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Michael Hoggan Lance the Agnostic • 17 hours ago
It is unwise to encourage people who feel SSA to be sexually active or be in a "romantic relationship". I don't care what their theological beliefs are.
Michael Hoggan Lance the Agnostic • 16 hours ago • edited
Yes! I consider people who feel SSA to be psychologically fragile and they can't, at least in general, bear the responsibilities that come with those things. A lot of schizophrenics and bipolars are dead or in prison because society encouraged them to act on their impulses instead of helping them with their self-destructive issues.
Edit: Exhibit A for this would be the "defining down" of homosexual sexual abuse in California. Exhibit B is the "worry no more! HIV+ people can still have lots of sex if they take our new HIV suppression medicine!" commercials.
And the home run for out of this world hot takes:
Kyler Ray Rasmussen Michael Hoggan • 5 hours ago
This shows up in census data too. Rates of mental illness are substantially higher for those who identify as LGB (not to mention T) than they are for heterosexual individuals. And it turns out that stigma isn't what explains the difference--marriage rates do. When you control for whether individuals get married, that difference disappears for gay and lesbian individuals (though not for bisexuals--more on that in a minute).
The prescription usually made at this point is a clear one--encourage gay and lesbian individuals to get married--and that seems straightforward enough. But there's are a couple little niggles. One is selection--the type of gay individual who gets married is qualitatively difference from those who do not choose to get married, and encouraging the latter to get married may help but wouldn't necessarily make their mental health vulnerability equivalent.
The second niggle is more interesting to me--you can't separate the experience of same-sex attraction from the cultural forces in and surrounding the gay community and the gay rights movement. And those forces, for all the cultural cache of gay marriage, push hard against the formation of committed and stable relationships. When someone identifies as LGB, their odds of marriage drops preciptously, and the odds of having children drop off a cliff. It's not stigma that's doing this--it's progressive and gay culture.
When I was at BYU, I was pretty libertarian about gay marriage, and thought that allowing gay marriage could help transform gay culture and make it more stable and relationship-focused. But after a couple decades worth of data and years of training as a relationship scientist, it's clear to me that the opposite force ended up being more powerful. As progressive relationship sensibilities have become ascendent, and the purpose of relationships has become more focused on fulfilling personal sexual desires and proclivities--in concert with and in no small part because of the push for gay marriage--marriage rates have themselves tumbled. People are abandoning the institution en masse, and the reason for this should be no mystery: stable relationships are hard work, and if the goal is to fulfill sexual desires, then that goal is, ironically, most easily met alone.
People are starting to clue into the fact that this trend is counterproductive for mental health. As we become increasingly atomized, suicide rates and rates of mental illness and substance use are increasing in precisely the groups that are jumping on the progressive relationship bandwagon--the young, the single, and the irreligious.
And this issue is conflated with the phenomenon of bisexuality. Rates of mental illness among bisexuals are much higher than other groups and can't be adequately explained by stigma or even by relationship formation. And I suspect strongly that this is due to the lack of a stable identity--as people question and experiment with their own sexuality, they question and experiment with the core of who they are. Unmooring from that foundation of identity leaves them without a safe place to retreat to when the winds and waves of life come crashing in. That this would apply doubly to those experimenting with gender identity should be obvious.
So whether or not it's good for gay people to avoid same-sex relationships (and it's worth noting that this does NOT cut them off from all possibility of love, dating, relationships or families), it's clear to me that embracing progressive relationships prescriptions would do substantially more harm to the mental health of the church as a whole than it would do good to the church's gay community. As much as I empathize with the often tragic situation facing those in the church experiencing same-sex attraction, I'd rather do my best to comfort and care for that group within the confines of the gospel than watch the church's strong culture of marriage and family fall by the wayside.
-_-
Good Lord.
- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.