Apostle Boyd K. Packer has been one of the most mocked and maligned general authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ in contemporary history. And he is attacked most for an address he gave in 1993 titled, Talk to the All-Church Coordinating Council. Given to a meeting of those with more general (as opposed to regional or local) leadership roles, Elder Packer identified the three groups that posed the most threat to the future then and whose threat would only grow over time. Below I quote the section most mocked, and which is not inconsequently the most important section of the address.
Surely you have been anxiously watching the worldwide evaporation of values and standards from politics, government, society, entertainment, schools. Could you be serving in the Church without having turned to those pages in the revelations and to those statements of the prophets that speak of the last days? Could you, in working for the Church, not be conscious of or have ignored the warnings? Could you be blind to the drift that is taking place? Are you not conscious of the drift that is taking place in the Church? Could you believe other than it is critical that all of us work together and set aside personal interests and all face the same way?
It is so easy to be turned about without realizing that it has happened to us. There are three areas where members of the Church, influenced by social and political unrest, are being caught up and led away. I chose these three because they have made major invasions into the membership of the Church. In each, the temptation is for us to turn about and face the wrong way, and it is hard to resist, for doing it seems so reasonable and right.
The dangers I speak of come from the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals. Our local leaders must deal with all three of them with ever-increasing frequency. In each case, the members who are hurting have the conviction that the Church somehow is doing something wrong to members or that the Church is not doing enough for them.
Talk to the All-Church Coordinating Council, pgs. 3-4
As a side note, have you ever noticed how the jeering of those in the Great and Spacious Building is always loudest and pointed at that which is most important as a way to undermine it in the eyes of everyone? You can almost tell that which is most important and most valuable in any religious discourse by finding out which parts of it are hated most by the general public. That is certainly the case here in Elder Packer’s address.
I originally wanted to do all three in the same article, but each section quickly ballooned in length and I realized that just wasn’t feasible. So, this article will be focused on what Elder Packer called the “gay-lesbian movement” and what we call the LGBTQ+ movement. I will explore how they distort language in order to manipulate people, the way they distort science to promote their goals, the way that they suppress scientific work that challenges their assumptions, the outright lies they tell about religion and the causes of the high LGBTQ+ teen depression and suicide,
Distorting Language
In 1993, Elder Packer was warning of the breakdown of social morality and the rise of the gay-lesbian (i.e. the LGBTQ+) movement in an era when he must have sounded crazy to do so. I mean, this is three year before the Defense of Marriage Act passed which “specifically defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman which allowed individual states to not recognize same-sex marriages that were performed and recognized under other states’ laws.” To most it must have seemed that the proponents of tradition and social conservatism were more powerful than any threat to them. But can anyone claim likewise in the 2023? Thirty years later and Elder Packer looks more prophetic than ever before.
How this happened is worth understanding. In an NPR program on the subject, Dr. Michael Rosenfeld, Professor and Chair of Sociology at Stanford argues it is because the AIDs crisis of the 1980s made homosexuals appear in a much more positive light, that their suffering brought them sympathy, and then Bill Clinton’s campaigning on homosexual discrimination as an issue of civil rights made their cause popular. In other words, the mass media changed the way it reported on the subject and as positive presentations of homosexuality began to proliferate the way people’s views on the subject changed. This is also why homosexuals adopted the language of marriage in their strategies to win civil rights court cases.
Activists saw marriage as, “an engine that would pull many other rights behind it… [because] If we could claim the language of marriage, we would be claiming an engine of transformation, a vocabulary of shared values – love, commitment, family, inclusion, dignity, respect – that would help non-gay people better understand who gay people really are and allow us to share equally not only in marriage but in everything.” (NPR) In other words, they saw a vector for viral ideological infection, one that would allow their ideas to incubate in the minds of the masses, co-opting their own beliefs and transforming them into the means by which to promulgate the activists’ beliefs about how homosexuality should be viewed and treated. They twisted ideas and language to get people to accept their beliefs. The acceptance of homosexuality has given rise to the acceptance of many other ideas, including transgenderism.
Now, why should these be treated as a threat to the church specifically or society generally?
