It's at http://blogs.standard.net/the-political-surf/2012/05/08/lds-church-is-slowly-but-consistently-moving-to-tolerance-on-homosexuality/

Obviously Gibson is NOM at the least.  He writes columns about churchy stuff fairly regularly and it is always stuff that touches the fringes or goes beyond.  I applaud him and the Standard for doing this.  He may be doing more to free people of the Mormon church than anyone alive.  He writes a column, under his name, in one of the major newspapers in the middle of Utah.  Lots of people have got to be reading his stuff... 

Whilst I agree that a shift is a good thing, this is in effect, shift by stealth and really struggle to respect it. I see it as weasling towards respecting gays.

 

I recently heard a gay Catholic priest argue that in reality, this is how large conservative organisations change on issues like this. There were distinct parallels between Mormonism and Catholicism in what he described. 

 

And it struck me as I listened to him, that that snail-like slithering towards a more progressive position is likely not something most PostMos I know, can respect. It works like trimming off or excluding the more Neanderthal remarks from one end of the argument, and the result is a slow movement of the centre of mass towards modernity in some sort of vague relative progress through trimming off rejections. That they were formerly warmly embraced positions is no problem, as many members have very selective memories and even fossils die off over time.

 

The other observation I'd make, is that this is a very slow process, which might be viable in a slow change setting, but attitudes towards G&Ls are shifting quite rapidly in teh broader community, suggesting Mormonism will lag badly and consistently. 

 

I suspect that it the the gap between this and the notion of 'vision' that we associate with both religious and secular visionaries, that we struggle with. This is more like some sort of slug slowly slithering towards modernity.

 

Daryl