Eric Ethington & Isaac Higham Pride In Utah
By Mark Singer (Washington DC) OCT 4 | Utah State University graduate student and prominent LGBT Equality Rights activist Isaac Higham, and Pride In Utah founder Eric Ethington both responded to a speech delivered to the Mormon Church's semi annual General Conference in Salt Lake City over the weekend, that labeled same-sex marriage immoral behaviour and in direct conflict with the LDS Church's policies and beliefs.
At the gathering of nearly 20,000 Mormons, along with millions more watching the televised proceedings globally, Boyd K Packer, one of the LDS Church's 12 apostles, spoke to the audience telling them that supporting gay rights is like opposing gravity:
“There are those today who not only tolerate but advocate voting to change laws that would legalize immorality, as if a vote would somehow alter the designs of God’s laws and nature,” Packer, president of the church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles, said in a strongly worded sermon about the dangers of pornography and same-sex marriage. “A law against nature would be impossible to enforce. Do you think a vote to repeal the law of gravity would do any good?”
In an interview with Channel 3, Fox News in Salt Lake City, Pride In Utah's Ethington told a reporter: "Mormon statements like these are killing our children."
LGBT activist Isaac Higham released the following statement:
"Sometimes there are nights where I wake drenched in sweat, heart pounding, horrified by the dreams that had seconds before been playing out in my mind. These are the nights where I relive my days in high school. These are the nights where I relive the shame, and the embarrassment, I felt over not speaking out—over not standing up for another when they most desperately needed it.
Too many times to count I witnessed those who were brave enough to have come out in high school, or those who simply didn’t seem to fit the mold of their heteronormative gender expectations, be mocked, bullied, and outcast. Oh how badly I wanted to speak up! And oh the shame I felt for staying silent out of cowardice and fear of my big gay secret being found out. I stayed silent. I didn’t stand up to the bullies.
I am silent no longer.
And it is this determination to speak out and stand up to the bullies that drives me to address the talk given by LDS apostle Boyd K. Packer given at general conference this weekend. In his talk Packer made statements that “unnatural” same sex attractions can, and should, be overcome. He spoke of those who support marriage equality through their votes at the ballot box being akin to those who would vote against the existence of gravity.
I have no interest in arguing the absurdity of such things with the leaders of the LDS church. These are smart, accomplished, and for the most part well educated men who know better. No, I do not speak out and respond to argue their beliefs because surely they have the right to believe whatever they please, however disturbing and absurd they may be.
No, I speak out because I know that somewhere in some LDS family room or chapel pew, there sits a little boy or little girl who was just like me. A little one who desires nothing more than to be “worthy” and to have the approval of their church and of their family. I know that somewhere there is a child who, just like a younger me, quivers in fear of eternal damnation and fear of disappointing the family and the church culture they have been raised in because they are gay.
It is for these little ones that I refuse to stay silent.
The message delivered from the LDS pulpit continues to be a message of false hope, of misery, and of death for our LGBT children. LGBT youth are FOUR TIMES more likely to attempt suicide than their peers and they make up somewhere between twenty and forty percent of the homeless youth population—despite making up less than ten percent of the population of youth as a whole.
For twenty years I listened to the message of self loathing preached from LDS authorities. For twenty years I believed in their false hope that I could pray and fast and serve away my sexual orientation and God would then reward me with “righteous” heterosexual desires.
When the change never came, the blame became even more internalized, and I lost hope. But after a thankfully failed attempt to end the misery of this life, I finally found the true peace of my divine identity. I finally realized that all of those years I didn’t change because I didn’t need to. I was the way God intended me to be.
I began speaking out against the message of death that is killing our brothers, sisters, and friends. I began to work fight youth homelessness, youth suicide, and LGBT discrimination in housing and employment. I found new role models beyond the old men in the LDS hierarchy: like Reed Cowan who spends his time and efforts helping others in memory of his son, Dustin Lance Black who brought to life Harvey Milk’s message of hope and shared it with millions of LGBT persons who desperately need it, and hundreds and thousands of other activists fighting for change that is so desperately needed.
If this message should reach one of those precious souls who is somehow struggling and fighting that internal fight know this: there is hope. You are exactly the beautiful creature you were created and intended to be. There is love in this world beyond the message of death—find it.
And if this message becomes nothing more than a prayer in my heart, may the universe take it and share my love, and my hope, to those who in some way or another find themselves “in the thick of things”.
I stand confident of two things:
First, that the blood of the innocents drips from the hands of those who strangle the life and the hope out of them through their bully pulpit.
Second, that in the end I can stand upright and guilt free along side those who worked to make this world a better and safer place for everyone while others will hang their head in shame and weep for the hurt they inflicted on others in the name of self righteous piety.
“I know that you can’t live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.”
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1 comments:
In case it isn't obvious, I am agnostic with a progression of intolerance for organised religions. I can cope with a belief in God, but not with sacred texts that demand they are some kind of law that overrides the laws of nature and science. Oh, and being gay is 100% a natural, and if I believed in a God I would be quite convinced he would regard homosexuality as nothing short of being divine.
Men like Boyd K. Packer, should never be given the escape of "the right to believe what they want" when the act of stating that belief, harms others.
This is the problem of free speech without the notion of responsibility to be accountable for harming others.
And let us be perfect clear about that; stating a religious belief as a law to be blindly, unquestionably, followed by others, is harmful. Indoctrinating children with such laws is not only harmful, it is criminal, it is intellectually dishonest, asinine, and will, if left to fester in the mind of the impressionable, cause neurosis leading to insanity.
Boyd K. Packer and his ilk are more than a prime example of such insanity, they are the contagions of ignorance, the purveyors of harm, the firebrand of the very immorality they preach against in the name of love which they have abandoned for intolerant hatred.
They have forfeited their right, to have their free speech respected, or even permitted, by reason of the harm their words cause.
There are consequences for yelling "Fire!" in a theatre, and for yelling "Sin!" in a place of worship. Unfortunately it is the innocent who get burned, (at the stake,) or have their life's potential crushed out of them in the ensuing panic, caused by the fear promulgating from the pulpit of organised religions.
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