While Zion is in the world and not a city state with an insular encircling social reality, artists (notably writers) are more or less free to explore this issue from various angles. . . . But when the walls go up, the trumpet calls and the gates clank down . . .

You seem to be very taken with this idea of an isolationist society. (Every conversation you’ve had on this site comes back to it.) Why is it such a focus for you, do you think?

Sometimes divergent narratives can co-exist. Sometimes divergence becomes dissent and is disruptive to an agenda. The issue then becomes whether divergence is tolerable.

I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that the dialogue and concomitant monologues about same-sex attraction are a good example. Here we have an individual predilection with an associated potential social practice. At first, the official position (or narrative) was that it either didn’t exist or was simply a form of temptation which could be as easily suppressed as the urge to smoke or steal. Spirits were male or female, not both or neither or something else. Use made of the body should reflect that fact. Unfortunately, from the official perspective, the larger social reality (or narrative) did not support that view, much as it does not support the necessity or longevity of marriage, and local reality began to echo the encircling social one, as it did with the weakening support of marriage. Evidence of a genetic cause to same-sex attraction informed (or forced, depending on your narrative) a revision of the condition’s earthly origin tale (okay, it may be built-in to the body and be harder to deal with than a taste for tobacco) without a revision of the spiritual narrative (spirits are male or female), with the result that you can now be gay, but you still can’t act like it. The reactive narrative on the divergent side is that God personally (Himself and to the divergent member) approves of homosexual love, at least when the attraction is built-in and the love is real.

While Zion is in the world and not a city state with an insular encircling social reality, artists (notably writers) are more or less free to explore this issue from various angles. At this point,I suspect there is greater danger of censure from the encircling social reality than from the internal one. But when the walls go up, the trumpet calls and the gates clank down, musing on the reality of same-sex attraction and the fairness of controlling and negatively sanctioning it will become patently and blatantly subversive.

Mind you, with the current encircling social reality removed, a lot of pressing issues won’t press us anymore.

I don’t mean that snidely, by the way, but when a sanctioned representative or confirmed supporter of anything tells me someone else was impressed by the thing represented or supported, I bring out the salt.

And you bring up an important point: other religions impress people (and convert them), too. In fact, people have testimonies of other religions (and the gods they serve), also. Whether or not we have the corner on some sort of truth, testimonies don’t prove a thing except to those who gain them and those who are willing to be convinced by them. It’s nice when people think we’re nice, but it doesn’t make us God’s people. That’s between us (collectively and individually) and God.

His journey is his own, and I have no place in his true narrative with God, so what I think of it hardly matters. But I do feel like I must stick to my own lessons learned. Although I need to always be adapting and learning and changing based on my ever fluctuating experiences, still there’s a time you’ve got to know what you really believe and honor that. Dutcher did that for himself, just as I’m trying to do in this essay as well. And part of my beliefs is that, although Dutcher has many other virtues, he’s wrong about Joseph Smith. That’s MY journey, for Joseph Smith is one of the aspects of the Gospel I can point to with personal surety… that, as well as Jesus and the Christian story of the Gospels. Those are two aspects of Mormonism I’m fervent about, so Dutcher and I, I’m afraid, will just have to not see eye to eye on those issues.