With the Mormon church having poured money into getting gay marriage somehow illegal in California, you might be wondering what the highest-profile Mormon celebrity might be feeling. Naturally, Donny Osmond isn't going to upset his church, is he, opening a page on his website to explain his stance on gay people who consider themselves to be married. (Nice to see him approaching the question with an open mind.)



Don't run away with the idea that just because he feels he has the right to tell them what to do, he's in any way homophobic:



There are many gay individuals that are members of our church. I know many of them. In fact, some of my best friends are gay.

You ask how I react regarding their marriages. Well, I do support our Church leaders who say that we can accept those with gay tendencies in our church as long as they do not act upon their temptations.

Everyone has tenancies to succumb to temptation, but we all have the same standard given to us by our Father in Heaven. Whether we may be tempted to be immoral with members of our own sex or of the opposite sex, we are expected to live chaste lives. This is very well explained not only in the Book of Mormon, but in the Bible as well.

We all determine for ourselves what is right and what is not right for our own lives and how we live God's commandments. I am not a judge and I will never judge anyone for the decisions they make unless they are causing harm to another individual. I love my friends, including my gay friends. We are all God's children. It is their choice, not mine on how they conduct their lives and choose to live the commandments according to the dictates of their own conscience.

We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God. Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.



We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.

Of course some of your best friends are gay, Donny. We all know you're not having a go at individual people, just an amorphous 'other', right?But how can you have gay people in church: doesn't that somehow threaten all that is holy?Aha! How generous. Providing you don't actually be gay, you're fine.Right. But let's say that someone chooses to live their lives by their own moral code, rather than a book that you might find in a drawer in a Courtyard by Marriott; what then, Donny?That - although not actually answering the question about gay marriage - seems fair enough. Except Donny arrives at this conclusion after running this extract from a Mormon executive:So he seems to be saying if people want to get married, that's great, it's up to them, providing nobody else gets hurt... oh, which they will, because it will bring down calamities on the nations.It's not so much that Osmond is happy to pretend he's friends with gays while actually suggesting that for them to fall in love is a security risk, it's that he tries to seem like he's reasonable while doing the equivalent of writing a post that says 'up to you' underneath a photo of a man holding a 'sodomites will kill us all'.