So much for that public relations makeover for the Mormon Church embrassed by the widespread reaction to their religious-based homophobic actions in the Proposition 8 fight to strip marriage rights from same-sex couples in California!
The leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Boyd. K. Packer, issued a sermon on Sunday which will likely lead to more early deaths of LGBT teenagers at their own hands as he reiterated heterosexual supremacist and virulently homophobic church dogma:
Same-sex attraction can be overcome and any type of union other than marriage between a man and a woman is morally wrong [emphasis added], an LDS apostle told millions of Mormons on Sunday.
“There are those today who not only tolerate but advocate voting to change laws that would legalize immorality, as if a vote would somehow alter the designs of God’s laws and nature,” Boyd K. Packer, president of the church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles, said in a strongly worded sermon about the dangers of pornography and same-sex marriage. “A law against nature would be impossible to enforce. Do you think a vote to repeal the law of gravity would do any good?”
Packer, speaking from his seat because of his frail health, addressed more than 20,000 members gathered in the LDS Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City and millions more watching the faith’s 180th Semiannual General Conference via satellite.
The senior apostle drew on the church’s 1995 declaration, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” to support his view that the power to create offspring “is not an incidental part of the plan of happiness. It is the key — the very key.”
Some argue that “they were pre-set and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural,” he said. “Not so! Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember he is our father.”
Alluding to the Utah-based church’s support of laws such as California’s Proposition 8 that would define marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman, Packer said, “Regardless of the opposition, we are determined to stay on course.”
“We cannot change; we will not change,” the senior apostle declared. “We quickly lose our way when we disobey the laws of God. If we do not protect and foster the family, civilization and our liberties must needs perish.”It should be noted that there is a direct (positive) correlation between the percentage of people who feel that homosexuality is a choice (as declared by Packer) and the percentage who disapprove of same-sex marriage.
Additionally, the notion that homosexuality is a choice and that young people who can not "overcome" their same-sex attraction is a key factor in may teen suicides. It should also be noted that in America, of course, marriage is a civil, legal institution which is open to people of all faiths (and no faith). What one religion believes about marriage should be irrelevant to how the state decides who can get married to whom.
I can honestly say that the widely broadcast words of the Mormon head will lead to more deaths (by suicide) of LGBT kids in America. The blood of those children are on Boyd Packer's hands.