From the church’s position, the doctrines of God are clear. Gender is an essential characteristic of the eternal nature of the human spirit, not merely a physical manifestation of genes. Children are entitled, that is to say they have a natural right, to a father and a mother who are bond together as husband and wife. Families formed of husbands and wives are ordained of God, not merely to function here on Earth as the basis for human procreation but as the essential building block of the society of Heaven. Just as for us to have eternal life means we have the kind of life that God has, for us to have an eternal family means we have the kind of family that God has. In the temple endowment ceremony, men and women covenant with God to only have sex with their opposite gendered spouse (husband with wife and wife with husband.)
Homosexuality, transgenderism, and its attendant philosophies, such as gender fluidity, are all direct assaults on these ideas. Emerging out of post-modernism (more on this in the third part of this series), these ideas assert that there is no such thing as gender at all. This is really part of two larger projects, to destroy the family completely and and obliterate the concept of sex altogether and say that there is no such thing as male or female just as there is no such thing as men or women. The way they accomplish this goal is by co-opting language, as they did with marriage, and twisting it to their ends. This way they don’t have to change the way you think by force. They can creep in by manipulating the words you already use by associating them with their ideals, values, and goals. Over time, your beliefs are overwritten as you gradually accept their views as being part of what you already believed in. This is known as the illusory truth effect because the more your brain thinks something, the more connections there are to a bit of information, the easier with which the brain can recall some bit of information, the more likely your brain will assume it is true. And as Dr. Rosenfeld admitted, they will use these tricks of language and function to manipulate you into believing what they want you to believe in order for them to achieve their goals.
In addition to the twisting and manipulation of language, they’re perfectly willing to manipulate and twist science in order to do so.
Just look at this 2019 Scientific American article.
Distorting Science
The author, then a doctoral candidate at NYU, argues that because some men and some women have genetic mutations and both estrogen and testosterone can be found in men and women there is no such thing as men or women. The whole argument is preposterous when you think about it rationally. A man with a genetic mutation that causes him to manifest breasts is still a man if he has XY chromosomes. A woman is still a woman if she has XX chromosomes, even if she has a genetic mutation that causes her to have gonads in her body. While genitalia is often a great shortcut to determining gender, I don’t think anyone outside of heated arguments really believes that is all that matters.
After all, no one denies that even if a man is in a horrible accident that severs his penis and testicles form him he would still continue to be male. Why? Because being male or female is determined at a chromosomal level, not merely the outward physically biological one. Likewise, the horrible accident of mutation doesn’t change sex. Just as cancer, a genetic mutation itself, doesn’t mean that a woman with breast cancer stops becoming a woman or a man with testicular cancer stops being a man, other genetic mutations don’t alter the gender and sex of the person with the mutation(s). Men with mutations are still men. Women with mutations are still women.
The article further argues that the fact that all hormones are found in both sexes in varying degrees means there is no such thing as sex. Just look at this statement:
And while testosterone exhibits the largest difference between adult males and females, heritability studies have found that genetics (X vs. Y) only explains about 56 percent of an individual’s testosterone, suggesting many other influences on hormones. Furthermore, measurements of sex hormones levels in any one individual wildly vary across the range of “average” values regardless of how close or spread apart you take the measurements. The binary sex model not only insufficiently predicts the presence of hormones but is useless in describing factors that influence them.
Think about the argument this article is making. Your genetics determines 56% of your testosterone, but that doesn’t matter. Really? If you lost 56% of your bank account, would that not be relevant? If 56% of your income came from a specific job, would that job not be a determining factor? The fact that the author can seriously suggest that because only 56% of you testosterone is inherited that clearly means there are no binary sex differences is moronic. If anything, the fact that 56% of a man’s testosterone is genetically heritable, meaning it is tied to his genetics, meaning to his chromosomes, meaning to his Y chromosome, is absolute proof of binary sex differences.
The rest of the argument is just as silly. Does the fact that working out significantly boosts testosterone in men and minusculely in women mean that there are no binary sex differences? Well, one might wonder why women have almost no discernable boosts to testosterone after exercise but men do if there are no binary sex differences. It is almost as if environmental changes don’t actually alter hormones enough to change the sex of someone and that the binary sex of a person actually determines how much their hormones fluctuate from environmental factors.
