Note: This is a three-part series that explores the unique ramifications polygamy culture has upon queer Latter-day Saints written exclusively by Nathan Kitchen for Life Outside the Book of Mormon Belt. To learn more about the experiences in the queer/Latter-day Saint intersection, be sure to pick up his memoir: The Boughs of Love–Navigating the Queer Latter-day Sain Experience During an Ongoing Restoration, published by BCC Press.

GUEST POST: In the clash of the queer marriages, the ghost of polygamy significantly harms LGBTQ Latter-day Saints because the Church practices both post-manifesto and pre-manifesto polygamy strategies on its LGBTQ population.

The Post-Manifesto Template

At the D. Michael Quinn Symposium at the University of Utah in 2022, Dr. Neil Young argued that the rising visibility of sexual and gender minorities in the 1950s and 60s caused religious groups, including Latter-day Saints, “to articulate and develop a theology that for most of them wasn’t there or certainly wasn’t developed.”[1] The Church’s own development leaned heavily on the prevailing prejudice and discrimination of the day—readily found in government, the medical profession, and society—to underpin its anti-queer theology. The need to consider the theology of another form of queer marriage besides polygamy wasn’t on the Church’s radar until the early 1990s when, in 1993, the Supreme Court of Hawaii cracked open the door to its possibility, ruling that denying a marriage license to same-sex couples was discrimination. Over the next decade, with the Family Proclamation in hand touting one-man/one-woman marriage, the Church chased the marriage equality fight from state to state.

Despite the LDS Church publicly fighting against queer marriage while quietly holding its own version close to its chest, marriage equality for same-sex couples became the law of the land in June 2015. The only prior experience the Church had with queer marriage was with polygamy. This presented the Church with an opportunity: A tried-and-true template already existed for dealing with queer marriage from its post-manifesto days. It just had to be pulled out of the closet, dusted off, and applied. No finer example exists of completely erasing the practice of queer marriage out of a church than when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints obliterated the sincerely held religious practice of polygamy out of the hearts of its members. The strategy was strong: externally greet the world with a proclamation articulating its doctrinal position on the family and internally treat legally wed, same-sex couples and their children like polygamists. Template at the ready, the Church began feeding its LGBTQ members through its well-oiled, post-manifesto polygamy machine: a woodchipper. Dubbed the “November 5th exclusion policy,” it was leaked online without warning in 2015.

Speaking to this strategy, Elder Christopherson observed, “The situation with polygamist families, for example, and same-sex marriage couples and families really has a parallel.”[2] Both circumstances restricted children in queer marriage families from joining the church until they were 18 and could repudiate their parent’s marriage. In both situations, Latter-day Saints who practiced queer marriage were automatically branded apostates. Horrifyingly, the Church then sent out its stake presidents who began to hunt down legally married same-sex Latter-day Saints with the tenacity of a U.S. Marshal hunting down the early polygamous brethren. Elder Neil L. Andersen instructed, “Do not rush to excommunicate same-sex married couples all at once. We don’t want to rush to do this. It will make it look like a witch hunt.”[3]

When the exclusion policy leaked online in 2015, I was a leader in Affirmation’s queer father’s group and witnessed the trauma and harm this policy caused the queer parents and their children in the Church. Later, I served on the board of Affirmation and then as its president, where I was an eyewitness to the harm, trauma, and suicides this policy incited among LGBTQ Latter-day Saints within their spiritual home. The Church was not only coming after us, but our children—treating us like polygamists instead of the beloved queer children of God that we are, with full and equal identities like our straight peers. Polygamists are made, but queer people are born—and we have been coming into the arms of our Latter-day Saint families for generations. For the LDS Church to reach into the great family trees of Zion and prune the Saint’s queer children out of their eternal family tree was more violence than members would tolerate. Three and a half years later, after extreme internal and external pushback, the Church rescinded the exclusion policy. But make no mistake, it did not back down on its doctrinal premise that queer people, in their authenticity, cannot be exalted. We are still excluded from our earthly and heavenly parents and families after death. Death, it turns out, is the ultimate exclusion policy for queer Latter-day Saints.

