I’d like to write a few words about something that was said, during the Saturday morning session of General Conference.

I grew up in Spokane, Washington. Living so close to the Canadian border, I frequently came across the random Canadian penny or dime. As a child, I learned that they were easily used to pay at the cashier but they were rejected outright by vending machines.

You see, those Canadian coins weren’t counterfeit, they were just foreign. The cashiers knew the difference… but the machines did not. And what separates the cashier from the machine is experience — and the willingness to learn from it. The cashiers knew that the coins were valued the same as their US equivalents by their customers. The foreign coins weren’t part of the official economy, but they were part of mine. I knew that I could use them to get cookies at the grocery store, to pay for a day at the local pool, or to pay my late fines at the library.

I’m both an out gay man and a practicing Latter-day Saint… and I’d like to speak to my brothers and sisters: as Latter-day Saints, we know the power of bearing testimony. And as LGBTQ Mormons, I would hope, we understand how vital it is to live our lives out loud. It’s my hope that our lives might be a testimony to our friends, neighbors, and leaders of our enduring and inherent value — a testimony that our lives and loves are simply foreign… not counterfeit.

We’ve come so far, and have so far to go. Sites like Mormons & Gays

do their part, but the heavy lifting will be done in our wards and in our neighborhoods as LGBTQ Latter-day Saints step out from the shadows and members of the Church who’ve not had any true frame of reference realize that they’ve loved someone gay (or lesbian or trans) all along.

It’s hard, after all, to hate someone you actually know.