The author is actually dishonest in the above quote, claiming the linked study proves that the binary sex model doesn’t predict the differences in hormone levels throughout the day. Yet notice the phrase – “wildly vary across the range of ‘average’ values” said in a way to suggest that changes are very drastic when in fact all the differences fall within the average values for men and for women. Notice the way the author says “average” as if that were just rhetoric and not an objective mathematical measurement so as to sow doubt in your mind before you even read the article.
The author wants you to actually misunderstand the central fact that hormones in men vary throughout the day but stay within expected ranges for men and hormones in women vary throughout the day but stay within expected ranges for women. And that those ranges are different because of the binary sexes, whether you’re a man or a woman There is nothing “wild” about staying within expected norms. And what the author ignores about the study is that the hormones that are changing (or not) are different in men than they are in women. From the study:
Testosterone and cortisol were found to be highly reliable in both sexes. Progesterone was found to be reliable after collapsing across sex. Oral contraceptive use was associated with lower levels of testosterone, but did not affect cortisol. Contrary to expectations, oral contraceptives also did not affect progesterone. Menstrual cycle was found to affect levels of progesterone, but not testosterone or cortisol. Time of day had an effect on cortisol, on progesterone only at one testing time, and no effect on testosterone. We explored the interhormone correlations among testosterone, progesterone, and cortisol. All three hormones were positively correlated with one another in men. In women, progesterone was positively correlated with testosterone and cortisol, but testosterone and cortisol were uncorrelated.
Salivary testosterone, cortisol, and progesterone: Two-week stability, interhormone correlations, and effects of time of day, menstrual cycle, and oral contraceptive use on steroid hormone levels
What does this tell us? Testosterone and cortisol were found in similar amounts among all men and all women, which is not to say that men and women have the same amount of either. All men share the same levels of progesterone on average and all women share the same amounts of progesterone on average. But, again, men and women do not share the same amount of progesterone. This makes sense because progesterone is one of the key hormones related to menstruating and men don’t menstruate. This is why menstrual cycles effect how much progesterone women have. Testosterone wasn’t effected by the time of day, but the other hormones were. In men, these three hormones had positive correlations, meaning a change in one of them caused changes in the others. In women this wasn’t the case as a change in testosterone in women wouldn’t effect her cortisol levels and vice versa.
So, what does all this tell us? That hormones have average ranges in men and women, that there are different levels of these hormones in men and women, that the hormones levels of men and women operate along gender specific averages regularly, and that they operate differently in men than in women. All of this actually proves that there is a division in human sexes with men and women being biologically different, the exact opposite of the author’s claims.
Potential differences between the brains of people who identify as transgender and those who don’t are presented as proof that the development of the brain is irrelevant in the development of sexual binaries, of being male or female. Therefore, the argument goes, sexual binaries are invented and not biological. But this is a weak argument. Brain differences aren’t always the evidence of normal behavior. Often they’re the evidence of abnormal, unhealthy, and dangerous behavior. Just look at the brains of serial killers:
Examining brain scans of more than 800 incarcerated men, new research co-authored by a leading University of Chicago neuroscientist found that individuals who had committed or attempted homicide had reduced gray matter when compared to those involved in other offenses. Those reductions were especially apparent in regions of the brain associated with emotional processing, behavioral control and social cognition.
It seems likely that instead of disproving the existence of human sex, of being male or female, the differences between the brains of those who identify as transgender and those who do not indicates the existence of abnormal brain function in people with gender dysphoria that leads to unhealthy and dangerous behavior in people who identify as transgender. This is because the problems in the brain that cause gender dysphoria (in being “transgender”) result in serious psychological problems for people with this mental disorder that leads to ill mental health and engaging in dangerous self-harming behaviors.
How else do you describe a person who wants someone to cut off his or her genitalia?
