I feel, as a matter nearly of faith, that if you have known a certain amount of suffering and have emerged out of it into the light, you are obliged to share that light with as many of the still-beleaguered as possible.
I don’t believe that there is anyone of faith whose faith would not be strengthened by those experiences of family.
A lot of people are very political when they are young, and then they outgrow it.
I know one gay ex-Mormon who is a talented, self-destructive alcoholic. Whenever he is drunk and going on a tear, we are back to the Mormon Church and his being thrown out of the Mormon Church and growing up with this sense of being evil.
I’d had a vaguely Jewish upbringing, but no deep connection to faith.
I think what the Church should ideally do, and does appear to do in the context of straight relationships, is to support people in crossing from the easier pleasure of momentary carnal satisfaction, into the more difficult pleasure of love and family and relationship.
It’s deeply humbling to realize that there is no such thing as a society with a purchase on truth.
I understand why there would be prohibitions on straying from monogamy because of the harm that it does not only to the person who is betrayed, but also to the person who is betraying. “Betray” is a sort of shorthand for what happens.
When a church manipulates the law to say, “These people are lesser,” it takes a lot of resilience to hold your head up and say, “I am not lesser!” Some people can do it and some cannot; and some of those people who cannot will be destroyed.
I don’t understand what the nature of God is. But I do have the feeling that I’m at some feet, and lucky to be there.
At the end of the day, will God be interested primarily in whether I have been kind and helped others, or in whether I was baptized and how?
If really good people who are deeply committed and who are thriving spiritually have to beat down the nature with which they seem to have been born and cut themselves off from the full realization of love, how can that be pleasing to God?
I hope the Church will examine what is good and what is ill, and what good could be achieved by getting the suicidal, self-destructive, possibly carnal, or celibate to move toward this experience of love.
Being in a marriage and having children is the greatest pleasure, but it is certainly not the easiest pleasure. It is not like eating ice cream.
Every organization does good and bad things.
The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.
I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.
If your love didn’t always contain the possibility of loss, it would be very different from human love as we know it.
I hate the comparative idea that you have to love your spouse more than you love your parents.
I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.