On September 8, 2015, Meridian Magazine published an essay by JeaNette Goates Smith titled “Can You Help Your Children Choose Heterosexuality?” This title is controversial and outrageous to many only because the very concept of “choice” outside the realm of the reduction of all human perceptions and behavior to biological processes has been so mercilessly attacked and pummeled for decades by the progressive Left (and its partisans in the natural and social sciences) in its relentless attempt to persuade as many human beings as possible that they are nothing more than the puppets of blind, mechanistic forces wholly beyond their control (or, alternatively, puppets of their environment and social conditioning) that declaring that there is agency and choice in anything of any human salience has become, to paraphrase Orwell, a revolutionary act.

It is also scandalously politically incorrect, which is to say it is an existential threat to an entire totemic edifice of ideological pieties, dogmas, and shibboleths that are taken as oracular revelations of the human condition and of critical necessity in constructing the “better world” so long sought by those among us who so clearly see the shape of things to come.

After a barrage of hate mail, wails of moral anguish, and the beating of many progressive breasts, the article was withdrawn, and Meridian Magazine (long, to be sure, a bastion of faithful LDS discourse, LDS apologetics, and conservative social and political discussion) slunk away, head bowed, hastily tied bloody bandages dragging on the ground, and still muttering something about “sensitivity.”

Please listen, Meridian: this is what “sensitivity” will buy you in the great and spacious Mos Eisley that is the cultural and political Left; this is what your concern with the tender and the delicate will bring as the forces of political correctness carpet bomb your exposed entrails. You should have known. You should have been prepared. You should have seen the chum in the water. But now you have, and now you see clearly do you not, that the forces arrayed against the saints and all the good, just, and noble of the earth in the pitiless war for the nature, definition, and meaning of human sexuality cannot be reasoned with, will not tolerate reason, and have no intention of engaging alternative arguments in a philosophically serious or civil manner.

This is as it must be, as for the Left, politics is war by other means, and war is about the forcible imposition of the wills of some upon the circumstances, lives, and realities of others. Hence, it is not enough to subject JeaNette Smith to the standard two minutes hate and withering village self-criticism session in the village that raises our children and determines our individual potential, possibility, and future within the collective womb, but she must be threatened with the loss of her license to practice psychotherapy, her career destroyed, and her character and motives traduced. She must be sent to social, professional, intellectual, and personal gulag, there to be reeducated or left to languish in the twilight limbo of all things politically incorrect and just plain not hip.

Her opponents cannot, dear readers, and please trust me on this, defeat her in the marketplace of ideas, at least a marketplace they do not control and dominate and within which they can determine the conditions and terms of debate. They cannot even hold their own, and in the world of LGBTQ activism (or, as seems to be the developing post-gay marriage understanding, just “queer” activism) and social justice ideology, there is no mercy even contemplated for those who deny the faith and profane the inner sanctums of progressive religion.

But what was it, really, that set the dogs howling and arched the backs of countless cats? It won’t be needful to go far into Smith’s essay to see. Just a few core propositions will provide the room with a view we need.

The first mistake, in my view, was Meridian’s, and can be seen here in the short italicized preface to the piece:

Editor’s note: We understand this is a very sensitive and tender topic. Many families in the Church and outside are trying to understand gender issues from every angle. There are many things we do not know. The following is one therapist’s experience in this delicate field of learning.

While civility and respectfulness are important and welcome, this sentence telegraphs to anyone with a militant ideological ax to grind a self-conscious timidity, apprehensiveness, and timorousness in the engagement of this issue and in the confronting of those forces intent on undoing the very core of civilization itself in the name of the radically autonomous self and its desire to express its polymorphous self-authenticity; to transgress and “queer” itself and the culture around it.

Actually, this subject is not “delicate,” at least not at this late hour, nor is the continuing sexual revolution and its implications for western civilization “tender.” The war in heaven, transferred to this earth for the duration of the mortal probation, is neither delicate nor tender: it is, as are all wars, harsh, brutal, and lethal, and the spiritual lethality of transgression of God’s laws of human sexual relations, and most clearly, the open celebration of the unraveling of the very concept of marriage, family, and gender in any stable and civilizationally viable sense, should not be underestimated.

