EAllusion wrote:"Only in Provo" is clearly a reference to the idea that only in Provo is being outed as a closeted homosexual feeling forced to lead a double-life so horrifying that it allows people to extort them with the threat of it.
In most places, too, mental masturbation of this kind, and at this level of intensity, would be understood to be both a sign of intellectual desperation and neurotic externalization and rationalization of internal emotional turmoil, in this case aimed at the Church.
By contrast in more tolerant areas gays are more likely to feel free to just be gay, so there isn't the leverage for extortion. Jaybear is wrong on this point - Ted Haggards are all over the place, right Droopy? - but it's not hard to understand what's being said.
No, its very hard to understand what is being said, unless you are a virulent anti-Mormon bigot or a sanctimonious, crusading leftist driven to such lengths by the fever of his own smug sense of moral self regard.
A closeted homosexual man could be extorted anywhere under exactly the same circumstances, and you and Jaybear know that perfectly well.
Just another manufactured excuse for a manufactured argument for a manufactured thread for a manufactured calumny by unknown, manufactured Internet cowards against a Church and people the offend their well honed politically correct mental masturbatory fantasies that they are "tolerant" and "enlightened."
The vast majority of secular humanist liberals are neither tolerant of any dissent from their pious PC platitudes, nor enlightened beyond their own self imposed - and highly truncated and surgically selective - self indoctrination.