THE NEWLY SUSTAINED PRESIDENT of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dallin H. Oaks, offered us an address this General Conference weekend that has received a great deal of praise, including  by those LDS on the political left. They breathed a sigh of relief because they perceived him as encouraging care for the immigrants rather than the projection of bigoted assumptions upon them, peace over war, and the end of the harsh rhetoric that divides people. The last seems to feel very personal to them as the current US president consistently slams the left as “evil” and “lunatics,” something Mormon MAGA and Trump-leaning LDS too often repeat. This, of course, travels the other way as well.

Yet, no one feels a sense of relief unless they have first felt stress. The placement of President Oaks in the position of prophet has created that stress. He’s a man known for his anti-LGBTQ attitudes, and those attitudes, as kindly spoken as they are, have resulted in political campaigns and legal wrangling that has harmed the LGBTQ community, both inside and outside the LDS church. Yet, in his first address, he seemingly avoided talk of religious freedom, which, for him is, at least in part, code for the pursuit of legal guarantees his church can continue to marginalize the LGBTQ community. But did he? A close reading of the speech affirms that the mantle of prophet will not broaden his ability to accept the full personhood of LGBTQ people. He can’t let it go.

Our first clue that his negative view of LGBTQ people roils beneath the surface comes early in his talk. In reference to the resurrection, he says, “The conviction that death is not the conclusion of our identity changes the whole perspective of our mortal life.” Never forget that Pres. Oaks is a master rhetorician and chooses his words carefully. Were most of us speaking of the resurrection in the same context, we’d say, “The conviction that death is not the conclusion of our lives changes the whole perspective of our mortal life.” But he didn’t express it that way. He intentionally chose to substitute the heavily weighted word “identity” for the logical word “life.” What he means is that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities are not an individual’s final identity. He is teaching that, in the resurrection, LGBTQ people will be changed into cishet people. There’s no accident in his usage here, nothing new. Just the same old, “You weren’t made right for some unknown reason, but even if God can’t fix you now, He’ll fix you later.”  

Herein is the problem. The LDS church takes an unequivocal stance (calling it “doctrinal”) that homosexuality of any stripe didn’t exist premortally and, therefore, won’t exist in the next life. What’s interesting, however, is that, at the start of his General Conference speech, Pres. Oaks stated that Jesus’ resurrection is “settled doctrine” because of the number of Bible and Book of Mormon passages that affirm it. Yet, there is no scripture affirming the church “doctrine” that homosexuality only exists in mortality. None. Zip. Zero. What we have instead is a set of age-advanced, patriarchal church leaders who present as cishet telling us what they were raised to believe and what they apparently all agree upon. Members have been convinced that their authority alone makes whatever they say into divine revelation. There’s never been a more clear example of circular reasoning: “He’s a prophet who speaks God’s word so I know what he speaks is God’s word.” Likewise, there’s never been a more unsettled “doctrine” than the ideas Pres. Oaks consistently relies upon to support his perspective on LGBTQ issues. Suddenly scripture doesn’t matter. I’m concerned that the church, as a body of members, accepts the unsubstantiated opinion of mortal men as eternal truth.

Granted, Pres. Oaks, in his talk, does an excellent job of preaching the first and second commandments, using both scripture and the words of church presidents who came before him. He wants us to develop agape love toward humankind. To shore up the idea, he told a story about a nurse who “despised” a bedridden, foul-mouthed patient who took a tumble in the care facility where she worked. On hearing a loud clatter from his room, she rushed to his aid, expecting to receive his usual repulsive behavior, but instead found him weeping on the floor in the midst of shards of broken glass. She took the old man into her arms like a mother would and listened as he cried that he just wanted “to go home.” Pres. Oaks, and perhaps the nurse in her original telling, seemed to suggest the old man used the phrase “to go home” to mean “to pass away,” which he did soon thereafter. But, for me, the story is just as touching to think he meant he wanted to go back to his abode, to the place he knows and the place he is known. 

Pres. Oaks tells us the nurse reported having a spiritual transformation that day as she realized that, in his need, this surly patient is a child of God and worthy of love. She hadn’t loved him until she recognized this, or, to my mind, until she truly saw him as a man with a story all his own who feels alone in an existential way. It’s a useful story, but I’m left with questions. 

How did this nurse treat him before his fall? Before he had an emotional breakdown in front of her? Do you suppose the nurse returned his cruel, foul-mouthed behavior to him? Or do you think it more likely this trained nurse, living under the Hippocratic Oath, treated him with kindness? I’m betting that, anytime she was face to face with him, she screwed on a kind and gentle expression and hid what she actually thought of him, reserving that for conversations with like-minded people out of his earshot. In other words, she would’ve been kind to the awful patient because of the oath she had taken, but that kindness was not love. Not yet. She needed to hold him and listen to his soul’s yearning before she graduated to love.

Pres. Oaks’ own story tells us a truth he hasn’t yet seen. Kindness isn’t love. It can mask hate, disgust, pity, and an array of other condescending or negative feelings but it, alone, is not the equivalent of love. And treating LGBTQ people with a surface kindness only masks the disrespect carried in the heart.

President Oaks speaks of “balanc[ing] our various responsibilities” to love all individuals and to live up to the covenants that LDS people make in the temple. This is an admission that he recognizes conflict exists between Christian love and at least some aspects of those covenants and/or the commandments as taught by the LDS church. Folks can do their mental gymnastics right along with Pres. Oaks to make my last statement seem untrue, but if Pres. Oaks didn’t sense a conflict, he wouldn’t be speaking of balancing at all. To him, “covenants … inevitably position us as devoted participants in the eternal contest between truth and error.” His mistake is in deciding, without any scriptural evidence, that it can ever be an error to love. Jesus commanded us to love God and to love our neighbors. If you have to find balance between those ideas, you haven’t found love.

We learn from the nurse’s experience that love comes when we truly see a person’s heart, and we will not see that heart as long as we overlay it with our own biased attitudes. 

In a real way, I am the nurse, or, rather, I was. When I was much, much younger, I might’ve argued gay marriage was an attack on the family. In fact, I signed a petition to amend my state’s constitution so that it would denounce gay marriage and only recognize marriages between a man and a woman. I admit with shame that I once pitied LGBTQ people for their “confusion.” Then social media was born, and I had enough insight to seek out people who were different from me. I listened to those I met online as they told me they just wanted to love and be loved, to be accepted for the person they are, to not be told they are afoul of God’s plan for them. Though behind a screen, I sat with them as they experienced the agony of wishing they, too, could “go home” before they offended God. I tried to build bridges, but learned too well and too abruptly that those on one side of the chasm weren’t very interested in the bridge unless it meant they could stay exactly where they were. But I had walked onto that bridge and was embraced as the broken one by those I’d once seen as broken. They healed me and taught me what love is.

All it took was a willingness to see all people as like myself, as people with the same needs and the same hopes. To recognize their love of God is real, and to feel, through our conversations, God’s love for them, to understand that God doesn’t ask them to abandon either their lives or their identities because each is the same thing. That’s when I truly knew that the surface kindnesses I had previously extended to LGBTQ people had entirely failed to meet the mark of Christlike love. That’s when I learned there can be no covenant or commandment that is in conflict with true Christian love, and that, if either a commandment or a covenant seems to be in conflict with love, that covenant or commandment is missing the mark. Love never needs to be balanced.

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The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,”^[a] and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Romans 13:9

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