The Trouble With Taboos
My daughter Sara called me in great distress this week. Although she left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints several years ago, she was reeling from Elder Jeffrey Holland's widely-reported comments to faculty and staff at BYU about same-sex topics and musket fire. Because she is queer, she felt personally rejected. She ached for members of her community who are still members of the Church, who feel they are being told that they are indecent and expected to hide -- to become invisible. And she found rhetoric about musket fire chilling when a newlywed lesbian couple was found shot to death in the mountains near Moab last week. Our need to process this together is what has led to Sara's joining this blog. We've talked a lot about many things. We have areas of agreement and areas of deep disagreement. That's uncomfortable for me and painful for Sara, but we're willing to live with it because of the depth of our respect for each other's agency. My pos