I was discussing the gay marriage rulings with a TBM friend. She said she was concerned about the effect of gay marriages on the church. I asked her what she was specifically worried about and she had difficulty articulating her fears. Finally she came up with the idea that the church would be forced to offer health insurance to gay couples.

I said that wasn't probable because people who work for the church had to have a temple recommed - not likely with gay people. I asked if she thought the missionaries would be forced to baptize married gays if they wanted to join the church. She hadn't thought of that. I asked if she thought it would be hard to teach children of gay parents in Primary or YMYW. She said it might be if their parents weren't worthy.

I could feel this under current in her thinking that the church would look bad no matter what it did (tho she didn't actually say that).

So what do you all think? How will the check be affected?

Damn. How will the CHURCH be affected?

The effect on them will be zilch.

But TBMs have been manipulated not just by TSCC, but by the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, Falwell, Huckabee, and others like them into believing the world will end. They somehow believe their marriages will be threatened, but they seem to never ask themselves how it will affect them if two people of the same sex are married. And of course it won't.

I cringed reading about the comment on teaching the children of gays in Primary. Maybe it's because I now live in Arkansas and could just hear in my mind similar bigoted discussions 50 years ago about how awful it might be to have Blacks in classrooms.

Good for you for spreading the gospel of reason.

I know somebody who works for the church. They are doing their damnedest to avoid giving health insurance to ANYBODY except essential full time employees. Any gay or straight person who continues to attend mo-church needs their head examined. Same sex marriage will have no effect on the mo-church except for teaching them to mind their own business.

I doubt it will have much effect on LDS Inc itself, but if two BYU SS students get married, life for the BYU administration, for whom the Q15 are the board of directors, could get very interesting.

The church is essentially a private club with a religious exemption, giving it even more leeway than the average private club, which already has quite a lot.

BYU, otoh, is in some sense a public entity, and they don't get the same leeway. I bet they have a herd of attorneys working at Warp Speed even as we speak.

it doesn't directly affect them at all, but it gnaws on their little brains, makes them uncomfortable and annoys them. Good enough for me!

I don't think marriage equality will force the church to change anything ecclesiastical; they could still deny black people, for instance, the priesthood or access to the temples if they wanted. By the same token, they could refuse to grant gays a range of religious privileges if they chose.

But Brother of Jerry raises an interesting issue at the point where the church becomes an employer and landlord, for there the laws actually could force significant changes. I'm not an employment lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt. But once the supreme court decided that segregation was illegal, restraints on who could rent or buy a home or apartment in a closed community were removed. And when the supremes decided that the state could not invade the bedroom, limits on housing and employment based on sexual behavior were reduced.

So the new rulings, assuming they are upheld by the supreme court, as I think they will be, could eventually influence housing and employment law. It may become impossible for the church to discriminate against gays when hiring at BYU, the COB, etc. I'd love for someone with expertise in employment law to step in here since this may be a very important aspect of the new court rulings.

But maybe not?

I'm no lawyer either, but I have worked for a religious institution in the past.

Agreeing to a code of conduct is fairly common when working for a religious institution. For instance, I had friends who lost their jobs for having sex outside of marriage even though that's not illegal. A girl got pregnant by her fiance and they both had to leave staff because they failed to live up to the morals they agreed to when they took the position.

BYU already has an honor code that encompasses lots of things that aren't a legal issue.

I think TSCC will be able to keep the gays out if they want to. I suspect that the number 1 thing that will cause them to make changes is bad press.

Interesting. Thanks.

I agree that bad press will have some effect. When it becomes obvious to outsiders that gays are not being allowed to join the church it will become common knowledge and TSCC could become the butt of many jokes. When gay students get kicked out of BYU for marrying one another it will become obvious that it is more than just loss of a temple recommend. It is discrimination. It may be legal discrimination because BYU will never divulge what was the cause of losing the temple recommend. Such is the nature of freedom of religion laws. However, I think it will become obvious to anyone that knows the church processes that they are discriminating and punishing at the same time.

TSCC has been working very hard over the last few decades to look normal in the eyes of everyday people. But as social norms change TSCC will go back to being odd, peculiar, and downright awful. The leaders are going to have to decide pretty darn quick if they want to keep trying to cover-up their behavior, change their behavior, or stick to the status quo. I suspect they will continue trying to cover-up their behavior until it doesn't work any more. Status quo will cause numbers to dwindle and change will force them to admit they were either not inspired or were wrong which the Top 15 despise doing. Watching LDS Inc. squirm is interesting.

The social change that brought about legal gay marriage, that will cause TSCC to change or become irrelevant, as many social movements have done to religion throughout history.

The effect will be that everyone else will see marriage equality
as normal and good. The Church will not look good in the eyes
of the public.

That is the only "bad effect."

The Mormons were just fine with their racist policies and
teachings regarding Blacks. . . until the Civil Rights movement
made racism an ugly thing in the eyes of most Americans. Then
the Church looked bad. Where do you think the 1978 revelation
came from?

Don't allow Christians to frame the debate. They get stuck on whether or not the Bible says it's ok to be a bigot. They can point to NO verse that says that it's ok to deny homosexuals rights.

They cannot find the justification for institutionalized bigotry - because there IS NONE. The US is NOT a Christian country. We have a lot of Christians, but we are not a Christian country.

And there is nothing in the Constitution of the United States that says we have to consult the Bible when writing or enforcing laws. Anybody who says we have to make a law and make everybody else follow it because "it's in the Bible" is not being intellectually honest with you. Don't waste your time with people like that. They are confused about the topic of debate.

