Eli McCann: 'Even my former church recently expressed support for the newly enacted Respect for Marriage Act, which codifies some currently recognized constitutional protections. Who could have predicted this shift?'
Eli McCann and Skylar Westerdahl on their wedding day.I came out to my parents in their kitchen one Saturday morning when I was 29. The night before, a gay friend gave me some advice for the conversation. “Don’t beat around the bush,” he said. “Just come out with it. And be unequivocal. Don’t leave room for doubt because that might cause confusion.”
My dad was reading a newspaper, and my mom was slouched over her sewing machine working on a project for her highly competitive quilting group that’s harder to get into than the Illuminati.My dad put down his newspaper and frowned in confusion. My mother eyed me over her glasses that were down at the end of her nose.Once I clarified that, no, I didn’t think the amplifier really made a difference, that I was just trying to be unequivocal, they settled into the news with relative ease.
This was 2014. I was aware the conversation with them went much differently than it might have 10 or 15 years earlier. I had been inundated throughout my religious childhood with church messaging about the evil homosexuals who lurked among us. In the 1990s, Sunday school teachers regularly told me “one of Satan’s tactics is to convince people they are born gay, but we know that’s not true. People choose to be gay, and that is a sin.
I wasn’t sure, at age 12, when exactly I had “chosen” to have a crush on every boy in middle school . I figured this was maybe one of those opt-in things when you enter a raffle in which you also accidentally sign up to receive an eternal onslaught of marketing materials.
The change in our religious community wasn’t quick, but I started to notice movement over the next 10 years. As a young adult, I heard Larry King ask Gordon B. Hinckley, then-president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whether he believed people were born gay. To my surprise at the time, Hinckley said he didn’t know the answer to that. It seemed shortly after this interview that the “nobody is born gay” rhetoric died away.
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