Have heard about the new policy designed to protect children and inspired by all the confusion surrounding the churches position on gay marriage? Well we'll tell you about it and you can read the amended policy (as if you haven't already) right Changes-to-LDS-Handbook-1-Document-2-Revised-11-3-15. In this episode I talk with Jerilyn Pool and Tom Christofferson about the new policy and their reaction to it. After the recording was complete the church released a discussion between Elder Christofferson (LDS Apostle) and Micheal Otterson (church PR), please scroll down to the end of the post for that video. I also inserted my thoughts on the explanations given into the episode while completing the editing process. Let us know what you are thinking after processing this policy for a few days. Here is the transcript of the Tom C. portion of the episode (transcription provided by the kind folks at the Wheat and Tares blog). RF: Tom (Christofferson), you and I were talking about this online yesterday, and you described the news as dreary. What are your feelings now that you’ve had 24 hours to think about it? Tom: It always helps to have a night’s sleep. This too shall pass; we’ll get through this like we’ve gotten through everything else. I think my biggest reaction to it is that my experience both with my family and my ward family as I was coming back to church . . . seemingly would be more difficult to pull off under the setting that’s coming out here, I fear. My concern would be that this puts more pressure on families, too, and the ability to deal with dissonance and ambiguity may be even more of a challenge than it has been before. So just to back up and give background, when I came out to my parents 30 years ago I decided that I had done everything I could to be Mormon, and it wasn’t working, and I was still gay. So I had to try to figure out what it meant to be gay, and I asked to be excommunicated so I could feel like I was somewhat acting in integrity to go out and live my life and figure out what that meant. It was not an easy conversation with my parents so it took all of us a while to find our footing and be in a good place. But over time they really… it became apparent that they were going to hold on to both their faith and their family; so their approach to all of this, when my partner and I met and got together many years ago, their approach was that they included the two of us in everything. The family always included us and we enjoyed time in their home and them in our home. Because of their approach to us, eight or nine years ago when I started feeling a prompting to return to church; that something was missing in an otherwise happy life . . . I didn’t have to overcome any feelings of anger or feel that my parents had treated me badly in some sense because of the church. So it was easy for me to come back and find the spiritual things I felt I was missing and they were as welcome of that as they were of having Clark and me at an activity with them. When I went back to church and met with the bishop, my partner and I were still living together; at that point I wasn’t expecting that we wouldn’t be living together. I said, “Look, I’d really like to be able to come back to church and learn and feel the spirit and discover the path of a disciple.” His welcome was immediate without saying “If you’re living in this kind of relationship that creates problems.” I was already excommunicated, mind you, so I was a nonmember at the time, but the welcome and acceptance I felt in my family and my ward were both important in my own process of being able to move toward something I really needed in my life. And to feel the Spirit and to want to keep drawing toward that.
No transcript available.
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