Janice Graham

[We] called and spoke with Professor Morgan and Renata Forste, the department chairman. When asked why the meeting was being held, we were told that BYU students need a greater understanding of homosexual attraction in order to be kinder and more accepting of students who experience it. We were told these gay students are keeping the law of chastity and are not acting out sexually, so there is no honor code issue involved. We wondered how Prof. Morgan could know this, if all students who will attend the meeting have been screened for sexual abuse done to them or by them, or for wrong ideas and attitudes about sex and sexuality, or for current sexual impurity, how this is being defined, and if the gay students have told the truth. Homosexual behaviors are by nature practiced and spread in secret, BYU being no exception.

If there really are any innocent, clueless students jumping on the now public gay bandwagon for the novelty, youthful rebelliousness, sense of belonging, special attention, or politics of it, they had better find out quick what gayness really is —and so had Prof. Morgan — or they won't be innocent or ignorant for long. They will be recruited in earnest.

Our book Captain of My Soul, the true story of a young man's dark past experience during his freshman year at BYU ten years ago getting initiated into homosexual behaviors by older men via chat rooms and phone calls, shines the light on the grim reality of these covered sins.

Gay activism has done a great job presenting homosexuality as harmless, equal to heterosexuality, even virtuous, honest, praiseworthy. But homosexuality is not harmless, natural to the human body, chaste, pure, or wholesome in any form. The very nature of homosexuality is out of bounds.

Prof. Morgan related that the BYU counseling center no longer works with students on overcoming homosexual attractions, but merely on learning how to deal with them. So, according to this professor, young people are being told, without the benefit of knowledge and understanding as to how this came about and the spiritual, mental, and physical health dangers, that gay is the way they are, and here's how to accept it. There is no concern for the mortal testing, temporal future, or eternal soul of the young person, no understanding of their impressionable, impulsive, and fallen human nature, no interest in past or future suffering, and no cheering for righteousness, excellence, and nobleness, only what appears to be a perverse motivation to advance the current worldly whim. Can this travesty be true? Perhaps partly. But we happen to know there are still some right‑thinking people at BYU, including at the Counseling Center and send them our prayers.

Suicidal feelings and attempts, and depression are always mentioned by those promoting the social acceptance of youth homosexuality. Our conversation with Prof. Morgan was no exception; these serious problems are always ridiculously simplified to putting the blame on others. A victim mentality passes off personal responsibility and never helped anyone. Young people who feel suicidal or depressed are immature and easily persuaded, distracted, and recruited into all sorts of escapist causes and addictions. These problems may have less to do with sexuality than with the terrible conflict between right and wrong raging in the soul. There may be mental illness, as in the famous but misrepresented case of Stuart Matis. Many may desperately need clinical and medical attention. Tragically, the deep core issues are not being emphasized or even addressed. Instead, all is focused on the popular and politicized, self‑identified gayness of the sick person.

Apart from mental illness, it takes humility and repentance and an abandonment of sinful desires possible through Christ in order to change and improve ourselves. This can happen to everyone. In fact, thousands of people with homosexual tendencies and lifestyles have left it all behind.

This meeting, where young people with homosexual attractions will talk about how okay SGA [same‑gender attraction] is, and how bad they have it at BYU, is ill‑conceived. Not only will it not be helpful, it will be harmful, harmful to the souls of those giving the talks, harmful to those young minds listening who will be supported in covering both inward and outward sins and initiated further into homosexuality, and harmful to all those these people come in contact with.

[We remember] that just a couple of years ago, being openly gay and advocating for homosexuality was considered against the honor code. Apparently it's perfectly fine now, no matter what the honor code still states about unchastity. This shows that rules and codes and laws don't matter so much as the popular consciousness does. Where is our will? Is it with God, with teaching His timeless correct and saving principles no matter how unpopular, or is it with the sycophantic political correctness of the day?

By the way, the only defense of the social experiment called gay parenting students could come up with was to compare it as better than foster homes, orphanages, and bad traditional parents. Besides having no information on which to base this comparison, and besides respectable foster parents, honorable orphanages, and imperfect but striving traditional parents rightly taking umbrage at this comparison, the issue is not about comparing these situations. The issue is that gay parents are modeling sinful and highly harmful and risky sexual ideas and behaviors to innocent, untaught children.

If you think BYU upholds traditional family values, think again. Certain department heads, professors, guest lecturers, and students have become a law unto themselves, regularly preaching all manner of progressivism including socialism, radical feminism, anti‑Americanism, revisionist history, outdated Darwinism, and popular homosexualism, and continue to be supported, employed, and welcomed.

Interestingly, we don't have to worry about Soulforce anymore because now BYU has a very vocal home‑grown student advocacy group of its own called USGA, Understanding Same‑Gender Attraction. It meets every Thursday night at 7:00 p.m. in room 111 of the TMCB on the BYU campus with BYU's permission. Call this group what they will, from what we've seen firsthand, it's really about affirming out‑of‑bounds sexual lust.