Another topic that Christians are perpetually confused about is "majority rule." Actually, the US was founded on the idea that the mob mentality is a bad thing. What they mean when they say "majority rules" is that they support mob mentality. US law was written to protect the minority. That's why we have freedom of religion. You can be in a religion that is less than 1% of the population in the US, but your religious freedom is guaranteed. None of the "majority rules" nonsense.

Don't let Christians confuse you. They don't even know that they have been misled.

Finally, if you have somebody who absolutely insists that homosexuality is a sin because it's in the Bible, and that we must use the Bible to inform our legislation, ask them when we are going to enact a law against remarriage. Getting remarried is considered adultery and the Bible is against that. Luke 16:18

As them if it's OK to have a female boss, or even a female teacher. Timothy 2:11
Maybe we should make that a law, too.

Should we enact a law that says if a woman defends her husband, we have to cut off her hand? Deuteronomy 25:11-12

If a woman loses her virginity before getting married, should we sentence her to death? Deuteronomy 22: 20-21

If none of these things should be a law, why should we make a special exception and create a law for something that the Bible just doesn't like?

Good luck out there, folks. It's an ignorant world, and they want to make you ignorant, too. That's why I say, don't even spend time with people like that.

T-Bone

Good post.

The Bible makes a huge deal about divorce being Baaaaaaaddddd.
Yet Christians generally ignore that and harp on things like gay marriage.

They don't even have a good reason for justifying their inconsistencies. There's no reasoning with those types. The Bible is their tool to justify any darn thing they want.

The Mormon church has had its head in the sand so long on this gay issue that they are not prepared for all the implications of having gay families in their communities, like the OP pointed out.

Well I certainly think it will have an effect on TSCC in the social arena. The reason they are so afraid of SSM being legalized is for none of the reasons they state. The reason is because it will help normalize homosexuality in society. Once society becomes supportive of gays then TSCC will have to change their stance on homosexuality otherwise they will look like bigots, like with blacks and the priesthood.

Exactly.

TSCC has painted themselves into a corner on this topic. They taught that gay marriage was an attack on the institution of marriage, and that it would affect everyone. When gay marriage goes ahead and nobody is negatively affected, some morgbots will realize that they have been misled.

But the heterosexual marriages will be destroyed by gay marriage!

(Someone at the Huffblog made a comment about how marriage is going to be destroyed. I'll share it here. It gave me a chuckle.)

Here's how gay marriage will wreck your heterosexual marriage:

The heterosexual marriage wife will see the gay couple down the street is more loving, romantic or has better decor. She'll be pissed because HER husband isn't like that!

(Sorry for the stereotyping which is obviously not true. :-))

Seriously, I've yet to hear just HOW gay marriage is supposed to destroy marriage.

Gay marriage will destroy hetero marriage because ... because ...


Well, just because, that's why!

Heard it on Duck Dynasty so its got to be the gospel truth!

Timothy



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/26/2013 11:42AM by Timothy.

Looks like the church is no way ready to give up their position.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865592954/Utah-has-historic-opportunity-with-vigorous-defense-of-marriage-law.html

But isn't traditional Utah marriage plural marriage?

I also think the church facilitated the current situation since there is no waiting period or residency requirement for marriage in Utah. This was probably done to allow people to travel and be married in the temple, especially before the McTemple era.

Looking at the countless pictures of happily marrying same sex couples, some with children present, it's hard to see that they threaten anything. Rather, the unabashed joy, in public for all the world to see, may be just the thing to revive the institution of marriage.

"But isn't traditional Utah marriage plural marriage?"

Exactly. Of all the people who should STFU about who should marry who, it is the Mormons. Talk about Karma.

"Talk about karma ..."

My favorite comment on the SLC Trib site when the announcement was made:

Dear Utah
Karma's a bitch.
Love, California

That's. Just. Rich.

Thanks.

Or "Karma ran over your dogma"

Anyone who is gay or gay married and still in the church won't complain and will just take whatever the church gives them, otherwise why would they still be in the church (unless there’re into that kind of kink.) The other question to ask is how are gay people affecting you now? We are all around you. We shop at the same stores, go to the same schools, eat at the same restaurants and use the same dishes. As far as health care; if they have a business they are part of the govenment and subject to the same laws. Why should gay people have to pay for str8 insurance? Why should we have to pay for schools for those who don't have kids?

"I asked her what she was specifically worried about and she had difficulty articulating her fears. Finally she came up with the idea that the church would be forced to offer health insurance to gay couples."

Oh, right, because it's totally okay for a gay person to provide labor for the church, to spent 40+ hours a week working for a low salary to the benefit of the church, as long as the church doesn't have to give them the same benefits as the straight employees who are providing the exact same labor.

Gay marriage will have absolutely no effect on the LDS church. However it will take church authorities quite a while to figure this out.

What about the biblical law against wearing cotton and linen, or blending cotton and linen together? Let's stone a bunch CEOs of retail chains.

Don't garments come in a cotton blend?

The effect of marriage equality in Utah will be that church leadership will be eating a lot of crow from now on which will thin many of them down; something that Tom Monson could surely benefit from. Unless properly plucked the remnant feathers on the meat could be cause for a lot of spitting and choking and irritation. And of course the possibility of undercooked crow could be the source of avian flu and a host of other bird-related maladies.

I've heard that Gayle Ruzika is already having a tough time with her first meal of crow, poor thing. Someone told her not to worry, that it tastes like chicken. But all that sputtering and muttering and choking would seem to indicate otherwise. Well, at least it's got her mouth occupied for awhile, right? At least now she'll have an excuse for the bitter bile on her lips.