Posted on 06/12/2005 9:28:57 AM PDT by Graybeard58
SALT LAKE CITY -- David Johnson stopped believing in the Mormon church about three years ago, when he came out of the closet.
At 24, he is ignoring strict principles of a church that teaches that homosexuality is a serious sin by living the life of a gay man.
But he chooses to live here, in the capital of one of the nation's most conservative states, which is shadowed by the worldwide headquarters of a church that suffuses nearly every aspect of life in Utah. The Mormon church, one of the world's fastest growing faiths with about 12 million members worldwide, won't accept homosexuals until they are spiritually rehabilitated.
During the Pride Week Festival that runs through today, plenty of people like Johnson are gathering around Salt Lake City -- a yearly reminder of just how large the gay community here has become. It culminates today with a parade that organizers say is the second largest in the state, behind the annual July 24 "Days of '47" parade commemorating the Mormon settlement of the Salt Lake Valley.
A Mormon church spokeswoman declined to comment on Pride Week, instead referring a reporter to previous church statements on homosexuality in general. They read, in part: "We realize there may be great loneliness in their lives but there must also be recognition of what is right."
Figures on Salt Lake City's gay population are hard to come by. Leaders of many of the city's advocacy groups don't even venture a guess.
The latest census did not request information about sexual orientation, but did tally 594,391 same-sex couples living together nationwide, with 3,370 of them in Utah. Gay advocates have estimated those numbers undercount the population by as much as 50 percent, because it only counts homosexuals who are in a live-in relationship and admit that to census officials.
Urban Institute demographer Gary Gates and researcher Jason Ost, authors of The Gay and Lesbian Atlas, estimate Salt Lake City to be in the top 6 percent of cities where gay and lesbian couples were likely to live.
"Clearly, Salt Lake City has a high concentration," Gates told The Associated Press.
Many gays and lesbians in Utah are former Mormons who grew up in the area and don't want to leave -- despite a political system that just passed one of the country's most restrictive amendments banning gay marriage. Others migrated from equally conservative nearby states like Idaho and Wyoming, which have no high-concentration gay areas of their own.
Many of Salt Lake's gays and lesbians don't want to abandon the style of Western living they grew up with, said Michael Mitchell, executive director of the advocacy group Equality Utah. The pace of life is generally slow, and nearby mountain ranges full of ski runs and hiking trails provide abundant opportunities for enjoying nature while still living in an urban area.
Other benefits like affordability and a relatively low crime rate are enough for some people to justify staying, he said.
Besides, Mitchell notes, "the next big city is Denver, eight hours one way, and Las Vegas, five hours the other way."
The decision for gays and lesbians to stay in Utah can be complicated, especially since the Mormon church is as much a culture as a faith, but Johnson said he's been able to negotiate his own set of beliefs.
"Some of their core values I really like," he says of the church, "but some of their extenuating guidelines and morals, they just don't work for me."
I wonder who he negotiated with?
God?
What were his bargaining chips?
Do gay mormons practice the tradition of abstinence before marriage?
I believe the god that he negotiated with is his own ego and his own insatiable delight in a peverted sexuality.
He's negotiating with his conscience
such event are nothing more than sexual fetish recruitments.
It is not about "pride" it is only a perverse effort to expose their orgasm in public.
"Do gay mormons practice the tradition of abstinence before marriage?"
Well that would mean abstinence for your whole life since Mormonism (as any other Judeo-Christian religion), does not recognize 2 men as a marriage
Proving once and for all that an erect Johnson has no conscience.
I wonder why they always find it necessary to have a parade?
What's the deal with always wanting to be parading around?
That's my point. LDS doesn't seem to be an appropriate religion for those folks.
For them, it's not about finding a religion that is appropriate for their beliefs. It's about selfishly trying to force another religion to conform to their beliefs. Just like all the liberals who are not Catholic, yet endlessly opine about how the Catholic Church needs to become more "progressive," i.e. more accepting of deviance.
Public self exposure of their sexual practices is part of the gratification of the fetish.
The erotic is exotic theory. They LIKE (and need) being public perverts.
My pet theory is that the public flaunting of homosexuality is part of distracting others, but most importantly the individual, from that person's inner self-hatred. It's a ruse. No one who truly loves himself needs to hold outlandish parades with hundreds of other like-minded individuals.
Of course, this theory relies upon my personal belief that to deny the natural order of life, in this case that one man marries one woman and the two live monogamously for the rest of their lives, inherently produces unhappiness. My only support is the amazingly high levels of depression and other mental illnesses among homosexuals. While the liberals want to think this is due to society's persecution of gays, I tend to believe it is a result of the conflicted conscience over such spiritual poverty.
I could be wrong about this, but I believe the theory holds more truth than not.
["Some of their core values I really like," he says of the church, "but some of their extenuating guidelines and morals, they just don't work for me."]
Must be nice to have a conscience that lets you pick and choose your behaviors according to what you "really like" to do.
This sounds like the "WAHHHHHHHHH" from the gay and abort lobbies who attack the Catholic Church for not being 'progressive' enough.
Lets be honest. Gays are not interested in abstainence at any time, just as they are not really interested in gay "marriage". They are not satisfied with tolerance of their hedonism, they must have their unspeakable vice celebrated as virtue. To acomplish that, they must destroy real virtue. Accordingly they must attack the virtue of religion, the virtue of chasity, and the virtue of the married state, substituting their own perverted versions of each.
If there was a Satan, this is exactly what he would do.
such menu based "religious faith" is just the homosexuals trying to create "god" in their own image.
That was good.
In your face, public gays are moral suicide bombers.
(steely)
[homosexuals trying to create "god" in their own image.]
EEEEEEEWWW!
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