Interestingly, Smith begins with a clear articulation of the need for respect, civility, and humility in dealing with such questions and with same-sex attracted people, and lauds the overwhelming lack of open bigotry and discrimination that once characterized relations between homosexuals and heterosexuals to some substantial degree in eras past. This is all well and good, according to Smith, and a big step in the right direction in a broad societal sense.

Then, Smith steps off the cliff:

“When a young person understands (as well as is possible with their limited experience) the ramifications of choosing to live a homosexual lifestyle over a heterosexual lifestyle, one would imagine he would pause long and hard before choosing to give up an eternal family.”

This statement alone was probably all it took to set the pc police among the saints themselves baying for Smith’s blood and reporting her to the powers that be that control her ability to practice her profession. This single statement is fraught with so much ideological fissionable material that it almost defies description. The implications, based upon long observation and study of the gay subculture and the lives of numerous homosexuals, that living a homosexual lifestyle is dangerous, unhealthy, psychologically and emotionally traumatic, and places one in peril of a substantially disproportionate risk of alcohol and drug abuse (as well as relationship violence), and that, at a deeper level, such relationships and sexual couplings are purely earthly, and have no continuance or legitimacy in eternity, was simply too much to absorb.

An internet posse was formed and someone cried, “There’s a gonna be a lynchin!” The wagons were circled and the battlements manned, and the gatekeepers of progressive orthodoxy, massed in moral indignation, terrible as an army with banners, struck out at the existential foe that threatened them. But Smith was not finished with her gay teen suicide-inducing outrages.

We, as a society, have made it far easier than it ever used to be for someone with homosexual inclinations to choose a gay lifestyle. We can, and must, make it easier for someone with homosexual inclinations to choose heterosexuality.

This is far worse than merely politically incorrect. This is blasphemous to the cultural Left in a way that is difficult to fathom outside that ideological milieu. The implication here that, while SSA is not a conscious choice for many, homosexual lifestyles and relationships not only are, but should, without equivocation, be circumvented and avoided and forgone for heterosexual relationships if at all possible, is the equivalent for the Left of spitting on the Ark of the Covenant. Smith dares to add nuance to the normally intellectually facile level of discourse on this issue in the pop media:

You will note that I have differentiated between same sex attraction or homosexual inclinations, and acting on same-sex attraction, or living a homosexual lifestyle. Our youth need to recognize that there is a difference between the two.

But the homosexual rights/marriage movement had long invested itself in the idea that homosexuality is in no sense any different than heterosexuality or heterosexual relations, and just as desirable, wholesome, and good as traditional concepts of sex, marriage, and family formation. They’re just like us. All opposition is naked, mindless bigotry.

Smith then nails her own coffin shut by supporting an idea that has been to the cultural Left since the late sixties the equivalent of garlic to the blood-drinking undead: abstinence. That is: chastity, premarital celibacy and post-marital exclusiveness. In a homosexual context, this is clearly a difficult proposition, and perhaps “delicate” is the term that we could deploy in this specific case. Smith makes an important observation in that “Marriage itself requires people to manage their attractions.” (italics hers)

The gospel is a discipline, and we are disciples; we are here to train, master, and manage, if you will, our passions, emotions, feelings, thoughts, desires, and behavior. The coffin lid closes, and the howling mobs of compassion descend, shovels in hand, ready to finish the work. And they arrive just in time to hear:

Sex is a privilege not an inalienable right. It is a privilege God has reserved for husbands and wives within the bonds of marriage.

Smith then gores the heaviest ox of all:

The biggest obstacle to those with same-sex attraction who wish they were heterosexual is the belief that they can’t change. Once they become convinced they are “born this way” they accept their situation and try to persuade everybody else to accept it too.

Free will. Agency. Choice. The idea of someone with homosexual tendencies, inclinations, or fully developed desires modifying those desires and tendencies, and even more outrageously, wanting to change them – actually being uncomfortable with those inclinations and perceiving them an unwelcome and alien presence in the mind and soul, would, if taken seriously, unravel virtually the entire ideological edifice constructed around both the claim of biological essentialism but also the claims of queer theory and the concept of transgressive self-authenticity. Like so much else on the Left, no one can leave the collective, because the first one who does becomes an existential threat to the entirety of the internal mythology that holds the collective together and validates its claims of ideological certitude.

I hope Meridian will have second thoughts in the future when the delicate and tender forces of social justice come calling again, as they most certainly will, and not only to Meridian’s doorstep, but to the Church’s as well.