Missionaries and Gayness

[Just_A_Guy]

8 hours ago, Godless said:

There's an important element missing from this equation: economics. My parents were able to raise 5 kids and buy a house in the 90s on a $50k/yr Air Force salary and my mom's periodic part-time jobs. That financial dynamic simply doesn't exist anymore. 

I bought a house in 2012 with 4 kids and a wife who didn’t work at all, on $60K per year with no military/VA benefits.

I don’t want to downplay how tough it is out there.  But I think it’s worth noting that (as I recall, and please feel free to disprove me if I’m misremembering) several eastern European countries of late have tailored their social safety nets for the specific purpose of making it easier to raise additional children; and the affect on fertility rates in those countries have been effectively zero.

Child-bearing and child-rearing is enormously costly not only in simple dollars and cents, but in terms of physical labor and emotional investment and self-sacrifice and delayed gratification.  If you have those attributes and you prioritize child-rearing, poverty in and of itself is unlikely to really stop you from procreating; and if you don’t have those attributes/priorities—money itself seems unlikely to change the calculus all that much.

Edited April 6, 2023 by Just_A_Guy

[mikbone]

6 minutes ago, Just_A_Guy said:

I bought a house in 2012 with 4 kids and a wife who didn’t work at all, on $60K per year with no military/VA benefits.

Same here.  During residency I was making 35K a year.  Working 120 hrs a week.  Wife has never worked outside of the home.  We had 5 children before exiting residency.  And we lived in a cozy little yellow house in Lubbock Texas that we bought for 69K back in 2000 and sold for 80K in 2005.

Still paid our tithing.  

They repainted the house.  I also managed to renovate the kitchen.  It was a disaster when we bought it.  One day I was putting a can of beans on a shelf and it rolled off and banged me in the hand on the counter.  I got a sledge hammer and when I was finished there were only 2 cooper pipes coming out of the floor.  They had also glued crappy linoleum tiles over beautiful hardwood floors.  We fixed it up right.

 

[Vort]

20 hours ago, mikbone said:

There is a family in my ward that has 11 children.

Sheesh. Hope that guy is some big-time hedge fund manager or entrepreneur or surgeon or some such.

[mikbone]

1 minute ago, Vort said:

Sheesh. Hope that guy is some big-time hedge fund manager or entrepreneur or surgeon or some such

They take up an entire pew, sometimes two.

The sister is lovely and the children are generally well behaved.  

The father though…

[NeuroTypical]

I had some Catholic neighbors that put us to shame.  I think they maybe hit a full dozen before they were done.  Mom managed to homeschool them all until a few years back, when they found a great school.  She was doing the math and said something like "there will be no fewer than 5 teenagers in this house from today until 2027".    It was amazing living next to them.  The simple act of us just driving into our driveway was a huge event for their kids.  My daughters would be swept away in a massive wave of giggly girls.   They had one family birthday event every year - a BYOfood picnic at a local park, no presents please.  Probably their biggest expense was a used stretch-passenger van bought from the airport shuttle people.

The dad ran a small business that went belly up, then got a job in Denver and they all had to move.   I've seen the dictionary definition of 'making it work and being frugal', and it was them.

[askandanswer]

3 hours ago, mikbone said:

The father though…

I've heard that the father does terribly violent things to people while they sleep - like removing their limbs and stuff!

I wouldn't worry too much about this family - they'll probably move out of the ward at the same time that you will.

[old]

On 4/4/2023 at 9:41 AM, Just_A_Guy said:

I thought that, at least 20 years ago, same-gender-attracted folks were considered honorably excused from missionary service even if they had 100% complied with the law of chastity.  I’m wondering when, or if, that policy has formally changed.  Certainly we hear a lot of out-gays talk about their missionary service, but I’m not sure that they had “come out” prior to their calls.

The funny thing is that Boyd K. Packer gave a talk thirty years ago that the LGBTQ lobby interprets as endorsing violence against gays—but in context, he was talking about an anecdote where a straight missionary had woken up to find himself being molested by his gay companion (the missionary had, as I recall, given the perp a swift punch in the face and then felt guilty about it; whereas Elder Packer suggested that it was well-deserved).  So, yes; I think scenarios like you describe are inevitably going to be an issue; especially as LGBTQ advocacy progresses into what I think is the inexorable next step (and which I understand is already happening with male-to-female transgender folk demanding acceptance within the lesbian community):  that refusing the sexual advances of an LGBTQ suitor is per se bigotry.

But to your question:  I think pairing self-identified gay elders with self-identified lesbian sisters creates its own set of issues—sisters wondering if the elder is *really* gay (and the fact that sexual orientation is often more of a spectrum than a binary) (and, what about bisexuals?); and many women (LDS or not) are just plain intimidated/threatened by the idea of living with men generally, regardless of orientation.  And frankly, LDS missionaries are (by design) highly visible and since outsiders who see them wouldn’t necessarily know that they’re LGBTQ and would just see an unmarried couple living together—it becomes sort of an image, “Caesar’s wife must be above reproach” sort of thing.

 

Yes it happens.  There are multiple missionaries who "come out" on Facebook during their mission, who are openly homosexual, who proclaim they can be romantically involved and they have not broken the Law of Chastity.

It's a thing and it's going to get worse . . .a lot worse.

Edited April 8, 2023 by old
Test Edit

[popatr]

I feel suspicious of people who want small families (I feel like they have not really given their whole heart and mind to jesus), yet I live in a glass house... I've only got 3.  We started at 30 and I think I'm not deceiving myself when I judge my wife's health was insufficient for more... Yet who knows maybe we have a faith problem

 

Edited April 7, 2023 by popatr

[Grunt]

Y'all ponder some of the oddest things....