It was a sad Sunday, this 15 November 2015. For two reasons; the major disaster of course was the murder spree in Paris, which has shocked Europe to the core. The Sabbath prayers in our Utrecht ward were for the many victims, and for the grieving host of their loved ones. Europe is united in grief, but also in anger. We consider ourselves at war, a word we do not use easily, not with Islam, but with IS. Even the problem of housing hundreds of thousands of refugees who voted with their feet not to stay in a completely radicalized country, pales in the face of this tragedy. But we will not be budged, we will not let our lives be dictated by thugs. On that, everybody agreed, and the grief binds us together.

The other issue was totally unrelated, and very small in comparison with this, minute indeed, but the question kept our minds and tongues busy. We simply could not and still cannot understand that grief also could come from friends, from brothers in Christ. Of course I refer to the ruling on children of same sex marriages, who are now denied the normal pathway into the Church, administratively burdened not by their own faults but by the life style of their parents. We in the Netherlands used to be quite Calvinist, and our ancestors suffered under the weight of original sin, of inherited guilt. For us Mormonism was a liberation: the sins of the fathers would no longer impinge on the children, each individual has his or her own free agency, and any reckoning was according to our own deeds. That principle seems to be clausulated now.

Not all members were aware of this little storm in our Mormon teacup, but they quickly became so. Our stake president had been daring enough to write a letter with comments on the issue to all wards, despite admonitions from Frankfurt office to refrain from doing so. He thus tried to assuage feelings, but got stuck in the same contradictions: the love of our Heavenly Father expressed by exclusion. The reason for his action was evident: several faithful members, including a former bishop and his wife, decided to resign from office, and to refuse any callings in the future, considering the ward now a their home, more than the church. Others consider to redefine their tithing as budget, to have it stay inside the ward. Yes, we are economically minded, as Dutch. The primary president still is struggling how she can guide kids towards baptism, when some of them might be excluded from that covenant. One returned missionary testified of his struggle to comprehend, touched by the hurt of several gay people very close to him.

This sounds heavy for a minor administrative policy change, and it is, but we also see very little reason for this measure. The Netherlands is a society that has lived with same sex marriage the longest of all, since 2001, and with the possibility for these couples to adopt children since 2009. We have some mileage here. Our experience is that it simply is not a problem, and also within the Dutch LDS church it is not an issue at all. Nationwide heterosexual marriage is more popular than ever: after 14 years of legal same sex marriage, the institution of marriage is flourishing, actually doing better than ever since the cultural revolution of the ‘70s. Any threat to the traditional form of marriage as such is a chimera.

The argument is not about numbers, I a fully aware. But just to show what we are speaking of, in this ruling. Only 2 % of all marriages in the Netherlands are between partners of the same sex, and about 1 on 4 couples adopts children; adoption is complicated here. So only 0.5 % of the children will be raised by a same sex couple. These children will themselves be in the large majority heterosexual in orientation (it is a genetic predisposition, after all!), so of that 0.5% only 1 on 5 will be homosexual. Thus 1 in every 1000 thousand kids will be raised inside a same sex union and will be tempted to try such a union her/himself. And then, that child has to want to be member of the church in the first place. What, then, is really the problem here? Why such a heavy-handed approach?

Of course the sadness was and is not in the numbers, as people realize that the whole notion is farfetched. The sadness is that we thought we had left policies of exclusion behind us, in the church. The scars of the exclusion by African descent have not yet completely healed, surely not in our ward, and the ghost of this nightmare was easily evoked, adding to the fierce reaction by the members mentioned.

A sad Sunday indeed.

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