Tuesday, April 11, 2017

I love you, I love you, I love you?

Apparently an openly gay man who is a stake executive secretary in Florida calling himself  Nerdy Gay Mormon has recently written about an incident on his blog and facebook about how a year ago or so a visiting General Authority (a member of the Seventy) treated him especially lovingly. His article has gone viral. We take the story with a grain of salt; maybe he has embellished it to make it sound more dramatic---some people think lying is actually good if it gets their point across better. But so far this little vignette has not been refuted or corrected and there seems to have been several witnesses.

To make a long story short, Nerdy Gay says the GA visited his stake and showed him special attention and affection, touching, full-body hugging, whispering “I love you” threes times in his ear. He treated him this way because Nerdy told him he was gay. And no, he didn't treat anyone else like this. Nerdy goes on to say that in his talk the GA said that church members who think homosexuality is a sin are unkind and need to be corrected.

Boy, if this story is true it sure sounds like homosex is not just welcome, it's more than welcome in our midst. And again, that means traditional values are not welcome. Apparently, good old family values, which come from God, are now unkind and need to be corrected.

We have tried to get in touch with this GA to find out if this story is true as Nerdy has told it, but to no avail. A substitute secretary was no help. So they can't leave messages? Then his real secretary said she would tell her boss about our question. When we called again several days later she said she had not informed him about our question (whoa, what?  secretaries are running the church?), but we could talk to this other man---who turned out to be in the security department!

So you call up a church office building which has telephones which get answered and if you have a question they don't like they refer you to Security? (This has actually happened to us more than once.) This man did not know anything about the incident; he had not checked into it. We told him we just wanted to know if this happened as this guy said it did on social media gone viral that our grown children are incredulous about, or not? He made an excuse that there is too much material out there for them to deal with. We wonder what people do in that building and what the priorities are. Something that goes viral is pretty important. He presumed to warn us not to let our “faith” suffer because of stuff on the internet, as if this was his prepared statement whenever people have uncomfortable questions. Here he seemed to mean faith in the church institution. We assured him our faith was in the Lord Jesus Christ, so no, it wasn’t suffering. What we needed was to find out if this event had not occurred as related by Nerdy Gay Mormon, hoping that we could assure our children and friends that no, our church members and leaders don’t act this way and say these things. As fifth and sixth-generation, tithe-paying, service-doing, temple-going members it would seem we have a right to know what our leadership is publicly saying and doing; otherwise there is no leadership. The security guy said he’d check it out but probably not get back to us. Say again?  

All it takes is for this GA to say if this happened as reported or not. It isn't rocket technology. But he is unavailable. Permanently. At least to us. Make of that what you will. We say, it must be true, or he doesn't mind if it isn't entirely true and everybody thinks it is. In other words, he wants to be thought of as entirely pro-gay, which is entirely anti-traditional values. Otherwise he'd surely deny or at least clarify it.

It’s like, in this time of instantaneous communications, we’re not supposed to wonder about anything we see, whether it’s true or false or exaggerated or whatever. They aren’t going to tell us what is true or false and we’re not supposed to discern, as if we are made of straw or wood, as Thoreau put it. Well, God didn't make us unthinking lumps, he gave us functioning minds and hearts, and we do not live in a vacuum. The world around us is hugely pro-homosex. What is happening is that church members are swallowing this churchy story, hook, line, and sinker. Because of this unchallenged viral story homosexuality is being further accepted among church members. This must be what the church wants to have happen, or they would say something.

When things are unclear or uncharacteristic or inconsistent like this from the top, it ends up that members are always having to second guess or conjecture or surmise, based on whatever they happen to want, or what they see in front of them. This is happening all over with regards to the gay/transgender Boy Scout thing.When a church does and says nothing, when they don't correct errors made in public, people make their own various surmises, i.e. no leadership; and the house is divided into innumerable parts. That's what the word anarchy means: no leader.

If we had a child struggling against porn addiction and homosexuality right now, this stuff coming from within the church---Nerdy's story, the way the church isn't correcting it, the positive way members are responding on social media---would be very discouraging and destructive. We guess it's just more of this new brand of welcoming homosexuality into our midst.

