http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispa ... e%E2%80%9D
A few comments are in order:
A new poll released today by the Salt Lake Tribune shows that among Utah Mormons surveyed, 55% believe it is possible for people who are attracted to members of the same sex to change their sexual orientation. Twenty-five percent of Utah Mormons reported being “unsure,” and 15% believed gay people could not voluntarily “change” their own sexual orientation.
Among non-Mormon Utahns surveyed, 66% believed it was not possible for gay people to “change” their sexual orientation, while 20% thought it possible, and 14% were unsure.
Which confirms what those of us who live within the culture know: many, many LDS people live in a parallel universe when it comes to the reality of LGBT experience.
Brooks does not seem to be aware that successful change from homosexual to heterosexual orientation through reparative therapy for those uncomfortable with their homosexuality and who desire and are motivated to change is now undeniable and well established, and that even the American Psychological Association has long ago modified its original blanket denial of such a possibility.
Brooks apparently holds to a biological essentialist, reductionist view of homosexual origins, and apparently gives no credence to a broader bio/psycho/social approach. Such a reductionist view of homosexuality appeals, clearly, to a certain type of person that is not comfortable taking an unpopular stand amongst secularist liberal colleagues and peers with whom she would be outnumbered and perhaps persecuted for her views, were she to defend the Church's teachings here, and for whom the fashionable orthodoxies of the day provide both the popularity and psychological gratification of taking the "socially conscious" position, as determined within the highly ideologically conformist atmosphere of modern academe.
Better to take the easy and broad path.
Just a few weeks ago, I was visiting with a friend who has a gay adult child. We discussed the nuances of the recent events surrounding Elder Boyd K. Packer’s abrasive and controversial October conference talk which asserted that God would never have people be born with “tendencies” to same-sex attraction, and which drew hurtful, crude comparisons between the electoral battle to establish civil equality for LGBT people and a classroom of children “voting” on the gender of a cat.
Yes, this is typical emotion based leftist victimology mongering (in which she takes homosexuals as her mascots under her protective embrace against the "abrasive," "hurtful" words of the ogre, Boyd K. Packer) but its quite standard in the intellectually and morally vitiated world of the modern politically correct academy as it is in the mainstream media and arts community.
Brooks startling misrepresentation of Packer's actual words here is of note. Packer did not claim that there was no such thing as inborn "tendencies" toward homosexual attraction, or anything else. Here's what Packer actually said:
Some suppose that they were preset and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn temptations toward the impure and unnatural. Not so! Remember, God is our Heavenly Father.
Packer nowhere here denies inborn tendencies, bias, or predisposition. Neither has Dallin Oaks. What he does deny is the claim (essentially, the "born that way" argument of the cultural Left) that human beings come into the world "pre-set" regarding sexual orientation, or any other sexual fetish or preoccupation outside gospel boundaries. He denies that homosexuality qua homosexuality comes with us into the world as an essential element of our spirits and psychological structure. He denies no "tendencies" but does deny that human beings are "born gay," or, in other words, born not with some inherent predispositions, but with homosexual orientation already completely hard wired in an innate sense into the psych.
Happily for Elder Packer, no social science or brain science evidence exists in contradiction of that position, and the claims of the social Left and homosexual rights movement are ideological in nature, not rational or scientific.
Brooks needn't have misrepresented Packer in such a manner, and could have dealt with his words with at least a degree of critical rigor (and benefit of the doubt and good faith, given his position in the church of which she claims to have a testimony and in which she claims to "believe") and needn't have filled her criticisms of him with so much emotive baggage, but she chose to do so nonetheless.
Packer's fundamental teaching went to the very heart of the Church's understanding of sexual morality and its overall place within the plan of salvation:
We teach a standard of moral conduct that will protect us from Satan’s many substitutes or counterfeits for marriage. We must understand that any persuasion to enter into any relationship that is not in harmony with the principles of the gospel must be wrong. From the Book of Mormon we learn that “wickedness never was happiness.”
Marriage between a man and a woman is the only boundary of human sexuality within which actual sexual expression is legitimate. Satan's counterfeits for marriage would include premarital cohabitation without marriage, homosexuality, adulterous relationships, various sexual fetishes, group sexual activity etc.
The gate is straight, the way is narrow. A thief cannot break into the Kingdom of God by coming over the wall or sneaking in the back way. It cannot be. Perpetua had to climb up the latter into Heaven while avoiding sharp knives and other frightening weapons hanging from the ladder, and was forced (taking a great deal of courage) to step on the Dragon's head (as he was interwoven around the ladder) and use his head as a rung, to propel herself further upwards.
It isn't easy. Crosses must be born. Sometimes seemingly terrible sacrifices of the self must be undertaken. After we put all these enemies "under our feet," we become like God is, and live the life he lives, of which marriage and "eternal lives" is a central part.
There is sometimes no way around or over a mountain, only through it.