If you tell them you are gay and if you are in some way “acting on it”, (Whatever that means. The church’s definition, not mine.) you stand in a position to be excommunicated.
If you just have an attraction, and never “acted on it”, you are probably safe in telling your bishop. But, IMO, it’s none of anybody’s business, if you’re not acting on it. If you can live that way, (I did for over 20 years.) more power to you. Living a lie for so long was tearing up my life, and I had to come clean with myself and the rest of the world.
At this point, the choice is up to you. But, it has to be your choice. Don’t let some “Gay community group” talk you into coming out if you are not ready. They already have enough martyrs. They don’t need you to be their next victim.
Some people are afraid of excommunication and try to stay in hiding for the rest of their lives, hoping the church will never find out. I told them and they excommunicated me. I don’t really mind, and I have no hard feelings. I may have lost the church, but I never lost God, and that is what’s really important to me.
One of the things that helped me reconcile all of this back in the 80’s was a pamphlet from Affirmation about excommunication. It basically explained that it was not the end of the world.
I have, over the years, seen the church lose some of its best, smartest, most capable, and most faithful members because they came out as gay. This, IMHO, is a terrible shame and a waste, but this is the game they want to play.
But, before you do anything, I would make sure you have a strong support system of friends, associates, and hopefully family to back you up, whatever your decision is. It going to be tough to make any decision, and it’s going to be tough living with any decision, but such is life. Nobody said it was going to be easy, and this is how we grow.
Sorry to have to say this because many church teachings actually clarify and elucidate some of the darker passages of the Bible, but, here, the LDS Church has fellen into the same trap of mis-interpretation, mis-translation, and mis-application of Biblical passages that the sectarians have fallen into.
Nowhere does the Bible provide a definitive definition of marriage, and nowhere does the Bible condemn a stable, faithful, committed relationship or marriage between two people of the same sex. The D&C tells us (29:30) that not all God’s judgments are given to man. So, until God sees fit to reveal them all, we must never presume that we know them all.
Some say: “Gods laws are eternal, and it is not our place to question them.”
Let’s dissect this statement.
(1) These are not “God’s laws” in the sense that God owns them, or they originated with God. These are laws that God has to follow, himself. As Joseph Smith taught, following these laws is how God became God. Or, as the Book of Mormon teaches, unless God follows these laws, “God would cease to be God”.
(2) Man becomes like God, or more correctly, develops those godlike attributes inherent within him, on the same principles.
(3) But, if any church, teacher, prophet, guru, etc. claims to speak for God and tells you what God’s laws are, our religion teaches us that we have not only the RIGHT, but the DUTY to question those pronouncements and find out whether the laws are true or fabrications. There are two ways we can do this: (A) By going directly to God, ourselves, or (B) Discovering these principles, for ourselves, by life experience.
(4) It IS your place to question what a church teaches and claims to be a “law of God”. In the end, it is you and you alone who is responsible for your own salvation. You stand or fall based on your freewill obedience to divine principles, not on your blind or forced obedience to what some church tells you are divine principles. You can either live the Gospel, or what you think it the Gospel. In this light, it is IMPERATIVE that each man learn the truth for himself.
(5) If a church comes to you claiming to teach the “law of God”, it is up to you to judge whether they are “(A) telling the truth, (B) the whole truth, and (C) nothing but the truth”.
- (A) As I previously said, the principles the church cites in this article are not factually true, if their sole basis for their claim is the English translation of the King James Bible.
- (B) The church is not telling the whole truth, because there has been no fresh revelation, (to them at least, though God will reveal His mind and will on this subject to any person who is humble enough to ask for it), and we are told that the judgments of God are not all given to man, neither are we told what qualifies a person for the lower two degrees of the Celestial Kingdom.
- (C) Given their statement, it is impossible to separate out what are the laws of God and what is the cultural bias of the evangelical right-wing political rhetoric, so they are guilty of adding to the truth.
(6) But, if a person chooses not to follow those laws set up by some man-made church, either through ignorance of them, or through blind rebellion, or because he chooses to follow the laws of God, not the laws of man, what right does any church or religion have to step outside of its own ecclesiastical circle and trample, in the public area, on those individuals who choose not to these laws which they believe to be of God? I refer you to D&C 134, which clearly delineates the boundary between church and state.
John144 