No one seems to care that in seconds you will come across lewd porn on this stake exec sec Nerdy Gay Mormon's blog. Our security guy said he couldn't do anything about that. Well, that is dismissive and not true. There is something called church discipline. People get in trouble all the time, but not Nerdy Gay Mormon apparently. At the very least, this GA should know that pornography and lust is what he is encouraging, and what is being promoted, if he doesn't refute it. This lewd stuff is part and parcel of the gay lifestyle.

A little reading of Mormon gays’writings on blogs and comments reveals emotional illness, narcissism, obsession with male genitalia, sex as a prioritized 'need,' and the erotic sexualization of even the most casual human gestures and interactions. Indeed, Nerdy Gay’s interaction with a handsome church leader reads like a cheap gay romance novel. Suddenly there he was framed in the doorway, and stuff like that. Gross! It's gross no matter who is doing it. Decent people don't think of strangers in this way.

Also, what is this detail about how these stake offices have their own bathroom? What does that have to do with the story unless Nerdy has some preoccupation with bathrooms and what homosexuals commonly do in them? 

If this did not happen, it showcases the erotic pornographic homosexual mindset of Nerdy Gay Mormon/a stake executive secretary, and shouldn’t somebody help him? But if the church leader really did do all this flattering and special touching, for heaven’s sake, why?  G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) said, “All healthy men, ancient and modern, know there is a certain fury in sex that we cannot afford to inflame . . . ” Why would anybody who really cared about Nerdy Gay go out of his way to do something that could incite or encourage his self-determined gay identity and lusts? Why not just treat him like everybody else and play down the preoccupation with sex and sexuality?

How about the following quotes (apparently now shredded in wastebaskets)?

"If someone seeking your help says to you, . . . 'I am gay,' correct this miscasting. Heavenly Father does not speak of his children this way and neither should we. It is simply not true. To speak this way seeds a doubt and deceit about who we really are."
--Bishop Keith B. McMullen, 2010 Evergreen Conference

“ The most wicked of lies is that they cannot change and repent and that they will not be forgiven. That cannot be true. They have forgotten the Atonement of Christ.”
--Boyd K. Packer, May 2006

“Too many Latter-day Saints today somehow believe they can stand with one hand touching the walls of the temple while the other hand fondles the unclean things of the world."
-- Bruce C. Hafen, "Your Longing for Family Joy," Ensign, Oct. 2003

President Spencer W. Kimball reminded us that the prophets “constantly cry out against that which is intolerable in the sight of the Lord," including homosexuality, both in lust and physical acts.  He continued: “That such things should be found even among the Saints to some degree is scarcely believable . . . ” 

“The homosexual rights movement was born out of a desire to be tolerated. Through the years it seems to have morphed into a crusade bent on forcing all of society, even conservative churches, to accept and celebrate homosexuality as natural, normal and healthy.”
--Kelly Boggs, in Baptist Recorder, 11/6/13

"As a practical matter, being an open homosexual is indistinguishable from proclaiming a belief that homosexual acts are morally innocent. After all, if one accepted the traditional view that such acts are morally impermissible, one would ordinarily keep one’s inclination to them to oneself." (Emphasis ours.)
--Carson Holloway, "The Boy Scouts' Doomed Compromise."

"For Christians to accept some kind of validity with respect to homosexuality is for those same 'Christians' to turn on the Lord Jesus — whose arms are open to welcome homosexuals out of their identity, out of their habits, out of their former life, and into His liberating Grace."--Michael Glatze, ex- homosexual, in Renew America, 5/12/2010

"Recently, the [Mormon] church has called openly gay individuals to responsible positions in the church — persons also permitted to attend the church's temples, available only to the most 'worthy' members. Church leaders say such callings are limited to non-practicing 'chaste' gays — an oxymoron that reveals leaders' naïveté, since by any reasonable definition, a homosexual is someone engaged in the gay lifestyle, not someone who merely thinks about it, or long ago gave it up."
--Renew America article about Mormons and Boy Scouts by Stephen Stone

Note 5/27/2017
 We heard back from the Security guy. He said that everything happened exactly as Nerdy Gay Mormon writes on his [pornographic] blog. Make of that what you will. 

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