Last week, the Deseret News published ONE Community’s open letter to Arizona residents in which LDS and other community leaders called upon Arizonans to support legislative protections for LGBTQ citizens. Tad Walch points to the city of Mesa’s recent non-discrimination ordinance (NDO) on behalf of LGBTQ citizens. He then quotes Michael Soto, the president of the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Arizona:
“This letter serves as a powerful rebuke of attempts to repeal the ordinance and divide our community using fear and lies,” Soto said. “I hope Mesa residents will join church leadership and decline to sign the petition seeking to repeal the ordinance.”
While I too support protecting LGBTQ individuals from unfair discrimination, none of the language from the actual NDO was included in this piece. Citing Soto’s claim that church leadership has asked members to refrain from speaking against this ordinance is misleading. The Church has asked members to support equal protections for LGBTQ people in housing and employment, but has not required them to support laws which go beyond such protections to impinge on other important rights and freedoms.
I’m a Mesa citizen, a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and an ardent supporter of equal protections for all of God’s children regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. I attended the public hearing at which Mesa City Council passed the NDO cited above. Here I’d like to express my reasons for opposing this legislation as well as some broader thoughts for reframing equal rights discussions among Latter-day Saints.
The Mesa NDO was introduced to prevent discrimination against LGBTQ individuals, but the discussion centered largely on making gender identity a protected category. Anti-discrimination protection is a worthy goal shared by nearly every citizen who spoke at the public hearing. The grievance most frequently cited by concerned citizens was that the NDO failed to preserve the protections that currently define women’s spaces and sports programs by making it illegal for anyone to be denied access to girls bathrooms, locker rooms, or sports competitions, so long as they identify as female.
There is still ongoing debate in the U.S. about the nature of sex and gender and whether/how transgender women can fairly compete in sports against biologically female athletes. It is far from settled, but much legislation takes for granted that the only concern is a metaphysical concept of gender that violates every reason for which women’s spaces and sports have ever existed apart from those of men. Such a radical reimagining of sex, biology, and gender has profound implications that extend well beyond the policy’s stated goals.
Those in favor of the ordinance largely pointed to the social stigma of transgender identification. This is certainly a problem and one which community and faith leaders should work toward solving. But it serves neither LGBTQ people nor communities of faith to unquestioningly adopt discourse which takes for granted that every grievance is a sign of unbalanced public policy. Good legislation must look beyond the optics of social progress and balance urgent concerns with longstanding ones. An amorphous commitment to diversity and inclusion is no substitute for the dispassionate and abiding commitment to the humanity of all people that a diverse society requires.
Latter-day Saints must take care not to unwittingly advance a narrative that dichotomizes faith and rights, thereby abandoning a framework in which the good of all can be served by principles that are true regardless of religious belief. The defensive crouch of seeking religious exemptions from laws that hurt the non-religious is not good policy and it’s a disservice to the millions of Americans who are neither LGBTQ nor religious. As EPPC President Ryan T. Anderson has put it:
“[We] must avoid the trap of framing every debate as if it were about religious liberty. .
. . .[Conservatives] shouldn’t pretend to be agnostic about the truth of our perspective. We’ll have the best shot at winning fights over abortion restrictions or child sex-change procedures when conservatives are willing to assert that their beliefs are true, not merely protected in law.”
In other words, there are scientific, anthropological, and moral reasons for protecting children from laws that force them to share locker rooms with members of the opposite sex, ban doctors who treat gender dysphoria without hormones and surgery, or expose incarcerated women to convicted sex offenders. If we adopt an apologetic narrative whereby we exchange legal protections for the concession that certain attitudes about sex and gender are merely matters of religious belief, we “will ultimately lose even in the courts of law. . . If basic truths of human nature are redefined as religious bigotry, they will be excised from society, in court and out.”
Some laws are eternal and can't be changed than man comes along and think themselves more intelligent than the Supreme creator and tries to justify behavior that is contrary to the laws of nature which are were created by providence;because they become progressive in thought. Everyone has the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. However, you can't change something that is defined by nature. It seems like society is becoming a never ending costume party.