The Pre-Manifesto Template

Part of a human being’s inherent identity is their sexual orientation. It is how your heart opens towards others. How humans configure themselves in relationships with others is an expression of that sexual orientation. The concept of sexual orientation is a relatively new understanding of the human experience that began to de­velop in the nineteenth century.[4] However, the phenomenon of sexual expression is as old as humans are, and, over time, a configuration of that expression has been codified by government, church law, and social tradition into the institution of marriage. Traditionally, configuration had nothing to do with sexual orientation, only the structuring of power. And only recently in human history did it begin to fully encompass love.

The focus on configuration is the pre-manifesto template overlaid onto the sexual minorities of the Church. Polygamy hits directly at the heart of configuration, not orientation. Polygamy is not a sexual orientation. Polygamy is a taught religious and sexual practice. With enough tenacity, a church can stamp out an unapproved configuration through excommunication and teaching revisions. For the LDS Church, eliminating the practice of polygamy was a matter of configuring heterosexual orientation to practice monogamy instead. One’s inherent identity in this process was not challenged or erased. Contrastingly, when the Church attempts to quash same-sex marriage as it does polygamy, the LGBTQ person’s sexual orientation and identity are not only challenged but erased as a meaningless and even dangerous attribute. This obsession with configuration is illustrated in the Church’s explanation of why the BYU Honor Code forbids chaste homosexual romantic behavior: “Same-sex romantic behavior cannot lead to eternal marriage.”[5] Only configuration (not love!) matters for entry into the highest heavens. It used to be taught in the early church that the configuration of polygamy was required for exaltation, and now configuration is being used again to deny marriage equality to the queer children of God.

Focusing on configuration while ignoring orientation creates the outlandish proposal currently floated to LGBTQ people: They, too, are invited to participate in the approved marriage configuration of one man/one woman marriage (and even heavenly polygamy) to qualify for exaltation in celestial glory. This is a forever choice, an eternal configuration that is second nature to do if you are a person oriented to opposite-sex behavior. Yet it is awkward and a struggle (or even repulsive) to do if you are a person oriented to same-sex behavior. Exaltation is behavior-based. Lucky for you if you hap­pen to be heterosexual and cisgender.

For years, such a proposition led to a disastrous mixed orientation policy in the Church. For decades, generations of trusting gay and lesbian Latter-day Saints were programmatically shuttled into making very serious commitments with a straight spouse in a very serious eternal and legal institution without any informed consent about the risks, heartbreaks, or long-term viability of such an arrangement. Make no mistake, using straight marriage and straight spouses as a chronic conversion therapy for homosexual people is unethical and immoral. Sexual orientation matters in a marriage. Being in a mixed-orientation marriage is a terrible way to have to learn that lesson.

Most mixed-orientation marriages and families built on this foundation of heterosexual configuration fail.[6] The aftermath of this widespread failure contains shattered lives and the cries of innocent children. Seeing this outcome play out over decades, you would think the Church would stop this nonsense. By way of official policy, maybe—but members and leaders (including General Authorities) will still today tell sexual minorities to find an opposite-sex spouse and get married. Most recently, David Archuleta revealed that he experienced pressure from the Church’s General Authorities to marry a woman.[7]

Configuration equality favors heterosexual people. Marriage equality favors all people. It would be nice for the Church to accept marriage equality for its sexual minority couples on the basis that actions founded on equity and justice are the right thing to do—that, as the queer children of God, we are capable and inherently worthy of exaltation when we make the same choices according to our orientation as our straight/cisgender peers. But power does not work that way.

