This weekend, North Star International is hosting a conference at the Utah County Convention Center in Provo. It's advertised as an educational event, with "integrity" as one of the core values of the proceedings.
North Star bills itself as an organization providing "community for Latter-Day Saints who experience homosexual attraction or gender incongruence," which is their Victorian way of avoiding the words "gay" or "transgender." Within conversations about Mormon orthodoxy and sex, North Star occupies a lynchpin cultural position. The organization reinforces the belief that LGBTQ people must be treated with conditional love and tightly restricted "acceptance."
Take the story of a 17-year-old woman, posted on North Star's own website. This young, devout Latter-Day Saint read an article in LDS Living magazine about a "mixed-orientation marriage," meaning a marriage in which one spouse is gay and the other spouse is straight. In it, the couple claims their marriage is not based on emotions or hormones, but on their religious belief that one man and one woman are to be partnered in this life in order to fulfill their cosmic obligation.
At the time the young woman read that article, she was struggling to reconcile the fact that she was a lesbian with the religious beliefs and culture she embraced. The article left her in such a state of distress that two days after she read it, she put a gun to her head and ended her life.
The turmoil, self-loathing, and hopelessness required for a person to end their life are too much to bear, but the perverseness of North Star's response to this tragedy is astonishing: they publicly take credit for giving the deceased young woman "hope."
Misleading Mormons: Voices of False Hope | The Bilerico Project
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