Is the person who wants to voluntarily cut off their healthy and functioning hand with a machete and one who wants it cut off by another person with a scalpel really that different just because the person will more likely live through the latter? Are the actions of a cutter any different because he or she uses a sterilized blade and never cuts in a place that might cause life threatening harm? Or is the fact that a person wants to cut off healthy and functional parts of his or her body or wants to slice into his or her own flesh in an effort to change the way he or she fails not evidence that this person is mentally and emotionally unbalanced and in need of serious care and therapy? In both these cases of self-mutilation the obvious answer is this person is suffering from unhealthy mental conditions and needs real care that helps him or her see that self-mutilation is wrong.
Then why is it different when a person wants to mutilate his or her body by cutting off his or her genitalia, breasts, etc. in service to a delusion created by abnormal brain operation? Because it is better planned out? That is as absurd an argument as saying that cutting yourself with razor blades or amputating your fingers is healthy behavior just because you (likely) won’t die from the trauma. Self-harm is still harm, even when you pay others to do it for you.
Now, you may thinking that I just spent a significant amount of time on this article for no reason. But would that change if I told you the author, Simón(e) D. Sun, is a man who identifies as a transgender woman? This article actually gives us a great insight into exactly how far people in the LGBTQ+ movement will abuse and twist science in order to fit their ideological and social agendas. The ultimate goals is to manipulate the gullible who “believe the experts” (Sun now has a PH.D. after all!) and the ignorant who are too lazy to evaluate the Gish gallop of links thrown at them as proof of some claim. This allows them to come off as seeming highly objective when in fact they are interpreting everything through their subjective philosophical lens, highlighting what they think will promote their agenda, obfuscating that which throws their agendas into question, and distorting the facts to fit their desires. The goal of the LGBTQ+ movement isn’t to speak the truth. Very likely they’re incapable of even recognizing truth because of the intellectual shackles their biases and ideologies have placed on their minds.
Dr. Eric Vilain, said the quiet part aloud when he confessed that the acceptance of transgenderism and its attendant beliefs such as being nonbinary, “has been, in a sense, a philosophical change in our way of looking at sex; that it’s a balance.” It isn’t that new discoveries in science has changed the way we understand sex and gender. It is that their philosophy has changed the way they interpret the world, forcing them to shuffle facts into categories that meet their overwhelmingly politically Leftist beliefs. As with abortion, ideology trumps all and everything else is forced to conform. The primary goal is like wise ideological, to win the ideological “culture war” they are waging on the hearts and minds of society, to convert the masses to the social and political ideologies the LGBTQ+ movement supports. Even as evidence mounts that their methods don’t work.
Suppressing Science
There is a strong correlation between anxiety, depression, suicide ideation (thinking about, fantasizing about, and planning to commit suicide) and gender dysphoria, the mental health condition people who identify as transgender have that causes them to believe they are transgender. Anxiety, depression, higher risks of trying to commit suicide and transgenderism all go together, all products of a brain which is mentally unhealth causing psychological problems for those suffering under its dysfunction. And the more a person “transitions,” i.e. the more the a person presents as being the opposite sex or non-binary, the more anxious and depressed the person becomes. The LGBTQ+ community tries to portray the secondary psychological disorders caused by having a brain that is fundamentally malfunctioning on social persecution, as seen in the following example:
LGBTQ+ people are 9 times more likely to try and kill themselves, more than twice as likely to become alcoholic, more than 3 times as likely to become drug addicts, and a full one-third (that’s one out of every three!) will have a serious mental illness (along with a host of other problems the source website lists.) And we’re told that this is because they’re mistreated by society. But there are serious problems with this argument that become obvious to anyone who thinks deeply about them. The largest is the assumption that it is people not accepting those who identify as transgender which causes them to have so many mental and emotional problems when there is not evidence to actually suggest this is true. It is taken as an a priori assumption and then the evidence that exists is used to “prove” the assumption. This is not to say that poor treatment couldn’t cause such problems. Rather it is to argue that the mental imbalance of gender dysphoria causes anxiety, depression, and suicide ideation in people with gender dysphoria.
