"This is important:"

I am really, really grateful for Mormons who feel called to write things like this and then do it. Honestly, I skimmed most of the philosophical part at the beginning, but this ending that I've posted here I read carefully, and then went back and read it again.

from: http://rationalfaiths.com/summoned-unsettled-gay-mormons-power-face-love/

...Only when we allow ourselves to be fully summoned by another’s gaze and therefore another’s injunction do we begin to understand and experience what it is to love. My own unsubstitutable individuality is due to the other’s intentional gaze and summoned injunction. I owe myself to those who created me by addressing me (or failed to address me). Love is the “the act of a gaze that renders itself back to another gaze in a common unsubstitutability.”

This past week we learned that Charles Cooper, the Republican attorney who defended California’s Proposition 8 before the Supreme Court, is now in the process of planning his daughter’s wedding to another woman. Ironically, his daughter Ashley had become engaged to her girlfriend just months before Cooper began arguments against the legalization of same-sex marriage in California. While Cooper has not definitively clarified his own personal views on same-sex marriage, he has been quoted as saying, “What I will say only is that my views evolve on issues of this kind the same way as other people’s do, and how I view this down the road may not be the way I view it now, or how I viewed it 10 years ago,” and, more importantly, “I told Ashley that what matters most is that I love her and she loves me.” If Cooper had held any firm beliefs about the positive prohibition of gay relationships, it was not argumentation and logic that swayed him; after all, he was a paid expert in all the legal, cultural, and religious arguments to be had one way or another about same-sex marriage. And it was not just an abstract universal responsibility to love another human being (which at best becomes mere toleration). The only thing that changed his heart and mind (the only thing that could have changed his heart and mind) was an injunction derived from that particular face and that particular gaze of one whom he loved.

Part of the problem in living within the Mormon cultural mass (which, though becoming increasingly diverse is nevertheless still fairly homogeneous) is that gays and lesbians very often have no face, no particularity. They are invisible, both as individuals and as an accepted and legitimate category within the culture, and thus recede into the mass of otherness toward which we are supposed to feel some sort of general “ethical obligation,” tied to our notions of shared humanity. But such general ethical obligation—even where it genuinely exists—cannot produce genuine love and charity. We cannot genuinely love a universal ethic; we can only love a face with a gaze with a particular history, etc. When Mormons learn that someone they know and love is gay, this might produce an actual struggle for acceptance, which may at times change their views about the gay community because and only because of this particular gay person who has a face, who is that particular other that they love, whose own unsubsitutable gaze has helped to make them what they are as individuals. Of course, it also happens that at other times nothing substantively changes and they continue to hold previous beliefs and/or prejudices. There was nothing inevitable about the conclusions Charles Cooper arrived at through his love for his daughter; he might not have chosen to be open to her summons at all. But, no longer are these beliefs and prejudices beliefs and prejudices about a faceless other that one can believe just anything about. Now, they are must deal with these beliefs overlayed onto an actual person they are forced to reckon with. As Marion says, before the gaze of the face we are unsettled. Things change when the other has a face, and genuine love is only possible when this occurs, even when the other does not love us back. (This is important: we can love those whom we might not have chosen or preferred to love in different circumstances. What counts is that we are confronted with the face, gaze, and injunction of a particular other, not that they must love us in return).

Our beliefs regarding our LGBT brothers and sisters (and I daresay some of our doctrinal orientations and certainly our cultural attitudes) will change in proportion to gays and lesbians emerging from the faceless mass (toward which we have a mere ethical responsibility to treat fairly as human beings, and therefore are free to fear and not to love) and taking on the faces of those we love. Not all of us will love them simply because this occurs, but some will, and no doubt all of us would be unsettled.

That the gay community is mostly faceless to the average Mormon has, I am arguing, the effect of there being no particularized call, no one to address, no gazes to meet, no injunction to enact. And thus we remain settled and sure in our knowledge, enclosed in ourselves and comfortable in our separate worlds. To the extent that more gays and lesbians become that particular person–sons, daughters, friends, neighbors, with names, faces, and gazes, unsettling and breaking our hearts, and destabilizing our preconceptions–is the extent to which unpredictable events will begin to happen, and love and charity will do the work that loose, abstract ethical obligation cannot."