The Exclusion Policy: Asterisked Belonging

Having experienced the 2015 exclusion policy as a gay Latter-day Saint father of five and a senior leader in Affirmation: LGBTQ Mormons, Families in came language inviting “gay and lesbian Mormons to stay in the church.”5 This new stance permitted members of the Church to love their LGBTQ children and fellow ward members within a narrow scope of tolerance that did not counter the Church's teaching on marriage and family. The star of the show was the Church's new website, mormonsandgays.org, which showcased video messages from gay Latter-day Saints and pages of encouraging words for the LGBTQ Latter-day Saint community—more encouraging than we had ever heard before—from Church leaders.Grassroots inclusion efforts suddenly felt Church-sanctioned. This newly constructed post–Prop 8 bubble began filling with LGBTQ Latter-day Saints, their families, and allies, demonstrating that LGBTQ Latter-day Saints did want to belong. It was proof positive that if you prepare a place, any place with even a hint of welcome, LGBTQ Latter-day Saints will gather. For the first time in the history of the Church, LGBTQ Latter-day Saints felt wanted because they were hearing that they were wanted. I cannot emphasize enough how novel and exciting this all was. In the very spirit of Mormonism, it inspired many to be anxiously engaged and do many things within this space of their own free will.Laura Skaggs, an Affirmation board member during the exclusion policy, calls this period “The Integration Movement.”7 Concurrently, Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns shoved the Church into the national spotlight, creating a “Mormon Moment.” Keen to rehabilitate its post–Prop 8 image amid such publicity, the Church needed its bubble of belonging just as much as its LGBTQ members did. I joined Affirmation at the crest of the Integration Movement. Its exciting optimism was infectious and on full display at Affirmation's September 2015 conference in Provo. There, I felt part of something special. I was surrounded by a host of allies and connected with LGBTQ Mormons from around the world. I listened to Affirmation leaders deliver powerful and confident talks optimistically and unashamedly knitting LGBTQ Latter-day Saints into the fabric of the Restoration. The Church appeared to be tolerating the work that was going on in its post–Prop 8 bubble of belonging.What a difference forty-six days would make.On November 5, 2015, I came across a story on Facebook about a Church handbook change. Soon, my curiosity turned into crushing disbelief. Legally married same-sex Latter-day Saints were now branded apostates, and their children were denied the Church's saving ordinances. Why would the Church do this to children—to my children? Much has been written about why this exclusion policy was an affront to Christian teachings and Latter-day Saint theology.8 However, at that moment, what was most striking about the policy was the feeling of betrayal it engendered.The optimism of the Integration Movement presupposed that LGBTQ people, their families, and allies were collaborative partners with the Church over what constituted belonging. For many, the Church's change in tone instilled a hope that real change was imminent. In hindsight, none of the Church's teachings or doctrines had changed one whit since the Prop 8 days. The Church continued its vigorous state-to-state fight to oppose same-sex marriage, culminating in its amicus brief in Obergefell that quoted the entire family proclamation. When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality in June 2015, some thought the Church might adapt. Instead, the exclusion policy emerged, shattering the thriving grassroots movement that was burgeoning within the post–Prop 8 bubble.The exclusion policy was a harsh wake-up call to the realities of the maxim “Their space, their rules,” for at its core, the policy was a display of power over the lives and eternities of the Church's sexual minorities and their children. For many new to the bubble, it was a devastating moment where hope evaporated in the face of a betrayal of an assumed good-faith collaboration. For many of our queer elders who had survived the pre-belonging era, it came as no surprise. They had long warned that the post–Prop 8 bubble was temporary. Their caution had gone unheeded in a cloud of optimism.Astoundingly, the Church continued to heavily evangelize for LGBTQ belonging, as if the exclusion policy had never happened. It refreshed its website, offered new videos of faithful gay and lesbian spokespeople, and renamed the URL from mormonsandgays.org to mormonandgay.org.Mormon and gay.This was the ultimate messaging takeover, a colonization of Affirmation's message during the Integration Movement: “You can be Mormon and gay.” This time around, the Church began policing what was happening in its bubble of belonging, forcefully asserting its right to be the sole arbiter of belonging according to its definition of what made an acceptable queer in the kingdom. The result was social shunning, membership restrictions, and even excommunication—all spiritual traumas that introduced fear into the once-hopeful bubble.The trauma of the exclusion policy effectively ended the Integration Movement—not overnight, but gradually, as reality set in. Mormons Building Bridges discontinued “Sit with Me Sunday” and its “gay friendly” ward list. Its messaging shifted from integration to robust engagement over the morality of the Church's treatment of LGBTQ people. Affirmation made a slow pivot from “you can be Mormon and gay” to a “healing trauma and preventing suicide” platform. It organized Fathers in Affirmation and Mothers in Affirmation to support hundreds of queer parents and their children. Mama Dragons eventually exited the exclusive Mormon space and expanded nationally, appealing to all faiths.Before the implementation of the exclusion policy, LGBTQ Mormon support organizations were primarily online, emerging to host face-to-face events such as Pride parades and Affirmation and North Star conferences. The virtual peer and ally communities of the Integration Movement were the primary support sources for LGBTQ Mormons when the exclusion policy appeared. Peer and ally communities can only go so far in trauma support. In response, the therapeutic community met the need, with licensed therapists and organizations such as Encircle and Flourish Therapy emerging within this space to provide affirming, evidence-based, and culturally competent mental health services for queer Latter-day Saints and their families. This symbiosis between peer support and therapeutic support was evidence of a maturing community response in contrast to the days when Evergreen kept therapy in-house, often using non-evidence-based conversion therapy with LGBTQ Mormons.On its face, the exclusion policy may have appeared as rules to manage Latter-day Saint sexual minorities who strayed into marriage equality, but its reach went much further. The policy was a reminder to all queer Latter-day Saints that the Church was not afraid to enforce queer exclusion in the plan of salvation—even if it meant coming after the children—as it reached into the great houses of Zion to rearrange and sever family relationships on an eternal scale. The result was spiritual trauma, making many LGBTQ Mormons refugees from Zion, as the exclusion policy drove them from their spiritual home. This phenomenon rattled me the most. As a senior leader in Affirmation, I witnessed the death of testimony all around me. Affirmation had become a critical gathering place and a way station for LGBTQ Latter-day Saints, sitting with spiritual refugees as they made incredibly difficult decisions about where they wanted to be that felt safe and healthy for them in this new exclusion policy world.Before Prop 8, no dialogue channel existed between the Church and its queer population. The Integration Movement, launched during a period of public image rehabilitation, opened cautious lines of communication. In 2013, the Church signaled that it was amenable to dialogue with Affirmation, provided it tempered any public messaging that might embarrass the Church. This seemed a reasonable ask. After all, those were the rules our LGBTQ activist peers followed to find common ground and achieve remarkable work through compromise in the civil rights arena. This seemed a moment of synodality, where the Church and its queer population come together to “speak openly and as equals about issues that would have been previously barred from discussion.”9 For two years, these relationship-building efforts were remarkable in that they were even happening at all. However, the 2015 exclusion policy uncovered a critical difference between LGBTQ Latter-day Saints and LGBTQ activists. LGBTQ Latter-day Saints do not exist on common ground; they exist on church ground. There are no compromises on church ground. Discussions do not happen as equals. No amount of dialogue and relationship building had protected the LGBTQ Latter-day Saints from harm in their spiritual home, nor would it in the future.Some support groups for LGBTQ Mormons hoped that dialogue might still lead to progress. 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