Most recently, the media reported student outrage about a series of letters supporting traditional values in The Daily Universe concerning gay parenting/adoption, prompted by the TV show "Modern Family." A group of gay activist students who took especial offense to one letter to the editor made up an accusatory flyer and without permission stuffed a number of them in the next day's edition. Joe Campbell, the managing editor of the paper, faculty member, and also a columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune, catered to the lawless gay activists by printing an apology and affirming the Church's understanding and respect for homosexually‑attracted people, at the same time removing the offending letter from the online version of The Daily Universe, a letter that unequivocally expressed the timeless Biblical truth that homosexuality is sinful. SoL wonders, what about the person who wrote the letter that got removed? There seems to be no understanding and respect for him — or the Bible for that matter. Shouldn't he now be offended? Shouldn't God be offended? Apparently not. To quote the Salt Lake Tribune article, "BYU has no interest in pursuing or punishing the students who produced or distributed the flyer, Campbell said. 'We count this as a learning experience.'" And what has BYU learned? Never to publish scriptural doctrine in its paper because it might offend gay activists?

What is going on at BYU is incongruent and inexplicable. Unless we are instructed to turn in our Standard Works for new gay‑affirming scriptures and clean out our ward and home library shelves of all our LDS Church manuals, books, and magazines, homosexuality should still be officially, courageously, and correctly shown as sinful and harmful in both thought and deed in every ward, stake, and Church‑owned or endorsed group, business, or education entity.

Our Declaration of Independence says that we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But should people have a right to pursue their personal idea of happiness by any and every means? Of course not. Our society has all kinds of restrictions and outlaws a number of behaviors such as rape, murder, stealing, etc. The writers of the Declaration on which our country is founded meant that all people have the right to pursue happiness by lawful and moral means. [...] Increasingly, since the 1920s, the original meaning of the pursuit of happiness has been redefined, even high‑jacked, to include unlimited sexuality, the opposite of virtuous family life. We've seen how co‑habitation, out‑of wedlock pregnancy, divorce, abortion, homosexuality and the like, have become de‑stigmatized, then championed, all in the name of individual sexual freedom, fulfillment, or happiness.

Of course licentiousness does not bring happiness, only misery, but we live in a blind and prideful society which values only itself and has abandoned its responsibilities to both past and future generations. Sexuality is now the one impulse that need not be bridled‑‑‑except perhaps where it is associated with marriage, ecclesiastical discipline, and sex crimes, and even these restrictions are fast fading away. We have rampant infidelity, open marriages, state‑recognized "gay marriage," churches softening and abandoning their doctrines, a growing gay clergy, and new laws and policies, local, state, and federal, reflecting ever‑widening boundaries for all manner of sex and sexuality for all ages.

In the 1940s C. S. Lewis, in his essay "We Have No 'Right' to Happiness,'" (God in the Dock) discusses this societal trend, adding, "Our sexual impulses are thus being put in a position of preposterous privilege. The sexual motive is taken to condone all sorts of behaviour which, if it had any other end in view, would be condemned as merciless, treacherous and unjust." He is right. If our society did not embrace irresponsible sexual freedom as happiness, but rather the pursuit of classic family life as happiness, a "gay" man's abandonment of his wife and children, an adulterous woman's convenience abortion, a public school teaching children that homosexuality is normal and having a father who objects arrested, a little boy being encouraged by the adults around him to dress and act as a girl in preparation for hormones and surgeries that will confuse and mutilate his healthy young body, and many other behaviors, would not be condoned as they now are, but summarily condemned as merciless, treacherous, and unjust.

It's incredible to us at SoL that even those with resources, influence, and obligation avoid this topic like the plague. Many of our seemingly most moral and conservative leaders no longer take a stand on issues of sexual morality. They, quite irresponsibly, turn a blind eye to the tragic consequences for a society bent on sex, sex, and more sex. As a result, Lewis's prediction is coming true. To its detriment, as our society has settled on pushing and celebrating unlimited sexuality it has had no trouble pushing and celebrating every other preposterous entitlement men arbitrarily claim from society as a right: a "right" to marriage, a "right" to be a parent, a "right" to destroy the unborn, a "right" to own a house, a "right" to have a job, a "right" to free health care, a "right" for foreigners to break America's laws, and the list goes on. So much for the sense of personal responsibility needed to pursue real happiness.

Shannon Laudie, of Pleasant Grove, UT was highlighted on the Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor email segment Friday, December 9, 2011. Here's what she wrote in response to Margaret Hoover's take on Pamela Anderson disrespecting Mary in a Nativity Scene comedy sketch on TV: "Margaret Hoover has a double standard. She wants children to respect gays, but believes Pamela Anderson's profane portrayal of the Virgin Mary is funny." Way to go, Shannon!

We can learn a lot about gay activism by who they attack and why. Incredibly, some still openly deny the existence of a gay agenda, scoffing at the very idea. But of course there is a gay agenda. We see it playing out in our government, schools, entertainment media, and culture at large.