Christ asked Simon Peter: “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these?” In response to Peter’s affirmation, Christ emphasized his point repeating the question two more times while instructing him to ”Feed my sheep.” Gay boys and men need rescue rather than rejection. Brigham Young’s directive regarding faith-in-action for stranded pioneers was: “Go bring them in from the plains!” The same clarion call could be made relative to these identity-impaired souls. Go bring them into the warmth of genuine fellowship and belonging. Our love of God is demonstrated through our heartfelt service to others. Apparently, we are not to arrive at the gates of heaven alone. President Gordon B. Hinckley taught: “It will not be enough to be an able lawyer, a man of medicine, a skilled architect a proficient engineer or whatever. There will be the need for another dimension in your life –– that of reaching down to someone who may be in distress to offer your strong hand to lift him up.” And Elder James E. Faust taught: “We reach the Creator through his children … If performed in the right spirit, there is no higher worship than the un-purchased service to another soul of whatever faith, belief, or social stratum.” It is quite possible that if all men were following the commandments to truly love one another and genuinely be our brother’s keeper, there would be no homosexuality. Homophobia and homo-hatred are the snowdrifts and barren plains from which many need rescued in these modern times. What tender songs of the heart will be joyfully sung by helpers and those rescued!
To be sure, there is much reason for optimism. The psychodynamics giving rise to homosexual inclinations are now understood far better than in the past. Discouraged youth and adults no longer need to accept the dictum: “Once gay, always gay.” It is simply not true. Specific strategies have been identified that truly help insecure and gender-estranged individuals realize genuine personal and interpersonal growth. Elder Boyd K. Packer gave considerable attention to this topic and firmly declared: “It is contrary to the order of heaven for any soul to be locked into compulsive, immoral behavior with no way out!” Moral and spiritual verities possess powers that guarantee growth and liberation. There are doctrinally-based resources that are far more efficient and powerful than previous approaches which were derived primarily from secular domains. I definitely benefitted from studying psychology. Nonetheless, in my own struggle for clarity and liberation, I discovered Elder Packer’s affirmation to be true: “The study of the doctrines of the gospel will improve behavior quicker than a study of behavior will improve behavior.” The “virtue of the word” does fortify and bring comforting change. Through corrective emotional experiences and faith in Christ and Heavenly Father, release from soul-destroying compulsions is real. Men’s past can cease blighting their present and dimming their future. Others have followed this course and joyfully testified of their newness. When men learn to love Christ and his law, turning their lives totally over to him, they become better fitted for healing rapport with their fellowmen.
It has been suggested that “the primary and most critical problem facing homosexuals is not how to be sexually attracted to members of the opposite sex, but how to satisfy unmet, legitimate affectional needs with those of their own sex.” (Historian, Eric G. Swedin’s Healing Souls: Psychotherapy in the Latter-day Saint Community. P. 168. See also “Boys Need Fathers,” by Marion D. Hanks, General Conference, June, 2015.)
Needful men can love and become like those whom they value but believe to be forever remote and inaccessible. Their male-affect starvation and father hunger can be satiated as brothers unite in Christ. Truly, the immeasurably rich blessings that were promised Father Abraham are available to all men, including those who failed to grow up under favorable circumstances. They, too, can receive the blessed forever forward and increase of family. Lasting change during mortality can be realized. Christ can do for men what they are unable to do for themselves. At the bottom line, homosexuality is an identity and relationship issue, learning is lawful, and the law of the harvest is operative. What has been gotten into can be gotten out of. When the right elements are put into the mix, it is God who gives the increase. When males satisfy their early childhood same-sex relational needs, they will have become one of those “real” men for whom they search.
These struggling boys and men can be restored to their childhood purity and innocence and know life more abundantly. Should they be unable to discover a bonding relationship with their natural fathers, their newness of self can evolve as they are enabled to access nurturing, surrogate brothers and fathers. They can be helped to grow up in Christ and become fruitful in covenant-strengthened families. Through bonds of brotherly affection, they can have “roots and branches” and be brought into that sacred line of unity and togetherness that has joined fathers and sons in succeeding generations since Christ directed Adam and Eve to be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth.
We end this discussion of ways to benefit men struggling with obligatory homosexuality by referencing two inspiring quotations which I wholeheartedly believe to be true and particularly germane.
From the Prophet, Joseph Smith:
Friendship is one of the grand fundamental principles of “Mormonism”; [it is designed] to revolutionize and civilize the world and cause wars and contentions to cease and men to become friends and brothers. (The misunderstanding and perpetual conflict between straights and gays could end.)
From French philosopher, Pierre Teilharde de Chardin:
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Spiritually-founded relational intervention of this previously unresolvable issue can bring new life. Genuine, irrefutable progress has been realized. The necessary and sufficient elements of the process are definable, and growth beyond gay is truly attainable within the framework of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Applied correctly, principles of brotherhood and willingness to share one another’s burdens are powerful influences. Surely, this approach has the greatest potential in the world to resolve conflicts in the minds and hearts of individuals who grew up gay. It can also facilitate a rapprochement between leaders of LGBTQ+ activism and heterosexual cultures. Such could allow all desiring men to move toward realization of their birthright of gender maturity. They would more likely be able to experience the joys of secure heterosexual love, progeny, and fatherhood and have full access to blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant.
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