If we had to leave every institution that has problems with racism, queerphobia, ableism, sexism, xenophobia, classism, heterosexism, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, ageism, and so on, where would we go? What’s institutions could we engage in?

I stay for a variety of reasons, but one is that by being here church members and leaders have to see that queer people exist and confront that what they teach about and require of us is unfair.

I think religions give people a purpose for their life, to feel like their life has meaning. Before science, religion attempted to explain the phenomena observed, but science has taken much of that role.

For thousands of years, people only observed the sun and planets from earth without telescopes or other tools, and it appeared that earth is at the center of the galaxy, everything revolves around the it. The Catholic Church came up with a beautiful theology for why earth is the center of God's creations and everything circles around us.

Galileo Galilei improved on the telescope and used it to record evidence that the earth actually orbits the sun. This challenged the theology of the church. Rather than recognize the reality of the evidence, the church declared Galileo a heretic and put tremendous pressure on him to make him recant the sun-centered theory, banned the publishing of his work, and kept him under house arrest the remainder of his life.

It took a hundred years for the Catholic Church to lift the ban on printing his works, it took about another 100 years for the Catholic Church to permit the teaching of heliocentrism, and another 150 years before the church apologized and officially acknowledged Galilei was correct.

I believe this story describes the danger for religions and churches, which is that they love their theological stories so much that they are willing to deny reality and to suppress evidence which contradicts what they've taught.

The LDS Church believed in white superiority and supported this with teachings and restrictions against dark-skinned people of African descent. Science eventually showed that race is not a biological reality but rather a social construct, and that humans actually began in Africa and emigrated from there to the rest of the world, meaning all of us could be said to be of African descent. Still the church clung to its teachings even as society evolved to see that people are similar and deserve to be treated equally with dignity and respect without regard to their race or ethnicity. It was late to do so, but eventually the LDS Church lifted the restrictions and abandoned the teachings because to not do so would harm the church because these were considered obviously racist and wrong. I can't imagine the church would be thriving today if it still held those racist teachings and restrictions.

Similarly, queer people exist. We don't fit the theology of the LDS Church. The church fought hard against gay rights and gay marriage, and currently is taking hard stances against trans people because it valued the theology more than the reality of queer people and their lives.

It isn't just the LDS Church. It seems everyday somewhere in the United States a new law is being proposed to make life tougher for queer people, to limit their access to health care, to remove their pathways to create their own families, to roll back legal rights that they use for their protection and to build their lives. These laws are being pushed by Christians who see gays, trans and queer folks as a direct challenge to their beliefs.

We may talk about how the early Christians suffered under the Romans at the time of Christ and thereafter, or the persecutions of those in various Reformations. We may speak about more modern memories of martyrs as we remember Hawn's Mill, or Joseph and Hyrum, or the hardships of the pioneers. We may relive and retell these stories. We may even build monuments to remember.

And yet: When our reliving, retelling and remembering reinforces our own suffering at the hands of those who created environments of discrimination against us in the past, but we cannot see the environments of discrimination we have created and force upon others in the present, then I begin to wonder if we have learned the lessons Jesus has for us in these recollections.

Jesus warned us about beholding the mote in our brother's eye while failing to see the beam in our own eye.

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.

The world is oftentimes such an ugly place, but sometimes it can be so beautiful.

Like, when two choirs, one from Croatia and the other from Zimbabwe, met on the opposite sides of a Lisbon subway station and both sang to each other.

I unfortunately do not know what the Zimbabwe children choir sang to them (although it was so beautiful), but the Croatian klapa Kastav sang 'Kuća puna naroda' (a house full of people).

And let my reward be a house full of people, my life, give me a voice, so I can embrace you with songs.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

In the early 1970′s, a young man named Byron Marchant moved with his new family into a little house in Salt Lake City across the street from Liberty Park. His new congregation asked him to serve as scoutmaster for their Scout troop. 

He encouraged neighborhood boys to join regardless of whether they belonged to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His neighborhood had a large minority population and that was reflected in the Scout troop. Byron selected two African-American scouts to be the senior patrol leader and the assistant patrol leader. 