Studies already demonstrate that neither social transitioning (dressing and acting as the opposite sex) nor medically transitioning (getting surgery and hormone therapy to appear physically as the opposite sex) do anything to decrease anxiety or depression in people who identify as transgender. For example, this study by Drs. Richard Bränström and John E. Pachankis originally published in the American Journal of Psychiatry concluded that the, “association between gender-affirming surgery and reduced likelihood of mental health treatment lends support to the decision to provide gender-affirming surgeries to transgender individuals who seek them.” But they were forced to “correct” their study and its conclusions after numerous people wrote into the American Journal of Psychiatry to point out the serious errors in the study’s conclusions. After this, Drs. Richard Bränström and John E. Pachankis were forced to issue a correction which admitted that their “results demonstrated no advantage of surgery in relation to subsequent mood or anxiety disorder-related health care visits or prescriptions or hospitalizations following suicide attempts in that comparison.”
In other words, medical transitioning offered no support and did not change the amount of mental health problems or suicide attempts by people who identify as transgender. Neither does social transition, as shown in the next study.
Dr. Michael Bailey, the former Chair of the Psychology Department at Northwestern University who still works there as a psychologist who specializes in, “Sexual Orientation, Gender Nonconformity, Sexual Arousal, Behavior Genetics, Evolutionary Psychology,” wrote:
Our article was based on parent reports of 1,655 adolescent and young adult children. Three-fourths of them were female. Emotional problems were common among this group, especially anxiety and depression, which many parents said preceded gender issues by years. Most of these young people had taken steps to socially transition, including changing their pronouns, dress, and identity to the other sex (or in some cases, to neither sex). Parents observed that after their children socially transitioned, their mental health deteriorated. A small number—seven percent of those whose parents answered Suzanna’s survey—had received medical transition treatment, including drugs to block puberty, or cross-sex hormones.
Disturbingly, those young people with more emotional problems were especially likely to have socially and medically transitioned. The best predictor of both social and medical transition was a referral to a gender specialist. Some 52 percent of parents in our study who had received a referral said they felt pressured by the gender specialist to facilitate some sort of transition for their child.
My Research on Gender Dysphoria Was Censored. But I Won’t Be.
Notice here that only 7% of the 1,655 teens in their study had medically transitioned. That means 93% had socially transitioned. And the evidence in his study showed that social transition likewise did not stem the deterioration of the teen’s mental and emotional health, i.e. the teen who identified as transgender continued to have the same problems with anxiety, depression, and suicide ideation after transitioning as before transition. In fact, the mental health problems of the transgender identifying teens got worse after transitioning.
Further, though the study had limited data about whether the parents of the transgender identifying teen supported the teen’s transition or not, the data the study did have suggested that 93% of respondents lived in a home where the parents were “politically progressive, including supportive of LGBT rights and people.” Meaning that the likelihood that the reason these teens continued to have deteriorating mental health was not because they were being mistreated or abused at home. The opposite was true. Their mental health continued to deteriorate even though they were living in an environment supportive of their transitioning.
The conclusions are significant. Despite the propaganda from the LGBTQ+ movement (examples discussed here), people who openly identify and live as transgender and non-binary continue to have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide than the general population even after “transitioning” and even when living in “gender affirming” families. No matter how much they transition they still suffer. You can see this in the personal testimony and experiences of people who now or did identify as transgender. These are voices the LGBTQ+ Movement wants to silence because they disprove many of their lies, which is why there may be such a push to define people as “nonbinary.” After all, as this article points out, “if the gender fluidity trend continues, perhaps many people will have no unitary gender to ‘persist’ or ‘desist’ from,” effectively allowing the LGBTQ+ people to hide the failures of their ideology and the destruction behind lingual sophistry and social manipulation.
Don’t let them do it.
Listen to the story of Chloe Cole, a young woman who at puberty said she felt uncomfortable in her body, like a boy, and immediately every influential adult outside her home began to tell her that she was transgender and needed to transition. Listen as she recounts how doctors told her parents they had two options – a dead daughter or a transgender son – in order to manipulate the parents into supporting her social and medical transitioning. Listen as she recounts the scars her body will forever bear as a result of the multiple forms of mutilation she was subject to in order to forcibly change her body to look like a boy’s body. Listen as she mourns everything taken from her which she will never regain.
Listen and then tell me this isn’t monstrous to do to a child.
