Mormons at Gay Pride

It's the first Sunday of the month, so I was going to write another entry in my more-or-less-monthly series exploring contemporary Dominican society as a way to commemorate the 20th anniversary of my mission. But instead, I want to comment on the recent series of Mormon "It Gets Better" videos and the announcement that groups of straight LDS are planning to march in Gay Pride parades in various places around the country. They're marching today in Salt Lake.

I have on various occasions thrown a wet blanket on liberal Mormon optimism that the LDS Church is progressing toward acceptance of gay/lesbian people. I think that's a classic demonstration of the liberal faith in the myth of progress, and I'm not buying it. Yes, we've seen some dramatic toning down of church rhetoric since the days of Spencer W. Kimball. We've seen the church retreat from its stupid, arguably misogynistic policy of encouraging gay men to marry. We've seen correlated discourse in recent years cautiously leave open the possibility that homosexuality might be immutable (but don't act on it, be celibate), which has meant attenuating the church's prior faith in reparative therapy. And certainly in the wake of Prop 8 we've seen church leaders try to avoid provoking more embarrassing protests by publicly "making nice" with the gay community.

That's all good and well. But as long as the church is run by conservative straight males, with the ones at the very top in their 80s and 90s and living in a self-imposed bubble, a big dose of cynicism is in order. The changes we've seen in church discourse are ultimately about applying better make-up. Or, to use a different metaphor, they are a calculated "falling back" to a position that the church can more easily defend. I don't see evidence that church leadership is anywhere close to reconsidering their position that homosexual relations are contrary to God's will and an eternal dead-end. They're nowhere close to doing the kind of deep rethinking of Mormon doctrine that would be needed to create equality for gay/lesbian people in the LDS Church--along with gender equality, for that matter, since at root they're the same issue.

Cynic that I am, I look at the Mormon "It Gets Better" videos or the groups planning to march in Pride parades, and I wonder: How much do they owe to Mitt Romney? In other words, is church leadership leaving them alone, creating a space for them to operate, because the leaders know that the Romney campaign has heightened media scrutiny and public interest in Mormon controversies? If Romney loses and the media's attention drifts elsewhere, will we see the institution start applying pincers?

I will say this, though: the "It Gets Better" videos and the Pride marches have led me to revise my predictions of how "the gay issue" will unfold in Mormonism. My old prediction (which I voiced in a Sunstone symposium paper, I dunno, back in the late 1990s?) was that church leadership might be persuaded to back away from reparative therapy (happening) and might, at the absolute most, be persuaded to allow partnered gay/lesbian members to be active in the church in a kind of second-class status akin to that experienced by blacks before 1978. (Full church involvement is now allowed to celibate gays, and I've heard of bishops who encourage partnered gays to attend even if they're not calling-worthy.)

My revised prediction is this: The upper-level leadership--those conservative old men living in their bubble, along with all the yes-men who fill the bureaucracy that does their bidding--will continue to dig in their heels on the underlying issues while applying good make-up to try to dissuade the gays from picketing outside their temples. (Okay, okay, mixed metaphors.) But Mormonism will begin to look something like American Catholicism: a conservative hierarchy, but more progressive views among the laity. The clever ones will squeeze into the spaces opened up for them by the church's kinder, gentler rhetoric ("We teach our members to reach out in love to people with same-sex attraction") and then stretch those spaces much wider than the leadership intended. Wide enough to let them march in a Gay Pride parade, for instance. How much they can stretch before the institution starts pushing back remains to be seen.

You know what this means, don't you? If you want to keep the LDS Church under media scrutiny, and therefore under pressure to leave the progressives alone--you need to pray for Romney to win the presidency. If he loses, public interest in Mormons recede, and the church can go back to business as usual. If he becomes president--Mormon controversies stay newsworthy, and the institution has to walk more carefully. How's that for a quandary, O Mormon liberals?