Showing all posts in LGBT Issues

In LGBT Issues, Statistics

How often do BYU student speakers at commencement suggest they’re straight?

Author ZiffPosted on 18 Comments

Like many other people, I was dismayed to read Elder Holland’s recent speech at BYU where he advocated the use of metaphorical muskets to fire at people who he sees as not sufficiently faithful to the Church’s anti-LGBT stance. He seemed very concerned about a slippery slope that starts with a student expressing the idea (approved by powers that be in the administration!) that they were gay and also loved by God that might lead to . . . it’s unclear exactly what. Maybe a student would say they’re single and also loved by God, or trans and also loved by God. I can’t really get Elder Holland’s concern here, since the people approving the speeches work for the Q15, so if he doesn’t like that they approved it, he should maybe call an internal meeting over it rather than wringing his hands about it in public. Anyway, at the same time that he’s deeply concerned with this slippery slope, Elder Holland seems totally unconcerned with another slippery slope that he starts by bringing up the metaphor of using muskets to shoot at people who aren’t straight-friendly enough. This slippery slope starts with discussion of metaphorical musket fire and moves to discussion of real musket fire (helpfully already supplied by DezNat folks and their friends) and ends with physical violence against LGBT people. I think this should be a much bigger concern, but clearly Elder Holland doesn’t agree. I don’t even want to know how much he sympathizes with DezNat. I was clearly wrong when I placed him as “lean progressive” on my Q15 spectrum just a couple of months ago.

Photo by Daniel Sandvik on Unsplash

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In Conversion, Episcopalians, Hope, LGBT Issues

Choosing Life in an Affirming Church

Author LynnettePosted on 6 Comments

I knew that I probably shouldn’t let myself be encouraged by the unexpected news a few weeks ago that BYU was softening their stance on same-sex dating. Over the years, after all, you learn better than to hope. I remember attending my first Affirmation conference in the fall of 2015, and being blown away by the faith of so many of the people there, the confidence they had that eventually the church would make more room for them. The sheer exuberance of that hope was hard to resist. Despite my skepticism, it infected me a little. I mean, here was a crowd of LGBTQ people, surely a demographic bound for apostasy if anyone was, and more than anything it felt like EFY for queer people—complete with a dance, cheesy music, and even a testimony meeting at the end. I looked at this crowd and thought, okay, maybe I’m too skeptical. Maybe the church really will come around on these issues. How can they possibly resist this sort of faith? Read More

In Depression, LGBT Issues, Statistics

A Look at Crisis Text Line Data on LGBT Issues and Suicidality

Author ZiffPosted on 1 Comment

Crisis Text Line is a support service for people in crisis. It’s like a suicide hotline, but more general in that the service has crisis counselors trained to respond to a broad range of crises. Also unlike a traditional suicide hotline, it’s reached by text rather than by voice. As a result of this, according to a New Yorker story from 2015 about the service, most who use it are teenagers.

Of particular interest to me, the organization also publishes aggregate data about what types of crises its clients contact them about, and from what states, as well as trends by day of the week, time of day, and across historical time (since 2015). I thought it would be interesting to look at these data to see if there were evidence of the particular stress that LGBT people are put under in Mormonism, particularly after the November 2015 exclusion policy came to light.

Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the Crisis Text Line data doesn’t include information about clients’ religious affiliation, so I’ll just use the rough approximation of using Utah data as a proxy for Mormon experience. On the up side, though, a big advantage of these data is that they summarize reports of clients’ crises by type–where I’ll just be looking at LGBT-related and suicidal thinking–rather than having only completed suicide counts to go on. Distress over one’s sexual orientation or gender identity and suicidal thinking are surely far more common than suicide itself, so these data are potentially richer than data on completed suicides alone.

Here’s a map that shows US states ranked by frequency of clients texting about issues of gender or sexual identity as a percentage of all texts received from the state. Utah ranks number seven.

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In LGBT Issues, Theology

Some Thoughts Sparked by Taylor Petrey’s “Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology”

Author LynnettePosted on 20 Comments

At a conference earlier this year, I presented a brief (and admittedly self-serving) paper suggesting some of the reasons why Mormons need theology. I listed several areas where I saw a need for theological work, and I noted that one of the most pressing of these was our lack of queer theology. After my presentation, several people enthusiastically asked me exactly how one might go about doing queer theology, and I had to admit that I was only pointing to the need for it; I was still working out how one might actually do it. For this reason, and others, I was excited to see Taylor Petrey’s recent Dialogue article—a thoughtful approach to a topic about which most discussion produces more heat than light. I am still thinking this through, but I would like to play with some of the ideas that Taylor brings up. Read More