In a private message to family and friend, Ed Smart—father of Elizabeth Smart—announced that he was a homosexual and was leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
In 2002, Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her Utah home. Miraculously found nine months later, having been traumatized and abused by her captors, the young woman made what many have characterized as an amazing recovery. The ordeal has been continuously retold as a story of human resilience. As the story has been told in major media, the Smart’s family religion of Mormonism has played an important role.
Since at least 2016, however, Elizabeth has been challenging the way the Mormon church views “purity,” or this is how it has been characterized by the opponents of “purity culture.” Essentially, the narrative has been that Elizabeth was reluctant to leave her captor (and/or escape) because she believed that, having been sexually abused, she would be worth less to God or her community. Clearly, if that was Elizabeth’s presumption, it was tragic.
Enemies of purity culture have spiked the football on Elizabeth’s perceived challenges to Mormon teaching on the subject, and eager to pin her abuse somehow back on her religious upbringing.
Adding fuel to the fire, Elizabeth’s father has acknowledged he’s a sodomite and is leaving the LDS church.
According to the Utah Deseret News, Ed wrote…
In one of the hardest letters I have ever written, I have recently acknowledged to myself and my family that I am gay. The decision to be honest and truthful about my orientation comes with its own set of challenges, but at the same time, it is a huge relief…Living with the pain and guilt I have for so many years, not willing to accept the truth about my orientation has at times brought me to the point where I questioned whether life was still worth living.”
And so, here you have the same old tired sodomite victimology sob-stories about being suicidal because of religious oppression.
Predictable.
Just once, someone should presume the LGBT suicide rate could have something to do with self-loathing, self-abuse, self-trauma, and corresponds with high-risk, self-destructive behavior.
Smart went on to say that he was leaving the LDS ‘church.’
“As an openly gay man, the church is not a place where I find solace any longer. It is not my responsibility to tell the church, its members or its leadership what to believe about the rightness or wrongness of being LGBTQ.”
Smart went on to say, “I have come to the conclusion that it was never my Savior’s intent to change me from the way I was born.”
Of course, it is precisely the Savior’s intent to change the way you are born. That is what being born again is all about. That is the main reason Jesus came…to save and change people. That’s literally why Jesus died…because the way you were born is not good enough.
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