Over at MADB Smac posted some excerpts about an LDS guy who publicly protested the Church's anti-gay policies. He and his wife resigned rather than be excommunicated. Smac admits that the Church's treatment of Danzig disappoints him, but apparently feels the need to defend it anyway. He takes some cheap shots at Danzig. Other posters immediately started piling on with some even lower blows, questioning Danzig and his family's basic integrity and sincerity. This kind of thing irritates me more than anything else in the world. The view that one cannot question one's ecclesiastical leaders is Medieval, anti-intellectual, and just begs for abuse.
What California Kid means here is the Church's stand on the practice of homosexuality and the "Gay" lifestyle and its attributes. When it becomes more important to support trendy politically correct social fashions then to live and teach Gospel principles, and when one takes that opposition to the Gospel into the public square and attacks the Church, one's membership in the Church is put in jeopardy. That is as it should be.
California Kid, like so many here, simply does not understand the Church and its purpose. Danzig seems to think that the Church is a purely sociological construct amenable to his particular fashionable nostrums and preoccupations. It is not. The Church is here to interrogate and critique the culture, not to be interrogated and critiqued by it. This is not a question about the views of the Brethren. Unless one takes, a priori, a naturalistic perspective on the Gospel and the meaning of the Apostolic calling, one cannot simply run to the media and assault the leaders of the Church over a cause celeb of the liberal media and pop culture for which the Church takes a strongly dissident view.
Like others here in this forum, Danzig wants
the Church to be
his Church. I'd prefer not to have to go to a Church cast in the image of a moral and intellectual collaborator with the deteriorating popular culture around the Church.
If Danzig wants to slouch toward Gomorrah with the masses, he may do so. He will be popular and lionized here among those who share his pseudo moral cultural ethos.
The Church and the Saints do not.