Letter to President Packer

Here is my letter in response to the following invitation: "Please support President Packer in standing for truth and righteousness, sounding a clear and much-needed warning voice, and exercising his constitutionally protected freedoms despite intense intimidation. You can send an email to the Church’s Public Affairs office at owentl@ldschurch.org (we are told your email will be forwarded to Pres. Packer) or send a note or postcard to President Boyd K. Packer, 50 East North Temple, Salt Lake City, UT, 84150."

Dear President Packer:

I felt so relieved to hear your talk on homosexuality and gay marriage (although I don't think you even mentioned those two terms). I'm online a lot, and I get so frustrated by the high level of confusion and worldliness AMONG LATTER-DAY SAINTS on this issue. I've even sometimes wondered if the LDS Church was starting to soften and go politically correct, such as when Church PR announced support for Salt Lake City's gay anti-discrimination ordinance or when Elder Marlin K. Jensen seemed to apologize for the Church's involvement in Prop 8 recently in California, or at least made it sound as if we're not already bending over backwards to be as compassionate as we can without changing our doctrine and surrending our standards.

Personally, I believe that the twin assaults of pornography and homosexuality are the main keystones of Satan's final attempt to bring down the world. Abortion and drugs are bad too, of course, but porn and gayness are infiltrating and confusing even many Latter-day Saints to an unprecedented degree. He has been carefully planning and developing these two campaigns for millennia, and in the 1960s he was finally ready to say, "Release the hounds," and 40 years later they are still ripping and tearing our civilization and getting closer and closer to vital flesh and organs.

I believe he didn't tempt the Book of Mormon civilizations much with homosexuality because he didn't want it to get into the scriptures, so that he could save this abomination for his great last-days effort. If the Book of Mormon civilizations had faced this issue, they would have written about it and made it extremely clear, but the silence in latter-day scripture allows for more division and confusion among the LDS. It is so astounding how, with the gay movement and pornography, Satan has cleverly mixed together things like the black civil rights movement (which was mostly good) with the sexual revolution (which was nearly all bad), along with new technologies that can be both good and bad and can foster so much grassroots mobilization, not to mention act as a delivery mechanism for evil.

Again, thanks so much for standing up for sanity, and I feel bad about all the contention swirling around you. However, I fear that the gay issue, more than any other, will be the factor that really divides the god-fearing from the growing ranks of the secular/agnostic/atheistic in today's society, and I fear that before too long, the Mormons will be the only significant group left standing on God's side of the issue, which will bring back a nineteenth-century level of persecution on our heads.

In the nineteenth century, Mormons espoused a principle that the civilization could not abide, and the civilization eventually pressured us to abandon earthly polygamy, although we continue to hold polygamy as an eternal principle. The twentieth century was the eye of the storm, during which we grew strong and found favor and success in the world. In the twenty-first century, our host civilization is espousing a principle that Mormonism cannot abide, and I expect that the civilization will pressure us to accept gay marriage with every bit as much force as they employed to make us abandon polygamy. But I think we’re going to hold firm this time, simply because our doctrine won’t allow us to do otherwise.