Equality Is the Answer

The Church is struggling to redefine and justify historical polygamy. It doesn’t quite know how to do this, as evidenced by its recent significant revision to its original December cartoon explanation of polygamy to the children of the Church.[8] Notably, it removed whole sections that fostered the idea that polygamy in the early church involved the lack of control and consent.  Forget cartoons. Polygamy harms flesh and blood Latter-day Saints, and the Church must tackle the real issues of control and consent in the polygamy of the heavens. This will require nothing less than gender equality in marriage, both polygamy and monogamy. Just as women’s consent and control in marriage confronts a patriarchal system of power, queer equality does the same. Both upend the power structure. This upending is not a call to eliminate marriage or reinstate polygamy. This is a call for equality.

The queer community is not a monolith. When it comes to relationships, queer people, by virtue of being queer, configure themselves in a host of ways both inside and outside legal marriage equality laws. People outside the queer community often interpret this diversity as proof that queer people find little value in the institution of marriage now that it is available to them. In addition, some prominent LGBTQ scholars and activists loudly argue that marriage is an oppressive institution and that legal same-sex marriage does not benefit the most marginalized members of the community, particularly queer black people. A recent 2023 study shows that this assertion is simply not true. This marginalized population within the queer community was not only less likely to criticize marriage as an institution but “articulated a more expansive, equality-focused understanding of the right to marry than the [Supreme] Court itself articulated.”[9] They saw Obergefell as carrying the potential to empower and elevate their identities in various contexts.

What can even the most marginalized in the queer community teach us about equality? Whether or not queer people participate in marriage equality, its existence lifts us all in the community. Marriage equality is actually about equality. Likewise, gender equality is actually about equality. It is this equality that threatens how power is structured in a patriarchal system where all are alike unto God, but some are more alike than others. It will take courage to infuse both gender and marriage equality into the theology of the heavens. It will challenge how we think about power. This is not a bad thing. The Book of Mormon is plain on this matter, “Among the Lord’s people, equity and justice must always prevail.”[10]

Once, during a roundtable discussion at BYU, I was asked by a faculty member what the outcome of change for LGBTQ people looks like on BYU’s campus. I replied that you can claim change when any privileges available to heterosexual people are available to sexual minorities and any privileges available to cisgender people are available to transgender and gender non-binary people. Until then, we all have work to do for our marginalized population of LGBTQ students.

What does the outcome of prevailing equity and justice in marriage look like in a Zion people? A heterosexual couple has the privilege of marrying for love according to their orientation. This is such an innate privilege that most do not even recognize the privilege that they are afforded in this endeavor. We can claim a Zion outcome when Latter-day Saint sexual minority couples have the same privilege that heterosexual couples enjoy: the self-determination to marry for love according to their orientation. Until then, we all have work to do as a Church as we approach Zion. President Oaks explained in a speech at the University of Virginia that the Church ultimately depends on the value that the public (and by extension, its members) attaches to the positive effects of its practices and teachings.[11] As the ecclesia, what you attach value to, what you work for in the lives of the queer children of God critically matters in the building of Zion. Don’t take this power for granted. Instead of asking where the answers are for God’s people, realize that you are the answers for God’s people—and get to work!

Onward and Upward

I have been married to my husband, Matthew, for over five years. I was formerly in a mixed-orientation marriage of 23 years, guided into that configuration by the Church as a vulnerable teen in the 1980s. By experience, I can speak to the positive and protective difference it makes in mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health to now be married to someone according to your orientation. This difference is not only profound in self, but also in the wellbeing of my children. The love, connection, comfort, and experience when sexual orientations are compatible in marriage are indescribable. To love within the highest ideals of fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family, according to my orientation, is among the greatest privileges that God has given me.

The Church does not recognize my marriage to Matthew. Under the ghost of polygamy’s post manifesto template, I was pushed out of the Church when I married, given the choice to either resign or be excommunicated. Horrifyingly, when I die, the current theology denies our public commitment to love and fidelity in marriage on the grounds that it was not configured correctly. To symbolize this blatant disrespect for our love and marriage, after my death the Church will not hesitate to baptize me by proxy in a temple back into a system that configures me into eternal singleness against my express earthly actions to choose love and marry Matthew. Do not baptize me after my death until you can also kneel at the altar in the sealing room on our behalf and marry us as husbands. Until then, leave my memory and spirit alone. Turns out that in death, the temple is a place that configures the heavens for both sexual minorities and women in ceremonies beyond our control and consent.