Then in 1973 the Church announced a new policy, the Deacons Quorum presidency was to also be the scout troop leadership. That meant Byron would need to replace the top two leaders in his troop. And even if they joined the Church, since African-Americans were not allowed to be ordained to the Church’s priesthood, and therefore couldn’t be president of a priesthood quorum, the former troop leaders would not be allowed to be troop leaders again.  

Byron Marchant figured that whoever conceived of this policy just didn’t consider that some church troops would have the demographics that his had. He went to his bishop and continued all the way up the ladder of leadership, thinking if they heard about his troop that he could get an exception. Instead he was rejected at every level and warned that his pleas could result in church discipline

For Byron, this was not the end. He stood outside of General Conference passing out literature questioning the Church’s discrimination of Blacks and he contacted the NAACP. This resulted in Byron meeting President Spencer W. Kimball so that he could explain to the President of the Church his reasons for alerting the NAACP.

In 1974 the NAACP accused the LDS Church of discriminating against a 12-year-old Black child by not allowing him to be a senior patrol leader and planned to file suit against the Boy Scouts of America for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (they decided not to take the LDS church to court because of the special protections that religions have under the First Amendment).

“While we very reluctantly acknowledge the L.D.S. church’s legal right to maintain its doctrine excluding blacks from the priesthood, we are outraged when that doctrine finds expression in the church’s secular activities.”

That lawsuit led to an audience with the Church’s First Presidency for Byron to explain himself for why he took actions which led to the lawsuit which the Church saw it as the most significant challenge to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since the 1890s polygamy days.

Eventually the Boy Scouts reached a settlement with the NAACP and the Church had to reverse the policy and priesthood was no longer required for a boy to be a leader in Church-sponsored troops.

The refusal by the Church leadership to recognize the discriminatory effect of its policy on African-American youth affected Byron. He started learning about the origins of Church’s ban of Black people from the temple and the priesthood. 

In 1977 he even visited Church archives and saw the priesthood ordination certificate for Elijah Abel, an African-American. With permission of the archivist, he made a written copy of the certificate, typed it up at home, and began distributing it to the press & public in August 1977.

He no longer felt he could remain silent about the discriminatory policy of the priesthood/temple ban and one afternoon each week Byron would carry a sign in front of the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City.

Byron and a few other like-minded Mormons planned to carry out a protest on Temple Square during the October 1977 General Conference. 

Marchant’s local leaders threatened to hold a disciplinary court, but he promised to stop the protest if his leaders promised not to convene a court. 

Byron still wanted to make his point and in the General Conference of October 1977, when it was time to sustain Church leadership, Byron spoke up from the balcony of the Tabernacle. This was the first opposing vote in General Conference since the 1800′s. 

The cameras didn’t turn to see him cast his dissenting vote, but hundreds of thousands of people listening by radio or watching on TV heard his voice.

President Tanner: It seems, President Kimball, that the voting has been unanimous in favor of these officers and General Authorities, and we would ask those new members of the First Quorum of the Seventy to take their seats with their brethren, please.

Voice from the gallery: President Tanner? President Tanner?

President Tanner: Yes?

Voice from the gallery: Did you note my negative vote?

President Tanner: No. Let me see it.

Voice from the gallery: Up here.

Security escorted Byron from the building and he explained to the press that his negative vote was to highlight the injustice of the priesthood ban. 

Twelve days later he became the 2nd member excommunicated for opposing the Church’s priesthood ban. He was also fired from his job as ward janitor. His excommunication made national news. Eight months later, President Kimball announced to the world that male members of African ancestry could now hold the priesthood.

Byron Marchant truly embodied the Mormon phrase “Do what is right, let the consequence follow.” It’s easy to conform and go along, and difficult to stand alone. 

It was the treatment of children which opened Byron’s eyes. This still happens today, parents have a child come out as LGBT or they learn of the sexually-explicit questions that had been asked to their child by a bishop, and it opens their eyes to some problematic things in this Church, and those parents speak up.