It is no wonder Dr. Bailey’s work was suppressed. I wonder who else is having their important work suppressed, what lies people are consequently being indoctrinated into believing, and how many more lives, Chloe’s, are being destroyed as a result.
Religion and LGBTQ+ Teen Suicide Rates
Don’t overlook these findings because they matter. Especially because there are studies out there that claim otherwise. How can we reconcile these two seemingly incongruent results – one study which demonstrates no change at all and which does? The answer, I think, lies in testing the assumption that it is transitioning that made the person with gender dysphoria decrease his or her risk of suicide. Most of these studies follow people who transition, subject them to mental heath screening (and hopefully testing), and find that many people with gender dysphoria who were at higher risk of committing suicide before transitioning are now at lower risk of suicide after transitioning, and then assume it was transitioning that caused the mental health increase. But there is another option, one factor that is incredibly powerful, one that decreases the risk of suicide in all people of every persuasion no matter where they live. One that if you can just get it, then it can transform everything. What is this wonder factor?
Community.
In no better place is this seen than in religion. As one study explains:
The majority of well-conducted studies found that higher levels of religious involvement are positively associated with indicators of psychological well-being (life satisfaction, happiness, positive affect, and higher morale) and with less depression, suicidal thoughts and behavior, drug/alcohol use/abuse. Usually the positive impact of religious involvement on mental health is more robust among people under stressful circumstances (the elderly, and those with disability and medical illness). Theoretical pathways of the religiousness-mental health connection and clinical implications of these findings are also discussed.
Religiousness and mental health: a review
And a professional review of seventy-four studies exploring the connection between religion and mental health concluded:
Most of the past literature in this area reported that there is a significant connection between religious beliefs and practices and mental health.
Religiousness and Mental Health: Systematic Review Study
And why is there this connection between religion and decreased suicide risk? Well, there are multiple reasons. But one of the major reasons is because religions create communities – places where people with a shared identity, culture, beliefs, values, hopes, dreams, morals, and goals come together to aid, support, encourage, and uplift one another. And communities are one of the most important factors in whether someone tries to kill his or her self or not:
Connectedness at various levels including peers, school, religion, and community have all been associated with lower levels of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts in youth. Previous studies in youth found significant inverse relationship between connectedness and suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Consistent with the previous research, this investigation found positive peer social environment, positive school environment, religiosity/religious affiliation, and positive community social environments to be protective against suicidal ideation and suicide attempt in this population.
Undetermined Risk Factors for Suicide among Youth Aged 10-17 years-Utah, 2017, pgs. 64-65
On the topic of religion specifically, the study reported:
In addition to connectedness in the school environment, several studies have observed an association between religiosity/religious affiliation and suicidal behaviors or some risk factors for suicidal behaviors such as depression. It has been suggested that the sense of belonging in religion and the network of relationships and ties among members of certain religious communities are protective against suicide. Religion may improve connectedness by providing youth a trusted community of people with shared values and beliefs to count on during difficult and stressful times. Consistent with the literature, the results from the PNA found that youth who reported being religious (defined as attending religious services 1-2 times a month or more often) were 49% less likely to report suicidal ideation and 58% less likely to have attempted suicide during the 12 months prior to the survey (Table 14).
Undetermined Risk Factors for Suicide among Youth Aged 10-17 years-Utah, 2017, pg. 66
Religions create communities and not just generic communities or people like you might encounter in most places. Religions foster communities where people build long term interpersonal relationships based on shared values, beliefs, hopes, dreams, and love.
I can hear you response. It probably goes something like, “That may be true for straight kids, but religion actually causes more harm to LGBTQ+ teens, motivating them to kill themselves more than if they weren’t religious.” Many have made this claim. And not only can they not prove their claim, the evidence proves they’re wrong. Multiple studies prove they’re claim is nonsensical. A study from Austria indicates that religious affiliation and activity may act as a protective against suicide even for homosexuals and other “sexual minorities:”
Religion is known to be a protective factor against suicide. However, religiously affiliated sexual minority individuals often report a conflict between religion and sexual identity. Therefore, the protective role of religion against suicide in sexual minority people is unclear. We investigated the effect of religion on suicide risk in a sample of 358 lesbian, gay and bisexual Austrians. Religion was associated with higher scores of internalized homophobia, but with fewer suicide attempts. Our data indicate that religion might be both a risk and a protective factor against suicidality in religiously affiliated sexual minority individuals.