Polygamy culture is a damning stumbling block for the sexual minorities of the Church. It has threatened us and our children. For some of us, it exacted many years of our lives in a mixed-orientation marriage under false promises and threats of eternal separation from God. Currently, polygamy culture checkmates queer Latter-day Saints into eternal singleness, having violently pushed all other forms of queer marriage out of the nest of heaven. It is time to infuse control and consent into the lives of the queer children of God. It is time to infuse queer ethics into every form of queer marriage.

Carol Lynn, let’s walk together again soon!

~~Nathan Kitchen

Nathan Kitchen (he/him) served as president of Affirmation: LGBTQ Mormons, Families & Friends from 2019 through 2022. Nathan is a returned missionary, a dentist by trade, a sought-after public speaker, and the author of Boughs of Love. He lives in Arizona with his husband, Matthew. In his free time, Nathan likes to travel, read, and hold his five grandbabies.

Click the titles to read Polygamy is Queer Marriage (Part One) and Polygamy is Queer Marriage (Part Two)

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[1] Young, Neil J. “D. Michael Quinn: The Life and Times of a Mormon Historian.” Conference at “D. Michael Quinn: The Life and Times of a Mormon Historian.” Timestamp 29:54. Salt Lake City, 2022. https://youtu.be/WZHP_-1glu4?si=u-TUnyzEXR3IbRoZ&t=1794.

[2] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Elder Christofferson: Context on Handbook Changes Affecting Same-Sex Marriages.” newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org, November 6, 2015. https://

newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/handbook-changes-same-sex-marriages-elder-christofferson.

[3] Kitchen, Nathan. “The Hunted.” Essay. In The Boughs of Love: Navigating the Queer Latter-Day Saint Experience During and Ongoing Restoration, 265. Draper, Utah: By Common Consent Press, 2024.

[4] McClellan, Dan. “The Bible Never Addresses Homosexuality as an Orientation.” YouTube, March 29, 2024. https://youtu.be/BwOuNnTs7S8?si=cUqFEPGVCSC1nKgZ.

[5] BYU (@BYU). “Today this letter from Elder Paul V. Johnson, Commissioner of the Church Educational System, regarding the updated Honor Code was sent to students and employees at all CES schools.” X (formerly Twitter), March 4, 2020, 11:14 AM. https://x.com/BYU/status/1235267296970473472

[6] Dehlin, John P., Renee V. Galliher, William S. Bradshaw, and Katherine A. Crowell. 2014. “Psychosocial Correlates of Religious Approaches to Same-Sex Attraction: A Mormon Perspective.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health 18 (3): 284–311. doi:10.1080/19359705.2014.912970.

[7] Osunsami, Steve, Dominick Proto, and Carson Blackwelder. “David Archuleta Details ‘Faith Crisis’ After Coming out in the Mormon Church.” Good Morning America, November 18, 2022. Accessed July 27, 2024. https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/culture/story/david-archuleta-details-faith-crisis-coming-mormon-church-93505214.

[8]Stack, Peggy Fletcher. “LDS Church Changes Its Polygamy Cartoons for Children — Including the Message.” The Salt Lake Tribune, February 21, 2025. https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2025/02/21/lds-church-changes-polygamy/.

[9] Robinson, R. K., & Frost, D. M. (2023). Marriage Equality & Intersectionality. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 23, 219–240. https://doi.org/10.1111/asap.12342

[10] McConkie, Joseph Feilding, Robert L. Millett. “Righteousness Brings Peace.” In Doctrinal Commentary on The Book of Mormon. Vol. 4. Third Nephi through Moroni, 1151. Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1987.

[11] Oaks, Dallin H. “President Dallin H. Oaks’ Speech at the University of Virginia.” newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org, November 12, 2021. Accessed July 28, 2024. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/president-dallin-h-oaks-speech-university-of-virginia.