On Mormons and Gay Marriage

[This is a re-posting of a blog post originally posted here]

This issue first cropped up for me three years ago. I was living in Boulder, Colorado and in one of the statewide elections the question of defining marriage was on the ballot. With much less brouhaha than in California, the motion carried to amend the state constitution to define marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman. Since that time, I’ve been trying to reconcile my thoughts onto the issue into some sort of coherent whole.

The first part of the conundrum for me lies in the LDS view on homosexuality. Quite simply, it’s a sin. If you are actively gay, you cannot qualify as worthy to hold a temple recommend. I don’t think you are de facto excommunicated, or dropped from the church records, but it’s pretty safe to say that the church authorities and God view your actions as being very much contrary to the plan of Heaven. This is not to say you’re evil, just that you’re making less-good life choices.

The second part of my dilemma lies in the fact that we believe that this government was divinely inspired. Certainly not all the leaders have been, but the ideals and the expression thereof are of God. Included in those ideals is the concept that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That means that everyone should be allowed to pursue happiness in whatever manner they see fit as long as it doesn’t impede on the pursuit of happiness of others, more or less.

So, even if homosexuality is a sin (part one), gays should still be allowed to get married if it’s something they want to do to try for happiness, right (part two)? Keep in mind, I’ve been mulling this over for three years and hadn’t resolved anything.

Recently, I was looking in to this issue again, trying to find some peace of mind for myself and I realized that I’d been looking at things a little askance.

Y’see, in God’s plan, marriage isn’t about pursuing happiness. It’s about creating family units. The original goal of marriage wasn’t to express deep and undying love for another person; it was about creating an ideal environment in which a family, including children, could flourish and develop. Granted, this is much easier if husband and wife are happy together, but that’s not the primary aim. Having a family is.

This is also most likely the biggest reason why homosexuality is such a big deal. Because whether they’re married or not, gay lovers will never produce offspring. The equipment just won’t work for them that way.

This is also also most likely the biggest reason why extramarital sex is such a big deal. Any sexual act, in God’s plan, has the primary aim of creating a family. Pleasure and bonding are secondary to that primary goal. Doing that kind of thing outside of marriage is not part of family building and works against the way the plan is supposed to work.

So, from an LDS theological perspective, gay marriage is a bit of an oxymoron. Since marriage is about creating the ideal family unit and that’s literally impossible from the get-go in that situation, it doesn’t fit into our definition of marriage. So, what is being posited by the church is less a new definition of marriage and more a recognition of the definition of marriage that’s been the de facto definition for eons, and we’ve just forgotten it along the way.

I realize that one may argue then that infertile heterosexual couples fail to meet this definition of marriage, and that may be technically true. However, they have the potential whether in this life or the eternities to be able to procreate. That’s a potential that gay couples don’t have.

In a nutshell, God has always seen marriage and sex as family-building and any deviation from that primary goal is a deviation from the way God wants things done. Admittedly, this doesn’t cover all the questions tied to this issue. If you want to throw out your specifics, I’ll do my best to come up with answers (but it might take three years). I still have some questions I’m working on myself, but this way of looking at things makes sense to me. It’s helped me reconcile things in my own fractured little head and thought it may help those who wonder how this all fits together.

But then again, maybe not.