Religion and Suicide Risk in Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Austrians
This trend proves true for Latter-day Saints specifically. Being LDS and LGTBQ+ actually makes you less likely to try and commit suicide. Another study published in the Journal of Homosexuality examined Latter-day Saints who identify as homosexual and found that those who had left the church had more struggles with depression than those who stayed:
A nation-wide sample of 634 previous or current members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), non-heterosexual adults (ages 18–33), were surveyed to examine how specific aspects of minority stress are individually and collectively associated with depression, and how such associations differ across sex, sexual orientation, and level of affiliation with the LDS church. When five stressors were examined simultaneously, need for others’ acceptance (NA) was the strongest predictor of depression, followed by internalized homophobia (IH). All minority stress factors were found to be individually predictive of depression and did not differ across sex or sexual orientation subgroups. Differences were observed, however, when considering current LDS status, such that participants who were no longer affiliated with the LDS church reported stronger relationships between some minority stressors and depression. Implications of religious identity salience as a potential mediator of relationships between specific stressors and depression are discussed.
Specific Aspects of Minority Stress Associated With Depression Among LDS Affiliated Non-Heterosexual Adults
Consider what these studies tell us. They tell us that LGBTQ+ kids coming from religious backgrounds had higher scores for “internalized homophobia” – i.e. they believed homosexual romantic and sexual activities are sinful and wrong. But in both studies the complete opposite of results occur than what the critics of religion claim should be the case. The first study shows that religiously active LGBTQ+ people were less likely to try and commit suicide. And the second study showed that even among Latter-day Saints, those reviled by their critics as being especially bigoted against LGBTQ+ people, the very opposite situation exists than what their attackers claim. LGBTQ+ kids who leave the church are more likely to suffer from depression whiles those stay active in the church, including accepting its religious teachings, are less likely to suffer form depression. This is a significant find because depression is “one of the most relevant factors” in whether or not someone will try to kill him or her self, with anxiety being a strong secondary contributing factor. The more depressed you are, the more anxious you are, the more likely you are to kill yourself.
How To Save LGBTQ+ Teen Lives
Religion is actually a major protection for LGBTQ+ kids and leads less of them to try and kill themselves while not being religious actually leads to higher risks of suicide.
Read that again to make sure you understand it.
Religion is actually a major protection for LGBTQ+ kids and leads less of them to try and kill themselves while not being religious actually leads to higher risks of suicide.
That is the exact inverse of what pro-homosexuality and pro-transgenderism advocates claim. The bigoted old religions that teach religion is a sin actually save peoples lives. Not being active in religion makes it more likely LGBTQ+ kids will kill themselves. Therefore, opposing these churches and telling LGBTQ+ kids to not go to them actually puts them at greater risk of killing themselves.
There is another, equally important message these studies teach us though. One that devastates the entire pro-LGBTQ+ agenda.
Whether you’re supportive or not of another person’s sexual orientation or gender identity has no effect whatsoever on whether or not they’ll be more or less likely to commit suicide.
How do we know this? Because in these studies the religious LGBTQ+ kids have higher rates of “internalized homophobia” – i.e. they were not supported in their homosexuality or transgenderism because they had been taught to believe that both were sinful and wrong – and but lower rates of depression and suicide. Now, don’t get it wrong. If a kid who identifies as transgender gets severely bullied then he or she will be more likely to be depressed and want to kill him or her self. But if the kid is embraced by the religious community and included in it, even if he is told his sexual orientation or gender identity is wrong and comes to believe that, he will still be less likely to be depressed or attempt suicide than his non-religious homosexual and transgender identifying peers.
