KUTV 2News in Utah is featuring an interesting story tonight (Thursday) at 10pm. It seems that most of the stories we hear on this issue are built around people who left the church over same-sex issues. I haven’t seen too many stories featuring somebody who has chosen to remain with the church. (Ty Mansfield comes to mind.) Here’s the teaser for the report:
“Misty” is a woman in her mid 30’s. She married (in the temple) with kids, and is active in her ward. The story is her personal story of what it’s like to be a believing member of the LDS church and struggle with same-sex attraction.
There are thousand of members of the church like “Misty.” LDS family services estimates there a 4-5 members in each ward that are dealing with same-gender issues. They say most of those are married, with children.
I’ll make sure to update the post afterwards.
It’s interesting that they chose a woman for the story. Usually women tend to be much more private about such things imo.
Four to five members in each ward seems a little low of a statistic. Although this is a statistic that is very hard to define, since I believe the Kinsey scale probably plays a role and only those that have very strong inclinations towards the same sex are going to be validly categorized as “dealing with same gender issues.”
We’ll see how this news story goes.
The statistic surprised me, I am interested to see how they arrived at it, if that’s in the report.
As far as the statistic goes, I personally know of 3 in my ward.
It doesn’t surprise me that you don’t see these types of stories all that much. The op mentions Ty Mansfield. Look what happened there. He and the Matis’ got attacked on both fronts from Affirmation and gay rights groups in general on one side, and then by NARTH and Evergreen through Dean Byrd in a review published by FAIR on the other. It’s a lose lose situation to out yourself or justify your coping mechanisms because there’s people on both sides who will scrutinize every aspect of it.
Im in California so I wont see the broadcast but I am curious to see what gets said.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ve uploaded the KUTV Part One video to YouTube (it’s embedded in my latest MSP post) and I look forward to Part Two.
Here’s a link to the first of two parts:
http://connect2utah.com/news-story/?nxd_id=115056
Still working on putting together some comments on it.