Bona Links: LDS Church Donates to End LGBT Youth Homelessness, Celibate Partnerships After Obergefell, And More

Bona Links: LDS Church Donates to End LGBT Youth Homelessness, Celibate Partnerships After Obergefell, And More July 7, 2015

First, more like this please:

For the first time ever, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has donated to the Utah Pride Center.

The LDS Church quietly made a $2,500 donation to the non-profit Utah Pride Center to help its efforts with LGBT homeless and youth. The money, coming in the form of access to the Bishop’s Storehouse, will provide food for those in need, the Utah Pride Center told FOX 13.

more, via IP (and see here)

A Queer Calling writes:

This past week has brought a flurry of official pronouncements. I have been drawn, seemingly like a moth to a light, to reading every statement that is likely to provide some insight as to how clergy within my Christian tradition see the question of pastoring LGBT people in the aftermath of last week’s decision. It is simply remarkable how many statements fail to consider the question, “What should we say to congregants who are LGBT who desire to live their lives in harmony with this Christian tradition’s teachings?” I have lost count of the number of LGBT Christian friends who have approached me to parse the implications of their churches’ reaction to Friday’s ruling. Many statements contain directives that all people who enter into civil same-sex marriages ought to come under church discipline without any hint of an exception.

Did I mention that in ten days I will be keeping vigil in a hospital’s waiting room as Sarah undergoes surgery?

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Matt Jones on a church home:

Since I was recently informed that I am in fact just one human being (and since I wrote a previous draft of this that ended up being way too long), I will be primarily addressing Christians who claim to hold a more traditional sexual ethic, talking about how my current church home has created a space in which the traditional sexual ethic feels coherent, and in which celibacy seems not only sustainable but good. I will then use that as a springboard to discuss why I think other ‘traditional’ churches are failing to provide a space in which lgbt+ people like myself can thrive.

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Melinda Selmys reviews a new book on gender dysphoria:

Mark writes from a fairly conservative evangelical perspective, but there is one critical difference between his approach and the approach I usually see from conservative writers: Mark has actually listened to trans people with a view to understanding, and his goal is to help churches provide pastoral care to a group that has traditionally been stigmatized and marginalized.

A lot of the concerns that Mark voices echo my own. For example, he talks about the problem of marginalized groups having their stories written or told for them by more dominant groups, and then goes on to analyze how this happens in both the Christian and the secular world. I think it’s a very pertinent point. On the one hand, there is a very strong risk that people (young people especially) who are experiencing gender dysphoria in a Christian context will feel like they have to conform to gender expectations or that their trans experiences are an affront to the created order. On the other hand, there is a risk of people being railroaded into a narrow kind of transgender narrative in which hormones, surgery and legal change of identity are the only means of living authentically.

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And a short film in Polari, the language of England’s sodomy-law days–fascinating and harsh:

(via John Coulthart)


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