The key to saving lives is not abandoning the teachings of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and affirming a teen’s sinful homosexual or gender identity. The key to saving lives is to teach that even though something is a sin that the sinner is still part of the community of believers. Sinners are meant to be embraced and served and saved. All of us are sinners and all of us need to be made to feel like an important part of the community of the faithful, wanted and loved, even as we undoubtedly sin, sin, and sin again. We need to openly live the power of repentance and the love of God. If we do we will be able to mitigate a great deal of the impact of the mental and emotional instability disorders caused by gender dysphoria. We will be able to not only teach our children the truths of God and how to live the Gospel without putting them at risk, we will help them be at less risk and find greater joys by living the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Inversely these findings also teach us that merely affirming the homosexual or transgender identity of a teen does nothing to mitigate suicide risks. This assumption is proven false by the fact that teens in religious communities where their identities aren’t affirmed still have lower depression risks and suicide rates than those outside of religious communities and the fact that people who identify as homosexual or transgender are actually at greater risk of depression and suicide when they leave their religious communities. The determining factor isn’t affirmation of the chosen identity. The determining factor is community. The likely reason why people who socially or medically transition experience lower rates of depression and suicide is because after transitioning they join new communities. It is the community, not the affirmation, that lowers the risk of depression and suicide among homosexual and transgender identifying people.
With this knowledge it is no hard choice at all to encourage people to reject a community based on corrupting indulgence and choose a community based on Christ and eternal life.
Final Thoughts
Society is under attack by some of the most effective propagandists in history. They are not interested in facts. They are not interested in truth. They want your mind, your heart, and your soul. In pursuit of those ends they will say anything, twist anything, degrade anything, and attack anything that challenges or questions them. Anyone and anything that refuses to accept and comply with their interpretations, their demands, their orders will be destroyed. And what they want to destroy are men, women, science, knowledge, and families, the very Gospel of Jesus Christ itself, and replace it with their ideologies, their theologies, and their philosophies.
This does not mean that people who identify as homosexual or transgender are evil. When Dr. King talked about his civil rights work, he wrote that his attack was:
[D]irected against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those forces. It is evil we are seeking to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. Those of us who struggle against racial injustice must come to see that the basic tension is not between races. …We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may happen to be injust.
The same it is with us. Our attack is not against people who identify as homosexuals or transgender. These people have been victimized by evil ideologies and viral pathologies that have convinced them that they have no agency to think or act for themselves, that have indoctrinated them into a toxic and dangerous worldview, that have made them the vectors of a thought contagion that seeks to infect and rewrite humanity in its image. They are victims as much as we are, they just cannot see it yet. It is beholden upon those with sight to see and ears to hear to act not only for themselves, but in aid of the blind and deaf as well.
I know by now many of you may be laughing. “Even if I’m right,” you say, “how could trans people and gay people be a bigger threat than poverty, epidemics, and nuclear war?” A valid question. Even if it is true that nuclear weapons are more important that doesn’t mean this isn’t important, at least as important as poverty, hatred, and war. But I would argue that the problems created by the LGBTQ+ Movement are at least as threatening and destructive as a world war. You see, the most dangerous things on the planet are not bullets and bombs. The most dangerous things on the planet are those things which motivate us to resort to bullets and bombs. The most dangerous thing on the planet are ideas. The right ideas uplifts, enlivens, and exalts mankind.
The wrong ideas crush minds, ruin souls, and destroy destinies. Poverty, disease, and war are not seeking to try and forcibly rewrite the very nature of humanity itself, redefine half (if not all) of it out of existence, and transform all of society in their utopian dystopian image. No tyrant on the planet has such a global reach nor is he trying to secure universal control over so many of the minds of all people on the planet. No tyrant on the planet is taking advantage of mass media to better flood the Earth with his lies. No tyrant on the Earth is so effectively warping science on such a global level and twisting it, and the minds trained into subservience to it, to its purposes. No tyrant on Earth is better corrupting religion on such a global level, turning it into a tool promoting worldly ideologies.
Elder Packer was prophetic in recognizing the threat the “gay-lesbian” LGBTQ+ movement poses to the church, itself, and all of society. The question is if we are wise enough to follow his counsel and counter their lies before the hour grows too late. We are already on the back foot, allowing them to seize the initiative in promoting their agenda as the correct one and casting anything else as evil and socially apostate. The time to stand up, never back down, and ever agitate for the truth, for reason, for facts, for science, for the Gospel of Jesus Christ is now, before their indoctrination of society is complete.